Casual Physics Enjoyer

On Ukraine, Effective Altruism, and Catastrophic Black Hole Destruction

It was exam season at Cambridge, and I was in the mood for some procrastination. My favourite thing to do when I’m in this mood is to go for long walks. In one of my walks, I remember, one afternoon, briefly walking across a dingy building that I later learned housed the Centre of the Study of Existential Risk. The Centre of the Study of Existential Risk is a research group that focuses on identifying and predicting events that threaten the existence of the human race. Just yesterday, I went on a binge-read after speaking with a friend at coffee about Effective Altruism and its links with the study of existential risk. Several themes seem to be written about a lot in this context. One of the main themes is the existential risk of increasing advanced AI systems. Another central theme is the economic and human risk that stems from the development of bio-weapons — fair enough (did you know that the COVID cost the UK economy 300 billion dollars and the human cost?).

I also came across an interesting article about our world getting destroyed from the risk of strangelet clumping in the cosmos. Strangelet clumping is one of the extreme risks that the Brookhaven laboratory assessed in constructing the heavy ion collider. While I’d love to cover this in a separate article, the risk was so small that it felt slightly removed. I’ve referenced this below.

Those two topics of AI and biorisk are interesting, for sure. However, scrolling through the Future of Humanity’s webpage for their notable publications, one paper stood out for me. It wasn’t about AI or biological weapons. It was titled “How does the Offense-Defense balance scale?” by Allen Dafoe and Ben Garfinkel [1] and was on ‘offence-defence’ theory. Considering the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia, I thought this would be an exciting piece to read. One thing that makes the conflict between Ukraine and Russia different from the Crimean conflict is the overwhelming level of investment from foreign parties Ukraine has this time around.

Consider a fake world populated by only two countries, A and B, and suppose that these two countries decide to scale up their military investment in some fashion. How would this scale-up in investment affect country A’s ability to country B? How does increased investment in military capability change the probability of success of a potential invasion? This is one of the kinds of questions that the paper answers. First, the paper puts the problem on a proper quantitative footing and then tries to find a solution. It also references and challenges the 3:1 rule, which is a guideline in traditional military theory that says an attacker typically requires three times more investment in military capabilities to launch a successful invasion.

I find this interesting because it helps understand the kinds of circumstances in military investment that would encourage an attack by a country. It provides a valuable way of assessing the risk that a conflict would break out as a function of national budgets in military spending. As quoted in the paper:

Several scholars have argued that offense-defense balances play a significant role in determining the risk of conflict breaking out (‘crisis stability’) and the incentives to arms race (‘peacetime stability’). Jervis argues that when the offense-defense balance in a system tilts toward offense, this exacerbates the security dilemma.

Jervis is saying here that if we have a group of actors and the probability of success of an attack is relatively high, it creates an environment that facilitates attack, and therefore a more unstable world.

Metrics to quantify

It is not obvious how we would quantify the set-up of two parties shoring up investment to attack or defend. Dafoe and Garfinkel borrow a term used in the economics of competing parties. This term is called the contest success function. The contest success function is the expected value of a success given military investment levels on the attacking and defending side.

In a future post, I’d like to go into more detail of how this function actually behaves.

References

[1] Ben Garfinkel & Allan Dafoe (2019) How does the offense-defense balance scale?, Journal of Strategic Studies, 42:6, 736–763, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2019.1631810

[2] Review of Speculative “Disaster Scenarios” at RHIC