From: jimruttshow8596
The integration of human-created technology into global systems has fundamentally altered evolutionary dynamics, leading to unprecedented challenges for civilization [00:01:06]. While past civilizations underwent internal decay and collapse [00:01:18], the current globalized civilization faces issues of a different magnitude due to technology and globalization [00:01:40].
Evolution vs. Technology
Natural evolution and human-created technology operate under fundamentally different dynamics [00:03:45]. Misapplying evolutionary theory to human systems, such as markets, can lead to incorrect assessments [00:04:04].
Characteristics of Evolved Systems
Evolved systems are characterized by three primary features:
- Mutation: Occurs relatively evenly across an ecosystem (e.g., gamma rays, oxidation, copying errors affecting all species similarly) [00:04:50].
- Selection: Involves both survival and reproduction (mate selection) within evolutionary niches [00:04:34].
- Co-selective Pressures: Advances in one species (e.g., a faster lion) lead to similar advancements in others (e.g., faster gazelles), resulting in a strong, symmetric coupling of power across the system [00:05:34]. This creates a “meta-stability” [00:06:05].
- Nature: Unconscious, radically parallel, distributed, combinatoric, slow, and typically results in self-stabilizing complex systems [00:08:11].
Characteristics of Human-Created Technology
Technology, defined as consciously mediated methods of doing things that come from the capacity for abstraction [00:06:51], differs significantly:
- Abstract Pattern Replicators: Technology (e.g., language, social tech, physical tools) can change much faster than physically instantiated genetic replicators [00:07:00].
- Uneven Distribution: Technological change can occur locally, not necessarily everywhere simultaneously [00:07:08].
- Intentional Creation: Driven by agents understanding abstract principles and intentionally creating solutions [00:07:58].
- Impact on Systems: Creates parts not necessarily in equilibrium with whole systems [00:08:38].
- Fragility: Human-made systems tend to be fragile, unlike the antifragility of natural systems [00:43:59].
Consequences of Technological Impact
Breaking Power Symmetry
Technology has broken the power symmetry essential for the meta-stability of evolved systems [00:09:21].
- Humans, as apex predators operating with tools, can increase their predatory capacity orders of magnitude faster than the environment can build resilience [00:08:52].
- Unlike animals that fit a niche and don’t leave it, humans, with their tools, can move to new environments after over-exploiting one, becoming apex predators everywhere [00:11:49].
- The destructive capacity of human-made technology (e.g., ocean trawlers) is incomparable to natural predators [00:12:30].
- Humans, or their domesticated animals, now constitute the majority of biomass for large mammals and birds on Earth [00:10:43].
Rebound Effects and Limits of Growth
Increases in efficiency due to technology do not lead to greater sustainability; instead, they enable further exploitation of new markets and resources [00:14:16]. This is seen in Jevons paradox, where energy efficiency leads to increased net energy consumption [00:14:25]. Humanity continuously finds ways to exploit new niches without waiting for genetic mutation, driving exponential growth in resource consumption [00:14:08].
Rival Risk Games and Exponential Technology
The combination of human rival risk games and exponential technology creates a fundamentally unstable system [00:15:01].
- Rival Risk Games: An in-group seeks to get ahead, potentially at the expense of an out-group or the Commons [00:16:58].
- Exponential Amplification: Asymmetric technology provides radical amplification of agency to single actors or small groups [00:10:08]. This means a lion cannot increase its killing ability thousands of times over, but a human with a weapon can [00:09:32].
- Self-Termination: Running rival risk games with exponentially increasing capacity for harm on a finite playing field inevitably leads to self-termination [00:17:55].
- Inability to Stop Exponential Tech: Since exponential technology cannot be “put back in the bag,” humanity must develop rigorously anti-rivalry systems [00:18:06].
Generative Functions of Existential Risk
Many catastrophic and existential risks stem from common “generator functions” [00:21:18]:
- Rival Risk Games Multiplied by Exponential Tech: As discussed, this leads to an inability to prevent harm when strong incentives exist to cause it [00:16:15].
- Complicated Systems Subsuming Complex Substrates: Humans build complicated, fragile systems (e.g., a house from a tree) that increasingly replace complex, antifragile natural systems [00:43:57]. This increases the fragility-to-antifragility ratio, through which more energy is run, leading to breakdown [00:44:26].
- Solutions Creating Worse Problems: Human problem-solving, often narrowly defined, creates larger, unintended externalities (e.g., the plow solving local famines but causing desertification, the internal combustion engine solving horse manure but causing climate change) [00:45:41]. The information processing required for safety analysis (NP-hard) is orders of magnitude greater than for creating new technology (polynomial) [00:47:36].
Information Ecology and Sociopathy
The pursuit of competitive advantage leads to the withholding of true information (trade secrets, classified info) and the active spread of disinformation [00:39:34].
- Exponential information technology allows for customized disinformation, making it difficult to distinguish signal from noise [00:40:03].
- This creates “fractal defection,” where individuals optimize for personal gain or small group loyalty at the expense of the whole, leading to a catastrophic breakdown in sense-making necessary for good choices [00:41:00].
- Sociopathy, present in varying percentages in the population (e.g., 3-5% general, up to 30% in C-suite), is attracted to and incentivized by power structures like corporations and governments [00:51:24]. These top-down power systems act as “strange attractors” for those who want power over others [00:52:17].
- In contrast, small, transparent social groups (like tribes) make sociopathy disadvantageous due to enforced transparency and close relationships [00:53:57].
Towards a New Civilization System (Game B)
To overcome these challenges, a new civilizational model is required, radically different from any before [00:02:46].
Anti-Rival Risk Systems
The core problem is the inability to coordinate between agents whose basis for agency intrinsically creates deltas between personal good and collective good [00:38:53].
- This necessitates moving from rival risk to non-rival risk, and ultimately to anti-rival risk [01:07:03].
- In an anti-rival risk system, individual well-being and collective well-being are rigorously positively coupled [01:05:18].
Redefining Ownership and Value
- The concept of private property creates incentives for hoarding, artificial scarcity, and exploiting others [01:02:02].
- A shift to Commonwealth access-based dynamics (e.g., the sharing economy mediated by blockchain for common resource management) could drastically reduce resource load and remove destructive competitive dynamics [01:04:45].
- In such a system, identity and self-actualization would derive not from “getting stuff,” but from creating and contributing to the system [01:05:46]. Creativity is high-dimensional and non-fungible, making it harder to compare in a zero-sum way [01:06:06].
Transitioning to a New Paradigm
The challenge lies in transitioning from the current “Game A” to a new “Game B” [01:08:11].
- A clear, architecturally sound blueprint for Game B is needed [01:08:20].
- The current system, despite appearances, is not truly economically optimized for overall human well-being or the production of universally beneficial technologies [01:08:39].
- A “social technology” that is anti-rival risk (i.e., solvent for weaponization itself) could provide an increased capacity that cannot be weaponized [01:15:36].
- This social technology would incentivize full earnestness and transparency, leading to an intact information ecology and radically better sense-making and innovation [01:16:48].
- Such a system, fundamentally more attractive and open-sourced, could become a “new strange attractor” or “attractor basin,” drawing in early adopters and eventually mainstream society due to its superior quality of life and problem-solving capabilities [01:17:27].