EA - How Engineers can Contribute to Civilisation Resilience by Jessica Wen

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: How Engineers can Contribute to Civilisation Resilience, published by Jessica Wen on May 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Cross-posted from the High Impact Engineers Resource Portal. You can view the most up-to-date version on the Portal.SummaryCivilisation resilience is concerned with both reducing the risk of civilisation collapse and increasing the capability for humanity to recover from such a collapse. A collapse of civilisation would likely cause a great deal of suffering and may jeopardise the future of the human race. We can defend against such risks by reducing the chances that a localised catastrophe starts, that it scales up to a global catastrophe, or that it triggers irreversible civilisation collapse. Many facets of our defence layers are physical, meaning there are many opportunities for engineers to contribute to improving humanity's resilience.UncertaintyThe content of this article is largely based on research by 80,000 Hours, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and ALLFED. We feel somewhat confident in the recommendations in this article.What is civilisation resilience?The industrial revolution gave humanity access to unprecedented amounts of valuable and lifesaving technologies and improved the lives we are able to live immensely. However, a global catastrophe could put unprecedented strain on the infrastructure — global agriculture, energy, industry, intercontinental shipping, communications, etc. — that enables civilisation as we know it today. If these systems were to collapse, would we be able to recover and return to the state of civilisation we have today?Could we re-industrialise? Would this be possible without easy access to fossil fuels, minerals, and chemicals? Could we rebuild flourishing global societies and infrastructure if there was a breakdown of international relations? Questions such as these fall under the purview of civilisation resilience.Civilisation resilience focuses on how we can buttress civilisation against collapse and increase our ability to recover from a collapse if it did occur.A framework for thinking about civilisation resilienceHaving a framework with which to analyse the risks and prioritise the strengthening of our defences is useful to sharpen our focus and direct our efforts to bolstering civilisation resilience. The paper Defence in Depth Against Human Extinction: Prevention, Response, Resilience, and Why They All Matter(Cotton-Barratt, Daniel and Sandberg) introduces a framework that breaks down protection against extinction risk into three layers of defence (figure 1). This framework is equally applicable to civilisation collapse given civilisation collapse is a precursor to human extinction.In evaluating extinction risk, the defence layers protect against an event becoming a catastrophe, scaling to a global catastrophe, and then wiping out the human race. When considering a given catastrophe, the following three defence layers are proposed:Prevention — how can we stop a catastrophe from starting?Response — how do we stop it from scaling up to a global catastrophe?Resilience — how does a global catastrophe get everyone?Figure 1: The three layers of defence against extinction risk (Cotton-Barratt, Daniel, Sandberg)One advantage of this characterisation framework is that it can be used to evaluate where the weaknesses are in humanity’s defence against a given catastrophe. If we consider a given catastrophic risk, , we can define an extinction probability,where:is the probability that risk is not prevented.is the probability that the risk gets past the response stage, given that it was not prevented.is the probability that the risk causes human extinction, given that it got past the response stage and became a global catastrophe.Within th...