Technological evolution and its impact

From: jimruttshow8596

Daniel Schmachtenberger, an independent thinker focusing on the future of civilization, believes that humanity is at a critical juncture, facing a “hard fork hypothesis” between potential self-termination and a radically new civilizational model [00:00:21], [00:00:46], [00:00:53]. This unique moment is largely driven by the unprecedented dynamics introduced by technological evolution.

Technology vs. Biological Evolution

Schmachtenberger emphasizes a fundamental difference between human-created technology and biological evolution [00:04:18].

Characteristics of Evolved Systems

Biological evolution is characterized by:

• Mutation: Occurs through natural processes like gamma rays, oxidation, copying errors, or viruses [00:04:50]. These mutation pressures are generally evenly distributed across an ecosystem [00:04:53].
• Selection: Involves both survival and reproduction (mate selection) within evolutionary niches [00:04:34].
• Co-selective Pressures: Advances in one species lead to symmetric coupling of power across the system (e.g., faster lions drive faster gazelles, and vice versa) [00:05:34], [00:05:41]. This creates a “meta-stability” where rivalries exist but are balanced (e.g., lions and gazelles are symbiotic; both would die without the other) [00:06:05], [00:06:13]. Evolutionary agents evolve to fit a niche and do not thrive outside it (e.g., polar bears stay in the Arctic) [00:11:31].
• Unconscious Process: Emerges from complexity dynamics, radically parallel, distributed, combinatoric, and slow, leading to self-stabilizing complex systems [00:08:06].

Characteristics of Technology (Techne)

Human-invented technology, defined as consciously mediated methods derived from the capacity for abstraction, differs fundamentally [00:06:44], [00:06:57]:

• Abstract Pattern Replicators: Technology (including language and social tech) can change much faster than genetic replicators [00:07:00].
• Uneven Distribution: Technological advancements can occur locally, not everywhere simultaneously, making them serial and creating parts not necessarily in equilibrium with whole systems [00:07:08], [00:08:30].
• Intentional Creation: Arises from agents understanding abstract principles and intentionally designing things, rather than random mutation and selection [00:07:37], [00:08:00].

The Asymmetry Problem

When an evolutionary agent (human) with evolutionary motives gains the ability to create technology, it breaks the “power symmetry” essential for evolved systems’ meta-stability [00:08:49], [00:09:21].

• Human predatory capacity can increase orders of magnitude faster than the environment can build resilience [00:08:55]. This is likened to a lion becoming a thousand times faster, leading to the extinction of gazelles and then the lions themselves [00:09:08].
• Power asymmetries within humanity are also extreme; the destructive or economic capacity of a single powerful individual can be billions or trillions of times greater than that of a median person [00:09:42].
• This leads to fundamental instability when rivalries persist with such amplified power [00:10:27].

Consequences of Technological Evolution

The combination of globalization and technology has profoundly changed the magnitude of issues, leading to a “change in kind” of challenges [00:01:59], [00:02:06].

Environmental Impact

• Humans, as apex predators mediated by tools, could move to new environments after over-killing existing ones, eventually becoming apex predators everywhere [00:11:52], [00:12:07].
• This has led to global environmental harm: the majority of large mammal and bird biomass is now humans and domesticated animals [00:10:43].
• Technological efficiency increases do not lead to sustainability but rather new profitable exploits, a phenomenon known as Jevons paradox [00:14:14], [00:14:25].

Societal Issues

• The system drives “perverse incentives” where actions harmful to the whole are very profitable for individuals or groups in the near term [00:15:47].
• Examples include economic incentives to exploit the environment or a for-profit military-industrial complex making war more profitable than peace [00:15:50], [00:16:10].

Multipolar Traps

Societies face “multipolar traps,” a generalization of the tragedy of the Commons or arms races, where individuals or groups doing something bad for the long-term whole gain a competitive advantage in the near-term [00:23:20], [00:23:35]. Without external regulation, everyone is compelled to engage in the harmful behavior to avoid losing out [00:23:50]. With exponentially increasing power, these traps can lead to unrecoverable “bottoms” [00:25:07].

Information Ecology Breakdown

• In competitive environments, withholding true information and spreading disinformation become strategic advantages [00:39:34], [00:39:53].
• Exponential information technology allows for customized disinformation, making it harder to discern signal from noise [00:40:03].
• This creates a “fractal defection” where coordination becomes impossible, leading to a catastrophic breakdown in sense-making [00:41:00].

The “Generator Functions” of Catastrophic Risk

All catastrophic and existential risks stem from a few underlying “generator functions” [00:22:18], [00:42:21]. Addressing these categorical issues, rather than just instances (like climate change or AI scenarios), is necessary to create a new civilization [00:02:38], [00:02:46].

1. Rival Risk Games Multiplied by Exponential Tech: Humans playing win-lose games with uncapped technological capacity inevitably cause harm to the total system, leading to self-termination in a finite playing field [00:16:56], [00:18:00].
2. Increased Fragility from Complicated Systems: Humans create “complicated” (fragile) systems that subsume “complex” (antifragile) natural systems [00:43:57]. Continuously running exponentially more energy through increasingly fragile systems leads to collapse [00:44:26].
3. Solutions Creating Worse Problems: Human problem-solving often creates larger, unintended problems (harm externalities) because solutions are narrowly defined for specific metrics but interact with complex systems [00:45:37], [00:46:18]. The information processing required for safety analysis of new tech is exponentially greater (NP-hard) than the work to invent the tech itself [00:47:25].

Challenges to Current Systems

Daniel Schmachtenberger argues that current systems, whether purely market-driven or regulated by government, cannot escape these generator functions.

Critique of Markets

• Unregulated markets inevitably fall into multipolar traps, as short-term competitive advantage trumps long-term collective well-being [00:23:18].

Critique of Governments and Regulation

• Governments, though intended to solve multipolar traps through top-down rule of law [00:27:22], are mediated by agents (politicians, judges, lobbyists) who are still within the economic system and have their own rival-risk incentives [00:29:00]. This is the core of “public choice theory” [00:29:48].
• National governments are caught in multipolar traps with each other; international agreements (like carbon taxes) can be undermined by countries seeking short-term economic advantage, leading to citizen pressure to revoke laws [00:30:04], [00:33:06].
• The rise of decentralized exponential technologies means small groups or individuals can gain catastrophic capacities (e.g., gene drives, drones), making traditional rule of law unenforceable without a perfected surveillance state [00:31:28].
• Economic power often precedes and corrupts law [00:35:47]. Multinational corporations can evade regulation by moving headquarters or influencing elections [00:36:00].
• Sociopathy: Systems like corporations and governments can act as “strange attractors” for sociopaths, as they reward power-seeking and win-lose dynamics [00:51:52], [00:52:17]. Large systems reduce transparency, allowing for internal defection and hiding actions that benefit individuals at the expense of the whole [00:54:31].

Proposing a New Path: Anti-Rivalry

Given the self-terminating nature of current systems combined with exponential power, humanity needs to become “safer vessels for power” with a different basis for choice-making [00:49:10], [00:49:18]. This requires a shift towards “anti-rivalry systems” [00:18:10].

Core Principles

• Decoupling Well-being from Private Property: The current system conditions greed and sociopathy because well-being, identity, and self-actualization are tied to acquiring private property, often at others’ expense [01:02:02], [01:02:20].
• Commonwealth Access: Instead of possession, access to resources should be a given, where one person’s access does not diminish another’s, or ideally, enhances it [01:02:44], [01:03:26]. This concept, similar to shopping carts at a grocery store or a sharing economy, could replace much grotesque duplication and create higher quality of life with lower system load [01:03:34], [01:03:51].
• Transparency and Accounting: Inspired by tribes, a system with high, healthy, many-to-many transparency can prevent the evolutionary niche for sociopathy and internal defection [00:53:57], [00:54:22].
• Positive Coupling of Agency: Create systems where individual well-being is rigorously positively coupled with the well-being of the whole (anti-rival risk), rather than being uncoupled (non-rival risk) or inversely coupled (rival risk) [01:05:17], [01:07:07].

Self-Actualization through Contribution

In such a system, identity and self-actualization would derive from creativity and contribution to the common wealth, not from acquiring possessions [01:05:46]. This fosters a non-fungible, high-dimensional form of competition where people are incentivized to support others’ self-actualization because it directly improves their own lives [01:05:54], [01:06:06], [01:06:38].

The Transition Challenge

The biggest hurdle is the transition from the current “Game A” to this proposed “Game B” [01:08:11].

• The current system is deeply optimized for its own dynamics, and people are locked into rival-risk structures [01:07:54].
• A new system must be clearly specified to serve as an adequate blueprint [01:08:20].
• The key is to create a “social technology” that is anti-rival risk, producing increased coordination capacity that cannot be weaponized [01:15:36]. This requires fundamentally changing the nature of agents’ agency [01:17:18].
• Such a system, by fostering true information sharing and eliminating incentives for disinformation, would lead to radically better sense-making, coordination, and innovation than the current system [01:16:51].
• A small group of “fast adopters” could instantiate this new “full stack civilization” as a “new strange attractor” or “attractor basin” [01:17:22]. Its demonstrably higher quality of life and problem-solving capacity would draw in others, not through direct competition but through its inherent superiority and its willingness to open-source its “social technology” [01:17:33], [01:18:11].