The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away.
It seems difficult to imagine a permanently stable world civilization, or one which is succeeded by repeated world civilizations, which also agree on being very boring and never going to colonize anywhere. Humans do not create stable civilizations, period; Ancient Egypt, the longest lasting civilization, lasted only 3-4,000 years, which is an eyeblink in geological terms.
I like your style, and I think you'd like mine. Check out my latest (today's post) and let me know what you think. It's the last in my recent series, The Architecture of Extraction.
And why wouldn't a large institution like a world government not be subjected to rot? Institutional knowledge tends to fade away if not used. The only way to not let these skills atrophy is through repeated use, so maybe a perpetual war might pe useful for such an institution. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think you and even elites* focus too much on survival and too little on the quality of that survival. Its not if you survive, but how. Read that again.
Not all survival is preferable to no survival at all. Most survival, indeed, the overwhelmingly vast majority of survival scenarios, are not preferable to extinction.
(*though I would not call you an elite, and that's not an insult. I would be ashamed to be an elite, from this vantage point. Not for moral reasons but because I consider our elites profoundly weak and stupid)
I need to highlight that it really appears you are starting to fall into the age old trap of equating what wins as being what is best. Or, more specifically, conflating evolutionary adaptation and progress. I would suggest thinking through these relationships.
Food for thought, progress in capability and knowledge is not the same as progress in improving human welfare. The two overlap, and the second may require the first, but it is not sufficient.
Just as importantly, what is best for the advance of society is absolutely not the same as the advance in the welfare of humans (or whatever agents we might choose to focus on). Again, they may be correlated, but not the same.
Please correct me if I misunderstand your position. Clarification itself would be useful though to both you and your readers.
He doesn't tackle your questions head-on - I imagine Robin is less interested in the details of welfare than the conditions which might make it possible over very long time intervals - but he does discuss his politics here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-politics
But these don’t ensure welfare. These are suggestions for healthy and adaptive and long lasting societies, not for flourishing people within this society. If an adaptive society leads to a flourishing population, then ….great. If not, then what is the point?
I'm assuming Robin prioritizes long term survival and growth. Seeing as focusing on welfare can put policies at odds with such goals especially over the short term, it makes sense of him to leave the discussion of welfare to others.
Personally I'd love to hear Robin's thoughts on the details of welfare and flourishing, but having read his blog for over a decade I doubt that's high on his writing list.
When he gave his TED talk on Em economy I recall him saying something along the lines of "I know you're eager to decide whether this is good or bad, whether you love or hate this world. But I ask you to spend some time just thinking of the facts, what would happen. Think about it, find out about it, maybe even read a book about it."
So - welfare has objective variables such as population, health and longevity, and perhaps experienced or stated stress. It also runs into the weeds very fast, especially in contemporary culture. For a writer such as him it makes sense to focus on analyzing the raw facts as much as possible.
I’m with you and would prefer to just protect “flourishing” or “wellbeing” directly (even if imperfectly defined). He’s trying to avoid the assumption that the values we value (or any set of values) are objectively better than any other set of values, and takes evolutionary adaptability to be a more objective standard.
A Venn diagram comes to mind. In circle one are things that are worthwhile. In the second are things that persist by being adaptive. The hard work is getting the two to intersect.
I'm going to be more pessimistic and say the hard work is absolutely getting the things that are adaptive. I of course agree that having worthwhile things - for me, security, liberty, love between people - does seem like the ultimate goal.
I never got a clue about what cultural drift is. But I perfectly understand “focused on moral outrage”. That’s when, given massive progress in material culture and even varieties of moral philosophy, quite a few people start to wonder why we still must have massive and increasing variance in human welfare, and no ability to reign in extractive economies and their “externalities” that will make the planet uninhabitable (for us) before we can start to leave it. And there is also much outrage from those who say those things don’t matter or don’t exist. I guess it’s true that we will get minimal cultural variety to evolve innovation as long as this impasse persists.
The reason is evolution incentivizes and selects for evil. The code says, "produce and distill evil". The meme that there are no moral facts is a function of this. The fact that the most powerful people alive rape kids is a function of this. All while taking their champagne enemas while the average human being languishes in misery while their hormonal and reproductive and pair bonding drives are destroyed. For profit.
The fact that most stories, cartoons, myths, movies, etc— all seem to share a trope of, "the good fought with the evil long and hard, until finally, through the power of love, or friendship, or faith, or virtue, or magic(and so on), the good won"...
is a function of this. The opposite is true. Evil reings in this space and its grip only tightens with time. Strictly.
This doesn't mean you're in the worst hell imaginable. You can still do good in this space. You can still have love . Friends. You can still be a hero or coward.
In fact it's even more meaningful in this space. So, hate to be the bearer of terrible news, but the quicker you accept it the quicker you can accurately move through reality. Which is a good thing, because the real nightmare is being stuck in the Matrix.
No, I didnt, but thats probably their own fault, you give someone a shovel and they injure their foot. I meant that they should become part of the USA. Like, the places where migrants come from, should become US territories and eventually states. Look at Texas and California, most succesful parts of Mexico😎
"It is more of a try-once step, that we either pass or fail within a cosmically short time."
I've had this niggling thought inbte back of my head for a few years that the great filter may be oil. On planets that didn't have quadrillions of little diotomes turning into petroleum for hundreds of millions of years, or for planets that have them and go through a mass exploitation of global reserves as we have, may never reach space travel.
I've tried imagining it out in my head and I'm skeptical if it is realistically possible to jump from natural renewable resource (wood) steam power to nuclear, without the incrediblely concentrated solar power stored in trillions of barrels worth of crude.
We may be currently in our only shot for extending past Sol. if global civilization collapses, the next one that rebuilds will already have all the easily mined petroleum and mineral resources exploited and gone. You can mine ancient garbage dumps for a while, but it's an awkward way to get a resource - much of the metals in dumps are already advanced alloys with super high melting temps and difficult to separate out again without modern technology, techniques, and tremendous energy.
depending on the gap, I suppose. We rediscovered the classics in the late "dark" / early middle ages, and there is likely several times all we know of the classics post just from the fire of the library of Alexandria alone.
If we spend hundreds or a few thousand years to get back to the cusp of the industrial revolution, I'm not sure we would have many USB sticks or readers still around to read the ancient advanced maths and engineering, and if we did, we still can't build a photo voltaic cell out of wood.
That's more the filter I'm seeing. Is simply not having the energy or material resources available to advance modernity as significantly as we have in order to get to a stage where space travel is a possibility. You can load an entire forest into a rocket, lighting the bottom of it isn't going to get you into orbit.
We ....sort of... don't need petroleum for space travel now - we can use nuclear power to separate out hydrogen and oxygen and shove them in a couple fuel cylinders, but could we have got to that stage without the century+ of building the global infrastructure first by using oil to get us from wood to nuclear?
Yes. Without fossil fuels, there's still an acceptable pathway towards high technology (solar pv, nuclear) using hydropower as the sole industrial energy source. This pathway does not require resources that our industrial civilization would render scarce over the course of its lifespan, since the only required metals are iron and aluminum, abundant pieces of Earth's crust that are impossible to run out of.
The initial phases of a pure hydropower industrial revolution would look similar to what happened in premodern Europe and North America during the 1700s, with waterwheels and the like being increasingly used to mechanically power machinery. However, economic growth would be constrained by the lack of highly suitable sites, especially along big rivers where the vast majority of potential energy cannot be captured with waterwheels along the fringes alone.
Hence, industrialists would search for other forms of hydropower. Their answer would be dams. Dams large enough to be industrially useful have existed for thousands of years, with the Romans building dozens of dams like the Cornalvo Dam during their heyday. These dams would be repurposed to pass water through pipes to power machinery before the water used flows out into the fields, allowing for a further increase in economic output. Soon after this repurposing, states and corporations start the process of building increasingly large and sophisticated dams.
With dams becoming larger and more prevalent, the next big problems become the sore lack of industrial heat. While the hydropower revolution has been ongoing, iron and charcoal production has remained almost unchanged. Flowing water can neither directly create the temperatures needed to induce pyrolysis (to more efficiently make charcoal) nor heat iron ore to the temperatures needed for reduction to occur. However, scientists will eventually learn enough about electricity to make generators and figure out inductive heating shortly thereafter at the latest. Sure, in a post-us world this descendant civilization would have to make do with iron as its only electrical conductor for a while until aluminum production kicks up, which will be miserable to us, accustomed to our bounty of copper, but electricity will be adopted if only to make more iron to make more bigger, better weapons of war.
Here, the path to a fully industrial, electrified society operating at reasonable efficiencies relies on finding a way to ditch iron as a conductor and replace it with something better. Since we mined out all the copper, that's out. But the second best conductor of reasonable rarity, aluminum, is a major component of Earth's crust, rendering it even more infinite than iron. The main bottleneck will be discovering the Hall–Héroult process, since reducing bauxite into aluminum is hard. This will get discovered, especially since the powers that be of the second industrial civilization will know that the first nation to mass produce aluminum will experience a surge in economic growth and military power because it would no longer have to deal with the terrible efficiency of iron as an electrical conductor. Aluminum enables the efficient transportation of cheap power to where it is needed and would bring the capabilities of this second industrial civilization up to a point where I'm fairly confident they could discover and develop either nuclear power or solar electric power, depending on their inclination and particular technological pathway.
I wonder whether you are treating interstellar expansion as the successful outcome. Expansion and persistence are not the same as progress. A civilization could spread rapidly while becoming less free, less humane, or worse for the welfare of its members. Conversely, a non-expansionary civilization might still achieve enormous welfare, and it seems we would be better off locking in on this outcome than risking a step into catastrophe.
My point is that uncontrolled expansion is not automatically the successful outcome. A civilization can propagate widely while reducing welfare, freedom, or the likelihood of future improvement.
Continuous cultural evolution isn’t a goal I would sign on to unless it was the best path to improved human flourishing. And better flourishing with less cultural adaptation is something I think we would and should choose, if that option is available.
Your own ideas are in contradiction with each other. What kind of culture controls a single world government? One that was able to outcompete all other cultures on Earth. Doesn't that make it the "best" by your standards?
No, you don't think it's the best, in fact you don't like it. So you want cultures to compete with no holds barred, including war and oppression, but you don't want any of them to win "too much." But you think that this cultural competition is very likely to lead to a single winner anyway, which again, you don't like. So the very process of competition that you favor, you acknowledge leads to an outcome that you don't like.
Another of your views is that you're pro-authoritarian... unless the authority gets too big, then you flip and don't like it. You're opposed to cultural drift, which you think could be stopped with authoritarian enforcement such as training an AI to promote a certain culture... unless the authority is too big and then you flip.
You want there to be a game where everybody is trying to win, but you don't want any winners!
Lastly, you think that cultures that are not in competition with other cultures will drift and become maladaptive. But you also think that a global government, which would be in competition with nobody, would have a culture that would not drift for half a billion years.
Yes when many cultures competed, the best ones won. Yes, without competition, culture likely decays. Yes, I'm not against the idea of governance. I never suggested training an AI to solve anything. A stable limiting govt might only appear after many cycles of the rise and fall of civilization.
How do we know the best cultures won? There were thousands of fully free and egalitarian cultures in pre-agricultural times who worked less and spent most of their time in community with others and nature. Only the richest 1 percent of the world today get to spend that type of quality time. We have no idea how much deep knowledge has been lost from the rise of agriculture, colonisation and capitalism. But globalisation has made us closer to a global monoculture now than anytime in history.
This doesn't resolve the contradiction of wanting there to be a game where everyone tries to be a winner, expecting the game to lead to a single winner, but viewing the outcome of a single winner to be bad. Nor does it resolve the contradiction of expecting cultural drift in a non-competitive culture, but expecting a world government culture to stay the same for half a billion years without drifting.
And you did recently suggest training an AI to limit cultural drift.
The contradiction is that you want something that you believe probably leads to an outcome that you don't want.
Besides, what steps would prevent this world government culture from winning? To promote competition among cultures and prevent a single winner would require an entity, above and apart from all those cultures, to do that, similar to antitrust legislation. This entity couldn't be part of the game of cultural competition, because promoting competition among other cultures is not an adaptive trait, because it doesn't promote the entity's own proliferation. So an entity capable of doing that must have already won the game. This entity would *be* a world government.
And that says nothing for the other contradiction about how a world government would be stable without drift for half a billion years.
Ya, the first thing I thought when you posted on directed "cultural steering" yesterday was that all prior attempts in that direction quickly turned into totalitarian hellscapes (Cultural Revolution, etc.).
And yes the great danger of world gov't is stability. Supposedly the Soviet Union thought Communism could never be safe so long as a single external market economy existed (maybe apocryphal but feels truthy).
I still think AGI and ASI are going to throw a monkey wrench into all our plans very soon, and think our current ability to plan for that new environment is near zero. I don't think we're doomed but there's great danger.
We will have to be lucky. But then that's how life works.
What I struggle with is imagining a sufficient motivation to build a generation ship and make a (expensive, slow, risky) trip to another star system.
Our culture doesn't do that sort of thing as insurance against existential risks like asteroids. If it did then we would've colonized the deep ocean by now. And we don't do something that expensive "because it's cool", or for science. It would have to be a trip made out of necessity.
I suppose a Malthusian crisis of epic proportions could induce people to get on a spaceship for 150+ years, if we ran out of available matter or energy. Malthus hasn't been right yet but who knows.
But what won't come down (unless physics is wrong) is the communication cost of being widely separated from the entirety of culture.
Would you want to live in a place where every bit of information you send and receive experiences a 5 year delay? No you would not. And given our culture's direction, your propensity for accepting that bargain is going down over time, not up.
If people *have* to make that bargain then they will. That seems unlikely to me.
I'm not saying it would be bad for humanity to spread out. I'm saying it would be bad for humans.
Technology has put us on a rocket ship of economic development. But that creates dependency, and interdependency. It becomes harder over time to break away. Try it now and you become Ted Kaczynski, subsistence living in a shack. Play that forward another 1000 years and I don't know how much choice any of us will have. Perhaps no more choice than the mitochondria in your cells have to strike out on their own again.
Already at my company I'm seeing a lot of people forget how to write code. It's frightening how quickly we come to depend on things.
How consistent are you in your time-to-recover options for 2, 3, and 4. It seems like if you say #2 is hard to achieve given a half-billion-year timespan to try again, you have to think #3 and #4 have to be stable and in control for half a billion years to prevent #1 (your preferred outcome, I take it).
My current guess is there are a few giant hurdles in the filter, ANY of which stops a galaxy-spanning visible civilization. 2 are behind us: complex life and abstract modeled thought. At least one is ahead - ability to cooperate enough to get out of our starting solar system WITHOUT cooperating so much that we lose the ability to face novel challenges. Honestly, I'd put more weight on #2 than #4 for what blocks the next ~10Kyear attempt to expand. None of the 4 seem permanent enough to hold for half a billion years - we/they will have more tries, just like non-life Earth had many years of "trying" before complex life took hold and eukaryotes had a lot of variation and attempts before human intelligence and communication showed up.
It seems difficult to imagine a permanently stable world civilization, or one which is succeeded by repeated world civilizations, which also agree on being very boring and never going to colonize anywhere. Humans do not create stable civilizations, period; Ancient Egypt, the longest lasting civilization, lasted only 3-4,000 years, which is an eyeblink in geological terms.
I'd also like to hear Robin's thoughts on this, especially considering his previous views on value lock-in: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/macaskill-on-value-lock-inhtml/comments
I like your style, and I think you'd like mine. Check out my latest (today's post) and let me know what you think. It's the last in my recent series, The Architecture of Extraction.
The Intellectual Architecture of Trumpism: How the Left and Right Are Trapped in the Same Mental Loop - https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-intellectual-architecture-of-trumpism
And why wouldn't a large institution like a world government not be subjected to rot? Institutional knowledge tends to fade away if not used. The only way to not let these skills atrophy is through repeated use, so maybe a perpetual war might pe useful for such an institution. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think you and even elites* focus too much on survival and too little on the quality of that survival. Its not if you survive, but how. Read that again.
Not all survival is preferable to no survival at all. Most survival, indeed, the overwhelmingly vast majority of survival scenarios, are not preferable to extinction.
(*though I would not call you an elite, and that's not an insult. I would be ashamed to be an elite, from this vantage point. Not for moral reasons but because I consider our elites profoundly weak and stupid)
I need to highlight that it really appears you are starting to fall into the age old trap of equating what wins as being what is best. Or, more specifically, conflating evolutionary adaptation and progress. I would suggest thinking through these relationships.
Food for thought, progress in capability and knowledge is not the same as progress in improving human welfare. The two overlap, and the second may require the first, but it is not sufficient.
Just as importantly, what is best for the advance of society is absolutely not the same as the advance in the welfare of humans (or whatever agents we might choose to focus on). Again, they may be correlated, but not the same.
Please correct me if I misunderstand your position. Clarification itself would be useful though to both you and your readers.
Whatever you want to last, must be mixed into an adaptive package. You only get a few things to do this with.
He doesn't tackle your questions head-on - I imagine Robin is less interested in the details of welfare than the conditions which might make it possible over very long time intervals - but he does discuss his politics here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-politics
"I'd most save: open intellectual inquiry"
But these don’t ensure welfare. These are suggestions for healthy and adaptive and long lasting societies, not for flourishing people within this society. If an adaptive society leads to a flourishing population, then ….great. If not, then what is the point?
I'm assuming Robin prioritizes long term survival and growth. Seeing as focusing on welfare can put policies at odds with such goals especially over the short term, it makes sense of him to leave the discussion of welfare to others.
Personally I'd love to hear Robin's thoughts on the details of welfare and flourishing, but having read his blog for over a decade I doubt that's high on his writing list.
When he gave his TED talk on Em economy I recall him saying something along the lines of "I know you're eager to decide whether this is good or bad, whether you love or hate this world. But I ask you to spend some time just thinking of the facts, what would happen. Think about it, find out about it, maybe even read a book about it."
So - welfare has objective variables such as population, health and longevity, and perhaps experienced or stated stress. It also runs into the weeds very fast, especially in contemporary culture. For a writer such as him it makes sense to focus on analyzing the raw facts as much as possible.
I’m with you and would prefer to just protect “flourishing” or “wellbeing” directly (even if imperfectly defined). He’s trying to avoid the assumption that the values we value (or any set of values) are objectively better than any other set of values, and takes evolutionary adaptability to be a more objective standard.
A Venn diagram comes to mind. In circle one are things that are worthwhile. In the second are things that persist by being adaptive. The hard work is getting the two to intersect.
I'm going to be more pessimistic and say the hard work is absolutely getting the things that are adaptive. I of course agree that having worthwhile things - for me, security, liberty, love between people - does seem like the ultimate goal.
I never got a clue about what cultural drift is. But I perfectly understand “focused on moral outrage”. That’s when, given massive progress in material culture and even varieties of moral philosophy, quite a few people start to wonder why we still must have massive and increasing variance in human welfare, and no ability to reign in extractive economies and their “externalities” that will make the planet uninhabitable (for us) before we can start to leave it. And there is also much outrage from those who say those things don’t matter or don’t exist. I guess it’s true that we will get minimal cultural variety to evolve innovation as long as this impasse persists.
The reason is evolution incentivizes and selects for evil. The code says, "produce and distill evil". The meme that there are no moral facts is a function of this. The fact that the most powerful people alive rape kids is a function of this. All while taking their champagne enemas while the average human being languishes in misery while their hormonal and reproductive and pair bonding drives are destroyed. For profit.
The fact that most stories, cartoons, myths, movies, etc— all seem to share a trope of, "the good fought with the evil long and hard, until finally, through the power of love, or friendship, or faith, or virtue, or magic(and so on), the good won"...
is a function of this. The opposite is true. Evil reings in this space and its grip only tightens with time. Strictly.
This doesn't mean you're in the worst hell imaginable. You can still do good in this space. You can still have love . Friends. You can still be a hero or coward.
In fact it's even more meaningful in this space. So, hate to be the bearer of terrible news, but the quicker you accept it the quicker you can accurately move through reality. Which is a good thing, because the real nightmare is being stuck in the Matrix.
The world adopting the US Constitution fixes this. 😉
Did you know that some 3rd world nations adopted US constitution, with bad results?
No, I didnt, but thats probably their own fault, you give someone a shovel and they injure their foot. I meant that they should become part of the USA. Like, the places where migrants come from, should become US territories and eventually states. Look at Texas and California, most succesful parts of Mexico😎
"It is more of a try-once step, that we either pass or fail within a cosmically short time."
I've had this niggling thought inbte back of my head for a few years that the great filter may be oil. On planets that didn't have quadrillions of little diotomes turning into petroleum for hundreds of millions of years, or for planets that have them and go through a mass exploitation of global reserves as we have, may never reach space travel.
I've tried imagining it out in my head and I'm skeptical if it is realistically possible to jump from natural renewable resource (wood) steam power to nuclear, without the incrediblely concentrated solar power stored in trillions of barrels worth of crude.
We may be currently in our only shot for extending past Sol. if global civilization collapses, the next one that rebuilds will already have all the easily mined petroleum and mineral resources exploited and gone. You can mine ancient garbage dumps for a while, but it's an awkward way to get a resource - much of the metals in dumps are already advanced alloys with super high melting temps and difficult to separate out again without modern technology, techniques, and tremendous energy.
The next civ to replace ours will likely retain recipes for making solar cells and batteries.
depending on the gap, I suppose. We rediscovered the classics in the late "dark" / early middle ages, and there is likely several times all we know of the classics post just from the fire of the library of Alexandria alone.
If we spend hundreds or a few thousand years to get back to the cusp of the industrial revolution, I'm not sure we would have many USB sticks or readers still around to read the ancient advanced maths and engineering, and if we did, we still can't build a photo voltaic cell out of wood.
That's more the filter I'm seeing. Is simply not having the energy or material resources available to advance modernity as significantly as we have in order to get to a stage where space travel is a possibility. You can load an entire forest into a rocket, lighting the bottom of it isn't going to get you into orbit.
We ....sort of... don't need petroleum for space travel now - we can use nuclear power to separate out hydrogen and oxygen and shove them in a couple fuel cylinders, but could we have got to that stage without the century+ of building the global infrastructure first by using oil to get us from wood to nuclear?
Yes. Without fossil fuels, there's still an acceptable pathway towards high technology (solar pv, nuclear) using hydropower as the sole industrial energy source. This pathway does not require resources that our industrial civilization would render scarce over the course of its lifespan, since the only required metals are iron and aluminum, abundant pieces of Earth's crust that are impossible to run out of.
The initial phases of a pure hydropower industrial revolution would look similar to what happened in premodern Europe and North America during the 1700s, with waterwheels and the like being increasingly used to mechanically power machinery. However, economic growth would be constrained by the lack of highly suitable sites, especially along big rivers where the vast majority of potential energy cannot be captured with waterwheels along the fringes alone.
Hence, industrialists would search for other forms of hydropower. Their answer would be dams. Dams large enough to be industrially useful have existed for thousands of years, with the Romans building dozens of dams like the Cornalvo Dam during their heyday. These dams would be repurposed to pass water through pipes to power machinery before the water used flows out into the fields, allowing for a further increase in economic output. Soon after this repurposing, states and corporations start the process of building increasingly large and sophisticated dams.
With dams becoming larger and more prevalent, the next big problems become the sore lack of industrial heat. While the hydropower revolution has been ongoing, iron and charcoal production has remained almost unchanged. Flowing water can neither directly create the temperatures needed to induce pyrolysis (to more efficiently make charcoal) nor heat iron ore to the temperatures needed for reduction to occur. However, scientists will eventually learn enough about electricity to make generators and figure out inductive heating shortly thereafter at the latest. Sure, in a post-us world this descendant civilization would have to make do with iron as its only electrical conductor for a while until aluminum production kicks up, which will be miserable to us, accustomed to our bounty of copper, but electricity will be adopted if only to make more iron to make more bigger, better weapons of war.
Here, the path to a fully industrial, electrified society operating at reasonable efficiencies relies on finding a way to ditch iron as a conductor and replace it with something better. Since we mined out all the copper, that's out. But the second best conductor of reasonable rarity, aluminum, is a major component of Earth's crust, rendering it even more infinite than iron. The main bottleneck will be discovering the Hall–Héroult process, since reducing bauxite into aluminum is hard. This will get discovered, especially since the powers that be of the second industrial civilization will know that the first nation to mass produce aluminum will experience a surge in economic growth and military power because it would no longer have to deal with the terrible efficiency of iron as an electrical conductor. Aluminum enables the efficient transportation of cheap power to where it is needed and would bring the capabilities of this second industrial civilization up to a point where I'm fairly confident they could discover and develop either nuclear power or solar electric power, depending on their inclination and particular technological pathway.
I wonder whether you are treating interstellar expansion as the successful outcome. Expansion and persistence are not the same as progress. A civilization could spread rapidly while becoming less free, less humane, or worse for the welfare of its members. Conversely, a non-expansionary civilization might still achieve enormous welfare, and it seems we would be better off locking in on this outcome than risking a step into catastrophe.
That is just the sort of logic a world govt might use to prevent expansion.
That doesn’t make the argument false.
My point is that uncontrolled expansion is not automatically the successful outcome. A civilization can propagate widely while reducing welfare, freedom, or the likelihood of future improvement.
Continuous cultural evolution isn’t a goal I would sign on to unless it was the best path to improved human flourishing. And better flourishing with less cultural adaptation is something I think we would and should choose, if that option is available.
Your own ideas are in contradiction with each other. What kind of culture controls a single world government? One that was able to outcompete all other cultures on Earth. Doesn't that make it the "best" by your standards?
No, you don't think it's the best, in fact you don't like it. So you want cultures to compete with no holds barred, including war and oppression, but you don't want any of them to win "too much." But you think that this cultural competition is very likely to lead to a single winner anyway, which again, you don't like. So the very process of competition that you favor, you acknowledge leads to an outcome that you don't like.
Another of your views is that you're pro-authoritarian... unless the authority gets too big, then you flip and don't like it. You're opposed to cultural drift, which you think could be stopped with authoritarian enforcement such as training an AI to promote a certain culture... unless the authority is too big and then you flip.
You want there to be a game where everybody is trying to win, but you don't want any winners!
Lastly, you think that cultures that are not in competition with other cultures will drift and become maladaptive. But you also think that a global government, which would be in competition with nobody, would have a culture that would not drift for half a billion years.
Yes when many cultures competed, the best ones won. Yes, without competition, culture likely decays. Yes, I'm not against the idea of governance. I never suggested training an AI to solve anything. A stable limiting govt might only appear after many cycles of the rise and fall of civilization.
How do we know the best cultures won? There were thousands of fully free and egalitarian cultures in pre-agricultural times who worked less and spent most of their time in community with others and nature. Only the richest 1 percent of the world today get to spend that type of quality time. We have no idea how much deep knowledge has been lost from the rise of agriculture, colonisation and capitalism. But globalisation has made us closer to a global monoculture now than anytime in history.
This doesn't resolve the contradiction of wanting there to be a game where everyone tries to be a winner, expecting the game to lead to a single winner, but viewing the outcome of a single winner to be bad. Nor does it resolve the contradiction of expecting cultural drift in a non-competitive culture, but expecting a world government culture to stay the same for half a billion years without drifting.
And you did recently suggest training an AI to limit cultural drift.
There's no contradiction in wanting continued competition, instead of a single winner ending it.
The contradiction is that you want something that you believe probably leads to an outcome that you don't want.
Besides, what steps would prevent this world government culture from winning? To promote competition among cultures and prevent a single winner would require an entity, above and apart from all those cultures, to do that, similar to antitrust legislation. This entity couldn't be part of the game of cultural competition, because promoting competition among other cultures is not an adaptive trait, because it doesn't promote the entity's own proliferation. So an entity capable of doing that must have already won the game. This entity would *be* a world government.
And that says nothing for the other contradiction about how a world government would be stable without drift for half a billion years.
Ya, the first thing I thought when you posted on directed "cultural steering" yesterday was that all prior attempts in that direction quickly turned into totalitarian hellscapes (Cultural Revolution, etc.).
And yes the great danger of world gov't is stability. Supposedly the Soviet Union thought Communism could never be safe so long as a single external market economy existed (maybe apocryphal but feels truthy).
I still think AGI and ASI are going to throw a monkey wrench into all our plans very soon, and think our current ability to plan for that new environment is near zero. I don't think we're doomed but there's great danger.
We will have to be lucky. But then that's how life works.
These problems still continue even with AGI.
What I struggle with is imagining a sufficient motivation to build a generation ship and make a (expensive, slow, risky) trip to another star system.
Our culture doesn't do that sort of thing as insurance against existential risks like asteroids. If it did then we would've colonized the deep ocean by now. And we don't do something that expensive "because it's cool", or for science. It would have to be a trip made out of necessity.
I suppose a Malthusian crisis of epic proportions could induce people to get on a spaceship for 150+ years, if we ran out of available matter or energy. Malthus hasn't been right yet but who knows.
The cost of starships could come way down over coming millennia, if tech progress continues.
But what won't come down (unless physics is wrong) is the communication cost of being widely separated from the entirety of culture.
Would you want to live in a place where every bit of information you send and receive experiences a 5 year delay? No you would not. And given our culture's direction, your propensity for accepting that bargain is going down over time, not up.
If people *have* to make that bargain then they will. That seems unlikely to me.
But that delay is what ensures cultural fragmentation, and thus healthy cultural evolution.
I'm not saying it would be bad for humanity to spread out. I'm saying it would be bad for humans.
Technology has put us on a rocket ship of economic development. But that creates dependency, and interdependency. It becomes harder over time to break away. Try it now and you become Ted Kaczynski, subsistence living in a shack. Play that forward another 1000 years and I don't know how much choice any of us will have. Perhaps no more choice than the mitochondria in your cells have to strike out on their own again.
Already at my company I'm seeing a lot of people forget how to write code. It's frightening how quickly we come to depend on things.
How consistent are you in your time-to-recover options for 2, 3, and 4. It seems like if you say #2 is hard to achieve given a half-billion-year timespan to try again, you have to think #3 and #4 have to be stable and in control for half a billion years to prevent #1 (your preferred outcome, I take it).
My current guess is there are a few giant hurdles in the filter, ANY of which stops a galaxy-spanning visible civilization. 2 are behind us: complex life and abstract modeled thought. At least one is ahead - ability to cooperate enough to get out of our starting solar system WITHOUT cooperating so much that we lose the ability to face novel challenges. Honestly, I'd put more weight on #2 than #4 for what blocks the next ~10Kyear attempt to expand. None of the 4 seem permanent enough to hold for half a billion years - we/they will have more tries, just like non-life Earth had many years of "trying" before complex life took hold and eukaryotes had a lot of variation and attempts before human intelligence and communication showed up.
The first seems to me permanent enough - once the galaxy is full of colonists, that can't be reversed.