by Sven Nilsen, 2022
In this blog post I will outline the major problem humanity needs to solve to coordinate the future.
The Future is a landscape of 3 Big Ps: Possibility, Probability and Potentiality. This landscape is high dimensional, scales from sub-atomic to cosmos, and might contain lot of surprises and things yet unexplored. However, in the short term, one can pretty much sum it up in 3 steps:
Although I am going to talk a bit about politics, this blog post is not intended to convince you of some political position. There is nothing in this blog post that should surprise you, or change the way you think about the world, no matter which political view you might have. The reason I need to talk about politics, is because it is an important component of how the dynamics of power in the world works. To understand the future, it is necessary to first have a solid background understanding of how it is depending on politics.
In the past, people thought about politics as a left/right spectrum.
If you take a look at political institutions today, they function pretty much the same, with varying degrees of democratic processes, authoritarianism and commitees addressing problems.
The reason this system is how it is, is due to the difficulty of making ethical decisions that influences people’s lives.
Instead of trying to understand political processes on Earth as a whole, it is easier to use the Trolley problem to reason about why making ethical decisions is difficult, which in turn makes a simplified model of politics necessary. Later, I will show how the underlying assumptions of this model is violated.
The Trolley problem goes as following: There are 5 people standing on a train track with a train heading towards them. The 5 people have no time to move and will get killed unless somebody pulls a switch. However, by pulling the switch, the train will run over 1 person standing on the side track.
What makes the Trolley problem difficult to solve, is that depending on which person you are, the desired decision changes. Somebody wants the switch to be pulled while others prefer to not pull the switch.
Imagine that you are one of the 5 people. You might personally be willing to sacrifice your life to save another person’s life. However, perhaps the 4 other people are not like you. What about their lives? You see, it is not always easy to make the correct decision even under the purest motivation of altruism. Sometimes, altruism can look like pure selfishness: There are circumstances where we attribute a different motivation than the original intention.
So, in order to navigate this complex landscape of ethical decisions, people have come up with a simple model of politics: Left vs right spectrum. With other words, you go left or right depending on where you align yourself with other people, in order to make the best decisions you can for yourself and your community.
What makes the left/right spectrum a bad model for the world, is that the world is increasingly becoming more and more hyper-connected.
In the past, what people did in one country rarely affected other people on the opposite side of the planet. This was true in both an empathic sense and causal sense.
For example, people did not know each other as well they do now. Today, it is common that people have friends all over the world, which they care about and treat as part of their community.
Another example, what people did in one place did not affect other people around the planet. When somebody burned a forest in one place, it had little consequences for the world as a whole. Today, burning forests decreases carbon sinks that are very important for the survival of humanity as a whole.
This hyper-connectivity does not mean that people are having the same priorities in life. For example, people living in rich countries, with all material needs covered, are much more concerned about realizing their potential, achieved through means such as traveling. When pollution of airplanes are considered, they do not want their mobility to be affected. However, for people living in environments that are vulnerable to temperature changes, it is of little importance of how mobility of other people are affected, because stabilising the temperature might be a question of survival.
Just like in the Trolley problem, it does not matter whether you are an altruist or selfish. No matter which direction politics go, there are some people you know or people they know, that will get hurt by it.
This effect of hyper-connectivity, has made people more aware of what is going on around the world. The problem is that there is a lot going on at the same time, and people have limited attention span. This means that when people feel hurt, or know somebody they care about that get hurt, they think other people are not listening to their point of view.
Think about it this way: You do not have attention span or capacity to listen to all other people’s views. Therefore, you might be perceived by somebody as a person who does not care, because you do not react to issues that are important to them. How you perceive others, is often a reflection of how other people perceive you.
Hyper-connectivity makes politics of the world increasingly more symmetric, where the feelings and emotions toward others represents the involution of their feelings and emotions. This gets mixed in with the desire for survival and safety for future generations, with the desire for self-realization and prosperity.
Thus, humanity moves from a state where politics was divided into a left vs right spectrum, to a state where the world is increasinbly non-linear and everything that happens to either side of the spectrum, affects in turn the interests of the side that originally caused the aggression and provocation. This is so serious, that today the lives of billions of people are at risk due to lack of empathy, which in turn produces single minded stupidity. The process is very similar to how a bully in school pays less attention in classes, which worsens social problems and in turn causes more aggression that leads to less attention span and the ability to process different perspectives.
The solution is obvious: Humanity needs to invest in systems that can formally reason about different perspectives. We need to bottle empathy in order to survive as a species.
These are systems such as:
With other words, humanity must shift from a left vs right model of politics to a model that increasingly micro-manages individual issues as central ethical problems for the species as a whole. Humanity is no longer a simple set of classes or groups of interests, but an increasingly hyper-connected super-organism that exists inside the biosphere.
When humanity colonizes other planets, the risks at one planet will have much less consequences for another planet. This effect is produced by the isolation of causal systems by the vaccum in space, plus the empathic isolation caused by time delay in communication.
On Earth, the time delay in communication is not long enough to prevent people from caring about other people on the opposite side of the planet. However, the 15 min time delay between Earth and Mars, is significant enough to make people struggling to have a real time conversation. It means, empathic communication becomes much harder between people located at Earth and Mars respectively. This problem of time delay increases with distance in space.
Evidence from biology indicates that the human species will evolve into different species if separated, even within the time span of a few thousand years. This means, although aliens do not exist today, humanity might very well become a source for various species in the future.
In the long term, this can have many consequences for empathic communication. For example, an attack of one solar system on another solar system, can be automated and hard to defend against. Coupled with the spherical occupation of colonization of space, there might be limited ways for a centralized local civilisation to expand outwards. Before Earth runs out of resources both on the planet and in the solar system, enough time will have passed by to colonize every surrounding solar system. As such, those who stay on Earth will have two choices:
However, this choice is continuous over time, such that early pioneers will already have occupied the opportunity that presented itself. If you can imagine some choice being urgent in the future, then there will be people or agents already making a decision on that choice in advance.
This problem is easy to predict, so we will have time to think about it using assistence of technology. It is urgent that we establish efforts to reason about this now, before humanity reaches a level of technology where colonization of other solar systems becomes possible. This is because it can take relatively short amount of time from the technology is there, to decisons having long term consequences are made. Perhaps you imagine colonization of another solar system as a process taking at least hundreds of years, which sounds a lot of time seen from the perspective a normal life span. The problem is that humanity will likely soon find ways for a person to live a thousand years, which changes drastically the situation of how one person might reason empathically about others.
The hyper-connectivity of the present introduces stakeholding into open source systems. These systems influence and drive technological development of the human species. In the future, the stakes get higher and higher into providing safety for virtual existence.
For example, our galaxy might at some point in time have 100 trillion life forms descending from the human species. Still, in a virtual layer of computation, a trillion times more life forms can exist. So, the majority of life forms are invested in the safety for a galactic civilization.
This will lead to an equilibrium of politics on a galactic scale that concerns itself about safety. Today, humans do what they desire based on consequences to the limbic system in the brain, but in the future this limbic system, that determines goals and ambitions, might have itself been virtualised and subject to manipulation.
One can easily imagine how safety becomes more and more important, due to the increasing time delays between powerful entities in the galaxy. As these entities spread further and further outwards, they will have local hyper-connectivity, behaving as single super-organisms, while having limited ability to concern themselves about the well being of other such super-organisms. This is why a galactic civilization is necessary, to stabilize and preserve the stakes that are invested over time.
The obvious solution to this problem is to study mathematical languages. Mathematical languages can be transported between solar systems with ease, without presenting the danger of autonomous agents. This can be thought of as a combination of data and source code for a vast variety of algorithms, which helps life forms to interact with the language both physically and virtually, such that experience for empathic reasoning can be established.
As mathematical languages are exchanged through the galaxy, they will produce a common way of sharing beliefs and ideas, which is independent of the biological or virtual substrate of life forms.
With other words, thinking about the future this way, might provide insights into how humanity can transition from an over-simplified model of how politics works, into a hyper-connected world where everything influences everything.