Volume 1, Issue 2 
2nd Quarter, 2006


The Risk/Benefit Yardsticks Were Just Moved Off the Field: How Technological Convergence Renders Current Risk Assessment Models Obsolete, and What to Do About It

Douglas Mulhall

page 3 of 7

What Were They Thinking?
Imagine if super-intelligent beings look back at us and wonder, “What were they thinking?”

Let’s examine our behavior. We can acknowledge that we have not done too badly in some areas, but we have been completely stupid in others. 

The first area in which we have failed is "oil silliness."  We have had the technology for the past 25 years to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels for a good portion of our economy (such as electricity generation) and we are very rapidly gaining the capacity to replace it in many other areas (such as transportation). When we look at what oil is doing to us, it is absolutely silly from the viewpoint of the outside observer that we have not done this. Everyone is aware of the pollution problems related to oil production, and the geopolitical problems of oil are becoming very destructive.

If you look around the world today, you will notice many human right’s violations that are being supported by democracies in the name of oil. There are the troubles in Iraq and Russia, where semi-dictatorships are being propped up by oil; and all of the dictatorships in the Middle East are propped up by oil.

Several recent articles in the news about this issue indicate that the worst is yet to come in the battle for oil. A recent headline states, "China Stakes a Claim to Major Access to Oil Around the World".  The United States and China are starting to go head-to-head over fossil fuels. This will make Iraq look like a party.

This is also from a recent newspaper: "A New Player in the Sand Box". China is investing heavily in Canada’s tar sands, which contain more oil than all of Saudi Arabia and Iraq put together. This is making the United States very nervous.

Oil is starting to become a bigger problem, and yet we have the technology to avoid it. If we increased our fuel efficiency by about 20%, the Middle East problem would disappear because we would no longer need their oil. You can imagine how an outside observer would think that we are engaged in total silliness, and surely a super-intelligent being looking back on it will say, "What were they thinking?"

Another area where we might be judged harshly is mass animal slaughter. We live in wonderful surroundings and we enjoy our wonderful food, but underneath it all is an unbelievable current of mass slaughter that was very well documented in a recent book entitled, “Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson. This book catalogues the billions of animals that are currently kept unnecessarily under inhumane circumstances in order to feed us, largely to entertain our over-the-top eating habits. Here we have, underneath our sheen of civilization, an enormous slaughter and inhumane keeping of wildlife. A super-intelligent being will look back on this and conclude, "What were they thinking?"

Finally, we have the end of pipe medicine. We have a medical system today, in the United States and Europe (and beginning in other parts of the world), that supports a Mr. Fix-It approach. It waits until an ailment gets totally out of hand, and then begins to bankrupt our economy by making us pay to try and fix it. We already have a growing capacity to fix the sources of many illnesses today. We could fix our obesity problem in the United States and in many other countries. We have the capacity to do it, but we are not doing it.  Again, a super-intelligent being will look at this and wonder, “What were they thinking?”

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