Clear and present danger to your life as of now from cyberblitzkrieg
All of the risks mentioned here are real.
At a deeper level, the choice of competitive rather than cooperative system contexts brings an exponentially expanding set of risks.
And there are clear lessons in biology.
The incentives within competitive systems towards central control and economic efficiency are at variance with what biology teaches us about risk management, which is massive redundancy at every level.
There is sufficient energy and material resources present to deliver security through radical abundance to everyone, yet the resistance of many old paradigms to even the possibility of such change has been significant.
Yes – all the EMP class of risks are very real, I was thinking about them as I walked the dogs last night, and stared into the clear night sky (one advantage of living in a small country village, a long way from anywhere, we don’t have significant light or atmospheric pollution, and can still see hundreds of thousands of stars).
And we have the tools to mitigate all of those risks, but only if we adopt a universally cooperative strategic set. If anyone is left out, they may just get sufficiently upset by that injustice to crash the entire system. Even small probabilities, in sufficiently large populations, become close approximations to unity over time (which seems to be how a fundamentally chaotic subatomic reality can deliver the near perfect causality of our experience).
The risks are very real.
The deep strategic sets that can actually work in practice to mitigate those risks do not exist in the set of competitive strategies.
Is dogma more important than survival?