GLOBAL PLAGUE Pathogens spread more easily than ever, thanks to all the international traveling we do. But even though the global population has increased, the number of people dying in plagues has declined over the past century. That’s because people have gotten healthier (making them better able to survive infections) and medical technology has improved so much. Quarantine used to be the only way to stop a plague... Now we can quickly engineer vaccines and other weapons against pathogens. Again, the best protection against this threat is economic growth. Climate catastrophists like to warn of rampant malaria on a warmer planet, but malaria is primarily a disease of poverty, not climate. It used to be endemic as far north as Scandinavia, but it essentially disappears once a country’s per-capita income rises above $3,000, which should be the case everywhere by mid-century. As long as everyone keeps getting richer, we’ll keep winning the war against pathogens. Howmuch to worry: There will always be new viruses and microbes to fend off, but they’re not going to wipe out humanity. What to do about it: Keep funding medical research.
ROBOTS No, robots are not going to put everyone out of work. This fear is just an updated version of the original Luddite scare, when automated textile factories were supposed to be terrible for workers. They never imagined future workers would find other jobs and save so much on machine-made clothes that they’d be regularly dining out and hiring personal trainers. The more jobs that robots do for us, the richer we’ll be, and the more new desires we’ll pay other humans to satisfy. But there is a longer-term danger: Robots that are a lot smarter than we are. If they ever become as intelligent as humans, they won’t stay that way for long, because their intelligence would increase exponentially as they upgraded their circuitry, and before long they’d regard us the way we regard lower animals. Howmuch to worry: It’s debatable whether robots will ever become independently intelligent, but if they do, we could have a problem. What to do about it: Design software with built-in safeguards and upgrade our own brains so we can stay ahead of them. If that doesn’t work, then welcome our new robot overlords and hope they feel inclined to keep us around, if only for entertainment value. We want them to see us as the equivalent of Labrador retrievers or giant pandas, not the smallpox virus.
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November 2018
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