This is one of the reason why there’s a fair amount of discussion of bargaining on here. In a multipolar world, agents will likely find that they are better off bargaining rather than destroying each other—and so you probably don’t get a universe where everyone is dead, instead you get a world that’s the outcome of a bargaining process.
Or if there’s an offense bias but one agent is favored over the others, maybe it ignores bargaining, wipes out its enemies, and you no longer have a multipolar world.
Hm, logically this makes sense, but I don’t think most agents in the world are fully rational, hence the continuing problems with potential threats of nuclear war despite mutually assured destruction and extremely negative sum outcomes for everyone. I think this could be made much more dangerous by much more powerful technologies. If there is a strong offense bias and even a single sufficiently powerful agent willing to kill others, and another agent willing to strike back despite being unable to defend themselves by doing so, this could result in everyone dying.
The other problem is maybe there is an apocalyptic terrorist Unabomber Anti-natalist negative utilitarian type who is able to access this technology and just decides to literally kill everyone.
I definitely think a multipolar decaying into a unipolar situation seems like a possibility, I guess one thing I’m trying to do is weigh how likely this is against other scenarios where multipolarity leads to mutually assured destruction or apocalyptic terrorism.
This is one of the reason why there’s a fair amount of discussion of bargaining on here. In a multipolar world, agents will likely find that they are better off bargaining rather than destroying each other—and so you probably don’t get a universe where everyone is dead, instead you get a world that’s the outcome of a bargaining process.
Or if there’s an offense bias but one agent is favored over the others, maybe it ignores bargaining, wipes out its enemies, and you no longer have a multipolar world.
Hm, logically this makes sense, but I don’t think most agents in the world are fully rational, hence the continuing problems with potential threats of nuclear war despite mutually assured destruction and extremely negative sum outcomes for everyone. I think this could be made much more dangerous by much more powerful technologies. If there is a strong offense bias and even a single sufficiently powerful agent willing to kill others, and another agent willing to strike back despite being unable to defend themselves by doing so, this could result in everyone dying.
The other problem is maybe there is an apocalyptic terrorist Unabomber Anti-natalist negative utilitarian type who is able to access this technology and just decides to literally kill everyone.
I definitely think a multipolar decaying into a unipolar situation seems like a possibility, I guess one thing I’m trying to do is weigh how likely this is against other scenarios where multipolarity leads to mutually assured destruction or apocalyptic terrorism.