What If Humanity Invents a Type-1 Vulnerability? | Unveiled

What If Humanity Invents a Type-1 Vulnerability?

Welcome to the long march of human progress. Every day of all our lives it’s as though it rumbles along as background noise, steering us through history and directing us to where we’ll go next. Technologies come and go, cities rise and fall, and even whole civilizations flourish and collapse, as the human story plays out. It could all be described in a variety of ways… exciting, or inspiring, or perhaps frightening and confusing. But could it also, one day, prove to be fatal?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if humanity invents a Type-1 vulnerability?

The phrase Type-1 vulnerability was brought into use by the famed philosopher and future contemplator, Nick Bostrom. Bostrom is by now famous for developing or co-developing a number of theories and models regarding the nature of life, reality, and the human experience. He heads the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and he’s especially well known for his simulation hypothesis - an idea which broadly proposes that everything we know, see, think, and feel could really be the result of an artificial sim.

While it might be argued that a simulated reality could under some conditions count as a Type-1 vulnerability, however, the topic for today’s video is broader than even that. To better understand, we need to look at Bostrom’s separate 2019 paper, titled “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”. In it, Bostrom opens with a typically fresh way to consider the world. He writes that “one way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn” and that the balls represent “ideas, discoveries [and] technological inventions”. He goes on to say that while humanity has pulled countless balls out of the urn up until this point, most of them have been white balls, which he describes as being for our benefit. Some of them have been gray, which are (or have the potential to be) somewhat harmful… but we’ve so far avoided pulling a black ball from the urn. A black ball, according to Bostrom, would ensure total destruction of humanity by default.

Typically, whenever talk of the end of the world thanks to human action comes up, we head straight to nuclear weapons. And with good reason. While there are many fewer ready-to-fire nuclear weapons on the planet today than there were at the peak of the global arsenal in the mid-1980s, there are still enough active nukes to potentially trigger a truly global catastrophe. Nuclear weapons can still be considered a gray ball only, though, because their invention clearly hasn’t immediately or automatically caused the destruction of all humanity. We’ve managed to live and survive as a species in a world with nuclear bombs for decades now, despite the incredible threat they pose. They are, to some degree, controlled… and, crucially in Bostrom’s paper, nuclear weapons are difficult to make. If they were simple to make, if we had easy nukes, Bostrom shows how different the world would be.

In his paper he imagines an existence in which devastating weapons can be built out of only glass, a metal object, and a battery - three things that most people could easily acquire. And also that the science and engineering to produce a devastating weapon wasn’t, as it is, complex… but was instead easy to understand, easy to replicate, and easy to pass on. Then we’d be in trouble. Then we’d have for ourselves a Type-1 vulnerability. Bostrom describes it as a technology that’s “so destructive and so easy to use [that it makes] civilizational devastation extremely likely”. In this frightening version of the world, nuclear weapons - or any weapons of mass destruction - are essentially freely available. They’re quick for anyone to build, easy for anyone to source, and scarily uncomplicated for anyone to use.

So, what would be the result? Well, our prospects wouldn’t be good, that’s for sure! If the situation was just left to run its course, then we could see total carnage unfold, and quickly. Bombs dropped here, cities wiped out there, and by all sorts of people… including, as Bostrom refers to, those who “just want to see what would happen”. Clearly, it wouldn’t take long were we to travel along this particular path before the end times arrive and humans are no more. With close to eight billion people on the planet, it wouldn’t matter if even the vast majority of those didn’t seek to use so-called easy nukes… because if just a tiny proportion of the global population did, then we’d all be done for. For so long as the world’s most destructive weapons are known about, catalogued, checked, and monitored by the world’s governments, as they seemingly are today, then the theory is that there’s at least a chance of safety. But in an easy nukes version of life, keeping track of those weapons would be a close to impossible task… and so all semblance of safety goes out the window. For pretty much everyone.

There may be some attempts made to limit the destruction, but all options appear very difficult to implement. The basic materials needed for the hypothesised easy-to-make weapons could in theory be banned, rounded up, and destroyed. But what if those materials were so widespread themselves that locating them all just couldn’t be done? Imagine if all you needed was a pencil. If it was discovered that a humble pencil was also the key ingredient to a superweapon. Clearly this isn’t about to happen in real life, but it serves to highlight how difficult preventing a Type-1 vulnerability would be. Because now imagine the enormous task required to find every pencil on Earth. Even if everyone complied and turned theirs over to the authorities (which perhaps doesn’t seem likely), there’d still be countless pencils left unaccounted for - lurking at the back of desk drawers all over the planet, ready to cause chaos if they fell into the wrong hands. Schools, office blocks and art studios would suddenly become the most dangerous and physically volatile places of all. Not to mention pencil factories, which under the right circumstances could now stoke Armageddon.

Another theoretical option could be, then, not to round up and destroy every pencil, but to demand by law that every example of one be fitted with some sort of tracking device. Some kind of gadget that either shuts the pencil down as soon as it’s used in any way that isn’t government approved (in any way that isn’t writing or drawing, for example), or shuts the pencil down whenever it’s picked up by anyone that isn’t its registered owner (i.e., anyone who isn’t licenced and trusted by the government). Again, we don’t need to consider this for long to realise that it would be impossible. At best it would lead to a total police state which would cause its own problems, at worst there’d still be lost, hidden and contraband pencils all over the world without a tracker and therefore ready to launch. In a manner of speaking.

If nothing else, even the possibility of a Type-1 vulnerability, of a black ball taken from Nick Bostrom’s urn of possible inventions, perhaps shows how crucial it is that countries, governments, powerful groups, and people in general work together as we head into the future. One sector where we increasingly see this kind of co-operation is within the development of space travel. Today’s space agencies and private space firms are much more inclined to launch joint missions and to share in their success. There is still a space race to speak of, but perhaps nothing quite so intense as that between the USA and the USSR across the 1950s and ‘60s. And, ultimately, were humanity to become a spacefaring civilization, then some Type-1 vulnerabilities that exist now might not be considered Type-1 vulnerabilities in the future - when humans live on multiple planets, and not just Earth. Indeed, Bostrom also explores the importance of timing and technological progress, within his same paper, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis”.

For now, though, let’s hope that we don’t have to one day rely on space travel to run away from our problems. And that, if a Type-1 vulnerability does ever emerge, we can find an effective way to deal with it. The proposed “vulnerable world” certainly represents a major problem for our species to consider and balance in the years to come. Because, when all is said and done, no-one wants tracked pencils. Or tracked anything. It would be nice to just write, draw, think and be free, wouldn’t it? But also, to live in a world where a black ball technology couldn’t, theoretically, wipe us out in an instant. It’s one of the more pivotal chapters in the human story mentioned at the top of this video, but that’s what would happen if humanity invented a Type-1 vulnerability.