From: jimruttshow8596
Daniel Schmachtenberger, an independent thinker focused on the future of civilization, presents a “hard fork hypothesis” regarding humanity’s trajectory: either significant, fundamental changes are made to our social operating systems, or human civilization as we know it will end relatively soon [00:00:44].
Historical Context and Present Dangers
Historically, most civilizations have undergone internal decay leading to collapse [00:01:12]. While models from scholars like Tainter, Jared Diamond, Straus, or Baudrillard describe these collapses, the current situation is unique due to globalization and technology [00:01:24]. Unlike past civilizations that caused local environmental harm, globalized civilization can affect the habitability of the biosphere at large [00:01:40]. The existence of weapons of mass destruction and the accelerated rates of technology mean that changes in magnitude have become changes in kind [00:01:51].
Instead of addressing individual catastrophic risks like AI scenarios, climate change, or war, Schmachtenberger argues that these are all results of underlying “generator functions” [00:02:18]. Addressing these fundamental functions is necessary to create a new, radically different civilizational model that is non-self-terminating [00:02:37].
Fundamental Difference: Evolution vs. Technology
A central concept in understanding current societal dynamics is the distinction between evolutionary systems and human-invented technology [00:03:59].
Evolved Systems
Evolution is characterized by mutation, survival selection, and mate selection within evolutionary niches [00:04:30]. Mutation pressures are relatively even across an ecosystem, leading to a co-selective dynamic [00:04:50]. For example, faster lions lead to faster gazelles, creating a strong, symmetric coupling of power across the system [00:05:12]. While individual agents may engage in self-maximization (e.g., a lion and a gazelle in a rival risk dynamic), all lions and all gazelles are ultimately symbiotic; they depend on each other for survival [00:06:07]. This fosters a “meta-stability” in evolved systems [00:06:07].
Technology-Mediated Systems
Human-invented technology differs fundamentally:
- Abstract Pattern Replicators: Unlike genetic mutations, technology involves conscious, abstract pattern replicators (e.g., language, social technologies, physical tools) [00:06:51]. These can change much faster and with uneven distribution [00:07:00].
- Conscious Creation: Technology is consciously created and can happen locally, not necessarily in a parallel, distributed fashion like evolution [00:08:27]. This leads to parts that are not necessarily in equilibrium with the whole system [00:08:38].
- Broken Power Symmetry: Human “apex predator” capacity, mediated by tools, can increase orders of magnitude faster than the environment can build resilience [00:08:55]. This breaks the power symmetry vital for the meta-stability of evolved systems [00:09:21]. For instance, a human with a mile-long drift net has vastly more destructive capacity than a great white shark [00:12:30].
- Global Over-exploitation: Humans, unlike other apex predators confined to specific niches, use tools to adapt to any environment [00:11:50]. When an environment is over-hunted or over-farmed, human populations simply move to new environments rather than stabilizing, leading to global over-exploitation [00:11:57]. This is seen in the fact that humans and their domesticated animals now constitute the majority of large mammal biomass, and domesticated birds account for 70% of all bird biomass [00:10:43].
- Jevons Paradox (Rebound Effect): Increases in efficiency do not lead to sustainability but rather new profitable exploits in more areas [00:14:14].
Generator Functions of Catastrophic Risks
Schmachtenberger identifies several common “generator functions” that underpin all possible existential risks:
1. Rival Risk Games Multiplied by Exponential Technology
When humans engage in “rival risk games” (where one group’s gain is at the expense of another or the commons) without limits on their capacity, combined with exponential technological innovation, the result is self-termination [00:16:56]. This means exponential harm in a finite system [00:17:55]. Since exponential technology cannot be stopped, humanity must rigorously figure out “anti-rivalry systems” [00:18:06]. This requires fundamental changes at the axiomatic level of civilization, moving beyond nation-states and private balance sheets which inherently foster rivalry [00:18:20].
2. Perverse Incentives
Harm cannot be prevented when there are strong incentives to cause it [00:16:15]. For example, if wild birds have no market value but domesticated ones do, there’s an economic incentive to exploit wild areas for farms [00:15:50]. Similarly, a for-profit military-industrial complex makes war more profitable than peace [00:16:10]. Attempts to bind these incentives with law often fail because strong economic power can corrupt the legal system [00:16:27].
3. Increasing Fragility
Humans tend to convert the anti-fragility of the natural world (e.g., a forest regenerating) into fragile, complicated systems (e.g., a house from lumber) [00:44:00]. This increases the fragility-to-anti-fragility ratio while channeling exponentially more energy through these fragile systems, leading to breakdown [00:44:22]. Humans currently only know how to build complicated, not complex systems, and they do not know how to limit growth [00:44:46].
4. Problem-Solving Creates Worse Problems
The way humans solve problems often creates worse problems [00:45:41]. Solutions are typically designed for narrowly defined problems, but interact with complex systems to produce larger, unintended externalities [00:46:06].
- The plow solved local famines but caused desertification [00:46:21].
- The internal combustion engine solved horse-related issues but led to climate change and resource wars [00:46:30].
- Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter provided value but created harmful externalities [00:46:48].
- Biotech research focuses on patentable synthetic molecules, leading to narrow solutions with systemic side effects [00:46:51]. This is because the information and computation required to create new technology is orders of magnitude less than that needed to ensure it won’t have long-term externalities, which is an “np-hard” problem [00:47:19]. The ability to project the future of complex systems is inherently limited due to sensitivity to initial conditions and the presence of strategic agents [00:47:51].
Challenges to Current Systems
Limits of Democratic Liberalism
The modern Democratic liberal synthesis (government regulating markets) is deemed formally impossible to solve current issues [00:32:01].
- Multipolar Traps: Markets without regulation inherently lead to multipolar traps (e.g., tragedy of the commons, arms races), where individual short-term gain leads to long-term collective harm [00:23:20].
- Global Coordination Problem: National governments cannot enforce global laws like carbon taxes or AI arms race treaties if other nations defect [00:30:04]. The proposed carbon tariff on imports to penalize free-riders is insufficient because other countries might still trade with defectors, leading to relative losses and internal pressure to revoke the law [00:32:31].
- Corruption of Law by Economics: Economics is seen as “deeper than law in the stack of power” [00:35:47]. Those with financial interests harmed by a law will use their resources (campaign finance, lobbying, relocating headquarters) to change it [00:35:58].
Public Choice Theory and Fractal Defection
The “problem of agency risk” applies to governments and corporations [00:29:22]. Government agents, like employees, still have personal incentives (status, power, financial gain) that can conflict with the well-being of the whole [00:29:06]. This leads to a “fractal defection,” where individuals, departments, and agencies prioritize their own utility maximization over the collective good [00:41:00]. This is exacerbated by the ability to corrupt accounting and hide actions in large systems, and by the exponential rise of disinformation [00:36:47]. This leads to a catastrophic breakdown in “sense-making” necessary for good choices [00:41:17].
Sociopathy and Power Structures
Current power structures (governments, corporations) act as “strange attractors” for individuals seeking power, and they attract, reward, and condition sociopathy [00:51:50]. Estimates suggest a higher percentage of sociopaths in corporate C-suites (30%) compared to the general population (3-5%) [00:51:30]. A benevolent dictator is unsustainable because those below them must engage in “power-law distribution of power” dynamics to maintain their position, preventing focus on the whole [00:53:15].
Proposed Solutions and “Game B”
Schmachtenberger advocates for a radically new approach, often referred to as “Game B,” to transition away from these self-terminating dynamics [01:07:38].
Anti-Rival Risk Systems
The core solution is to create systems where the well-being of individual agents is rigorously positively coupled with the well-being of the whole (“ante rival risk”) [01:05:18]. This means eliminating the “Delta” where what’s best for an individual is at the expense of others or the commons [00:39:01].
Addressing Sociopathy and Psychopathology
- Forced Transparency: Small communities (like tribes or villages, around the Dunbar number) foster high transparency, making sociopathy less advantageous as lying and conspiring are easily found out and punished [00:53:57].
- Interpersonal Interaction: Society needs to ensure that individuals are not “shut-ins” and that psychopathology is noticed and addressed, as decentralized exponential technologies amplify the destructive capacity of even small numbers of disturbed individuals [00:59:05].
- Advantageous Participation: The social system must be more advantageous to participate with than to defect against [01:00:24].
Transition from Private Property to Commonwealth Access
- Eliminating Private Property as a Source of Misaligned Agency: Schmachtenberger argues that private property incentivizes hoarding, artificial scarcity, and extraction, leading to misaligned agency [01:01:57].
- Commonwealth Resource Model: Instead, a system where access to resources does not remove another’s access, like shopping carts at a grocery store, is proposed [01:03:26]. This could apply to transportation, maker studios, and other goods, creating a “sharing economy” enabled by technologies like blockchain [01:04:45].
- Benefits: This model could lead to higher quality resources, lower costs, reduced grotesque duplication, elimination of designed obsolescence, and modular upgradeability, resulting in a much higher quality of life for everyone with a lower load on the system [01:04:08].
Non-Fungible Creativity and Self-Actualization
In a system where basic needs and access to resources are a given, identity and self-actualization would shift from “getting stuff” to “creating and contributing” [01:05:46]. Creativity, being high-dimensional and non-fungible, is less prone to zero-sum dynamics than monetary comparison [01:06:00]. When others are more creative, the shared “commonwealth” improves, benefiting everyone [01:06:40].
Building a New System from the Ground Up
The current system is seen as not truly optimized economically, as it prevents even the wealthiest from accessing the best possible products due to proprietary IP and designed obsolescence [01:08:51]. The argument is that a new system, designed with different axioms, could provide a comprehensively better quality of life for everyone, including the wealthiest [01:10:51].
Increased Capacity That Can’t Be Weaponized
The key to transitioning is creating a “social technology” that provides increased capacity but cannot be weaponized [01:15:16]. This technology would be the “solvent for weaponization itself” [01:15:45]. If a system incentivized full earnestness and transparency, leading to an intact information ecology, it would foster radically better coordination and innovation [01:16:50]. This new “attractor basin” would demonstrate a superior quality of life and produce solutions unavailable to the old system, creating dependency rather than enmity [01:17:30]. The social technology, while open-sourced, would fundamentally change the basis for agency for those who adopt it [01:18:14].
This approach relies on demonstrating a “strong beneficial network effect” where players of the new game (Game B) are better sense-makers and choice-makers, creating valuable things to share with those outside the network [01:19:10]. Adopters would commit to a “peer” doctrine, irrespective of traditional power differences [01:20:22]. Ultimately, the goal is to create social systems where those with increased capacity are oriented to steward others rather than exploit them [01:22:06].