EA - What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would cause technological stagnation? (outdated research) by Luisa Rodriguez

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would cause technological stagnation? (outdated research), published by Luisa Rodriguez on October 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Important note This is a rough draft I wrote between October 2019 and April 2020. It’s incomplete, and doesn’t reflect updates in my views in the 2+ years since I worked on it. I think there are serious downsides to sharing the draft publicly, because I think some parts of it are likely to be substantially wrong. I’m posting it anyway (with the hope that flagging the potential substantial wrongness will help people be especially skeptical of the conclusions) because I think the benefits outweigh those downsides. The benefits: Transparency: I’ve shared the draft with a number of researchers exploring civilizational collapse, and they’ve built off some of the research. It seems bad for an unpublished piece of research to be informing other research without being public (citable, scrutinizable) itself. Potential insights: To the extent that not everything in this post is wrong, it seems good for people to be able to easily draw/build on any good arguments in it (rather than have to start from scratch). Noticing bad arguments: As per Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.” I think the probability of technological stagnation is somewhat higher than I did when I was working on this piece in earnest for a number of reasons — most of which I don’t have capacity to write up at the moment. The biggest reason is probably the risk of extreme, long-lasting climate change. It seems possible that anthropogenic climate change could cause global warming extreme enough that agriculture would become much more difficult than it was for early agriculturalists. Temperatures wouldn’t return to current levels for hundreds of thousands of years, so if the warmer temperatures were much less conducive to recovering agriculture and downstream technological developments, humanity might be stagnant for millennia. Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Forethought Foundation. It was written by Luisa Rodriguez under the supervision of Lewis Dartnell, and draws heavily on research and conversations with Lewis and Haydn Belfield. Thanks to Max Daniel, Matthew van der Merwe, Rob Wiblin, Howie Lempel, Aron Vallinder, and Kit Harris who provided valuable comments. Thanks also to Will MacAskill for providing guidance and feedback on the larger project. And thanks to Katy Moore for editing this piece, and for drafting the summary. All errors are my own. Summary In this post, I explore the probability a catastrophe that caused civilizational collapse might lead to indefinite technological stagnation (and eventual human extinction) — even if it didn’t cause extinction in the very short term (a topic I covered in What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)?). To do this, I ask three key questions: 1. If we “re-ran” history, would we see the agricultural and industrial revolutions again? If a catastrophe caused a return to hunter-gatherer levels of society, we’d have to undergo the agricultural and industrial revolutions all over again to get back to our current levels of technological civilization. How likely is it that we’d overcome those hurdles again? Because the first agricultural revolutions happened in multiple places following the stabilization of the climate after the last glacial period, I expect it’s very likely that we could expect to see subsequent agricultural revolutions within years (once the climate is suitable for agriculture). I feel less confident, but still fairly optimistic, that another industrial revolution — which has only happened o...