First, I am not at all sure history shows international coordination has ever done anything about limiting war.
I think there’s a decent case that the Peace of Westphalia is a case of this. It wasn’t strong centralized coordination, but it was a case of major powers getting together and engineering a peace that lasted for a long time. I agree that both the League of Nations and the UN have not been successful at the large-scale peacekeeping that their founders hoped for. I do think there are some arguments that the post-WWII US + allies prevented large scale wars. Obviously nuclear deterrence was a big part of that, but it doesn’t seem like the only part. I wouldn’t call this a big win for explicit international cooperation, but it is an example of a kind of prevention. I recognize that the kind of coordination I’m calling for is unprecedented, and it’s unclear whether it’s possible.
What I like about the urn metaphor is the recognition that the process is ongoing and it’s very hard to model the effects of technologies before we invent them. It’s very simplified, but it illustrates that particular point well. We don’t know what innovation might lead to an intelligence explosion. We don’t know if existentially-threatening biotech is possible, and if so what that might look like. I think the metaphor doesn’t capture the whole landscape of existential threats, but does illustrate one class of them.
I think there’s a decent case that the Peace of Westphalia is a case of this. It wasn’t strong centralized coordination, but it was a case of major powers getting together and engineering a peace that lasted for a long time. I agree that both the League of Nations and the UN have not been successful at the large-scale peacekeeping that their founders hoped for. I do think there are some arguments that the post-WWII US + allies prevented large scale wars. Obviously nuclear deterrence was a big part of that, but it doesn’t seem like the only part. I wouldn’t call this a big win for explicit international cooperation, but it is an example of a kind of prevention. I recognize that the kind of coordination I’m calling for is unprecedented, and it’s unclear whether it’s possible.
What I like about the urn metaphor is the recognition that the process is ongoing and it’s very hard to model the effects of technologies before we invent them. It’s very simplified, but it illustrates that particular point well. We don’t know what innovation might lead to an intelligence explosion. We don’t know if existentially-threatening biotech is possible, and if so what that might look like. I think the metaphor doesn’t capture the whole landscape of existential threats, but does illustrate one class of them.