Frameworks for new social operating systems

From: jimruttshow8596

Daniel Schmachtenberger argues that humanity is at a “hard fork” point, facing an imminent end to civilization unless fundamental design issues in its “social operating system” are addressed [00:00:53] [00:02:55]. This perspective, while dire, also carries immense hope for a radically different and vastly improved future [00:03:09].

Fundamental Design Issues of Current Social Operating Systems

Schmachtenberger posits that current civilizational collapse, unlike historical collapses, is global and accelerated by technology [00:01:40]. He identifies common “generator functions” that lead to catastrophic and existential risks, which must be addressed categorically rather than individually [00:02:21].

The Impact of Technology

Human-created technology fundamentally changes global dynamics compared to natural evolution [00:03:41].

• Evolutionary Systems: Characterized by mutation, survival selection, and mate selection within niches [00:04:30]. Mutation pressures are evenly distributed, leading to “co-selective pressures” and a symmetric coupling of power across the system (e.g., faster lions drive faster gazelles) [00:05:55]. Organisms are symbiotic within their broader ecosystem [00:06:13].
• Technological Systems: Consciously created through abstraction, these “abstract pattern replicators” change much faster and with an uneven distribution compared to physical genetic mutations [00:07:00]. This breaks the natural power symmetry, allowing humans, as apex predators, to rapidly increase their predatory capacity orders of magnitude faster than the environment can adapt [00:09:08]. This leads to fundamental instability, as a lion becoming “a thousand times faster” would quickly consume all gazelles and then go extinct [00:09:08].

Limits of Growth and Resource Exploitation

Human technological advancements and efficiencies often lead to a “rebound effect” rather than sustainability [00:14:14]. Increased efficiency (e.g., energy efficiency) does not reduce overall consumption; instead, it opens new profitable markets, leading to more net energy use and the exploitation of more areas [00:14:16]. This makes a steady-state population model unworkable for humanity [00:14:45]. The sheer scale of human impact is evident in the biomass distribution: humans and domesticated animals now constitute the majority of large mammal biomass on Earth, and domesticated birds account for 70% of all bird biomass [00:10:43]. This “constructive” growth paradoxically leads to immense ecological pressure [00:10:36].

Rival Risk Games Amplified by Exponential Technology

A core generator function of existential risks is the pervasive nature of “rival risk games” [00:16:58]. In these games, one group’s (person, company, country) gain comes at the expense of an out-group or the Commons (e.g., warfare, market cornering, environmental exploitation) [00:17:00]. When combined with exponentially increasing technology, the capacity for harm from these rivalries becomes unsustainably large in a finite system, leading to self-termination [00:17:46]. Since technological advancement is inexorable, the only alternative is to develop “rigorously anti-rivalry systems” [00:18:10]. This necessitates fundamental changes to the axioms of civilization, including the existence of separate nation-states and private balance sheets [00:18:20].

Perverse Incentives and Government Limitations

Current systems are plagued by “perverse incentives” where actions beneficial to an individual or group in the short term are detrimental to the whole in the long term [00:15:47]. Examples include:

• Economic incentive to exploit resources (e.g., wild birds vs. farmed birds) [00:15:50].
• For-profit military-industrial complexes incentivizing war over peace [00:16:10]. These lead to “multipolar traps” – generalized scenarios like the tragedy of the Commons or arms races, where competitive advantage compels everyone to engage in harmful behaviors, even if it leads to collective ruin [00:23:22].

Governments, acting as top-down systems with a monopoly on force, attempt to regulate markets and solve these traps [00:27:08]. However, they face several inherent limitations:

• National Multipolar Traps: Nations themselves are caught in multipolar traps; if one nation implements environmental regulations (e.g., carbon tax), others may free-ride, gaining economic advantage and undermining the effort [00:30:04].
• Decentralized Technologies: The rise of decentralized exponential technologies (e.g., gene drives, drones) grants catastrophic capacity to small groups or even individuals, rendering traditional rule of law and monopolies of force ineffective [00:31:25].
• Agency Risk: Government agents (judges, lobbyists, politicians) are still individuals with rival risk incentives, leading to corruption of the regulatory process by economic power (public choice theory) [00:29:00]. Economic power is often “deeper than law in the stack of power” [00:35:47].
• Coordination Challenges: Small, strong interest groups can more effectively coordinate to influence policy than larger, more diffuse groups with less direct stake [00:37:20] (as highlighted in Mancur Olson’s “The Logic of Collective Action” [00:37:05]).

Information Ecology Breakdown and Sociopathy

The current system incentivizes the withholding of true information and the signaling of disinformation for competitive advantage (e.g., trade secrets, classified information, corporate politics) [00:39:34]. With exponential information technology, this leads to a world where it’s nearly impossible to distinguish signal from noise, making effective coordination and sense-making impossible [00:40:03]. This “fractal defection” — everyone defecting on everyone to some degree — results in a “catastrophic breakdown in the sense making necessary to make good choices” [00:41:07].

Moreover, current top-down power systems attract and reward individuals with cluster B personality disorders, such as sociopathy and narcissism [00:51:16]. These systems become “strange attractors” for those seeking power and adept at winning win-lose games, often involving disinformation and defection [00:52:16]. This leads to a world “run by sociopaths,” which is detrimental to all [00:53:38].

Requirements for a New Social Operating System (Game B)

Given the self-terminating nature of the current system, a new “social operating system” (often referred to as “Game B”) is required, which needs to address the underlying generator functions of existential risk [00:42:06].

Core Architectural Changes

1. Anti-Rival Risk Basis for Coordination: The system must shift from competitive win-lose dynamics to a framework where agents’ well-being is rigorously positively coupled, meaning “your well-being and mine go up and down together” [01:05:18]. This is the “solvent for weaponization itself” [01:15:45].
2. Increased Antifragility: Humans must learn to build systems that are either inherently antifragile or foster antifragility, reversing the current trend of turning the natural world’s antifragility into fragile, complicated systems [00:44:00]. This implies both building more resilient creations and ceasing to exploit all exploitable areas [00:45:01].
3. Solutions that Don’t Create Worse Problems: The new system must overcome the current pattern where human solutions to narrow problems create larger, unintended negative externalities [00:45:41]. The information and computation required for safety analysis of new technologies (NP-hard) far exceeds that for their creation (polynomial) [00:47:38]. This requires a different basis for human choice-making, guided by “love, wisdom, and prudence” [00:49:12].
4. Redesigning Resource Provisioning: Private property, as currently constituted, incentivizes hoarding, artificial scarcity, and defection [01:02:50]. A new system might employ “Commonwealth access-based dynamics,” where an individual’s access to resources (e.g., shared transportation, maker studios) does not diminish others’ access and, in fact, enhances the collective good [01:04:57]. Technologies like blockchain could mediate such shared resource systems [01:04:45].
5. Shifting Identity and Incentive: In this new system, self-actualization and identity would be derived from creativity and contribution to the system, rather than from acquiring material possessions or status [01:05:50]. This fosters a non-zero-sum dynamic, as others’ creativity enriches the shared environment and benefits all [01:06:38].
6. Protective Orientation for Capacity: Individuals with increased capacity (e.g., intelligence) should be oriented to steward and protect others, rather than exploit them [01:22:10].

Addressing Sociopathy and Information Integrity

To counteract the pervasive influence of sociopathy and disinformation, a new social operating system would need:

• Forced Transparency: Small, local communities (e.g., Dunbar number-sized tribes or villages) could inherently enforce high transparency and mutual accountability, making sociopathic behavior disadvantageous [00:53:57]. This contrasts with a “top-down one-to-many surveillance” state (like China’s strategy) [00:58:48], which may stifle innovation and lead to Red Queen dynamics [00:58:11].
• Robust Accounting Systems: Mechanisms ensuring true accounting of what’s happening within the system, making defection less advantageous than participation [00:59:59].
• Healthy Psychosocial Development: A system where psychological damage isn’t unnoticed and doesn’t lead to access to power [01:00:09].

Transitioning to a New Social Operating System

The transition from the current “Game A” to a new “Game B” is a significant challenge, as the current system is highly optimized for its own perpetuation [01:07:52]. However, Schmachtenberger argues that even the wealthiest individuals in the current system experience inherent “suboptimality” (e.g., proprietary intellectual property prevents the creation of the best possible products, profit motives limit crucial research areas like natural health solutions) [01:08:41]. The inexorability of catastrophic risks like ecocide also serves as a potent “forcing function” for change [01:11:33].

The proposed path forward involves:

• Clear Blueprint: Developing an adequately specified blueprint for Game B that meets the necessary and sufficient criteria for a non-self-terminating civilization [01:08:20].
• Non-Weaponizable Innovation: Creating “social technology” that increases coordination capacity and is anti-rival risk, meaning it cannot be weaponized [01:15:39]. This technology changes the nature of agents’ agency itself, incentivizing full earnestness and transparency [01:16:18].
• New Attractor Basin: A relatively small number of “fast adopters” can instantiate this new “full-stack civilization” from the ground up [01:17:22]. This new system, due to its inherently better sense-making and coordination capacity, would lead to a higher quality of life and better innovation outcomes for everyone [01:17:33].
• Dependency, Not Enmity: Instead of trying to “outcompete” the old system in power games, the new system would export solutions and create relationships of dependency rather than enmity [01:18:06]. This model relies on beneficial network effects, where membership in the new system (e.g., committing to peer-to-peer interactions regardless of traditional power hierarchies) becomes increasingly attractive and effective [01:19:10] [01:20:08].