Albert Wenger

World After Capital

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Technological advances broaden the space of the possible for humanity.

With the internet we can give everyone free access to education. But we can also share hate speech globally.
With artificial intelligence we can build self driving cars. But we can also more effectively manipulate people.

There is nothing fundamentally new about this duality of technology.

With fire we were able to warm ourselves and cook. But we were also able to burn down forests.
With steel we were able to construct more effective plows. But we were also able to forge swords.

And yet there is something special about our moment in time.

We are experiencing a non-linearity which renders many of the existing predictions about society based on extrapolation useless. The space of the possible is expanding rapidly due to the extraordinary power of digital technologies which deliver the universality of computation at zero marginal cost.

Humanity has encountered two similar non-linearities previously. The first was the invention of agriculture which ended the forager age and brought us into the agrarian age. The second was the enlightenment which took us out of our state of ignorance about nature and helped usher in the industrial age.

Imagine foragers trying to predict what society would look like in the agrarian age. Cities, rulers, armies all would have come as a surprise. Similarly much of what we have today, from modern medicine to computer technology would look like magic from the perspective of most people from as recently as the late 1800s. Not just the existence of mobile phones would have be hard to foresee but even more so their widespread availability.

Read online at worldaftercapital.org


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Quotes

  • Svyatoslav Yushinhas quoted5 years ago
    I want to provide one more reason for urgency in getting to the Knowledge Age. It is easy for us to think of ourselves as the center of the universe. In early cosmology we literally put the earth in the center with everything else revolving around it. We eventually figured out that we live on a smallish planet circling a star in a galaxy that's part of an incomprehensibly large universe.
    More recently we have discovered that there are a great many planets more or less like ours scattered throughout the universe. That means some form of intelligent life may have arisen in other places. This possibility leads to many fascinating questions, one of which is known as the Fermi Paradox: if there is so much potential for intelligent life in the universe, why have we not yet picked up any signals?
    There are different possible answers to this question. For instance, maybe civilizations get to a point similar to ours and then blow themselves to smithereens because they cannot make a crucial transition. Given the way we are handling the current transition that seems like a distinct possibility for Earth as well (see "A Dangerous Spiral" above). Or all intelligent civilizations encounter a problem, such as climate change, which they cannot solve and they disappear again entirely or become primitive. Given cosmic time and space scales, short lived broadcast civilizations might be especially difficult to detect (a broadcast civilization being one like ours that using electro magnetic waves for communication). I keep bringing up climate change because it is a clear and present danger but there are many more current and future species level challenges.
  • Svyatoslav Yushinhas quoted5 years ago
    The world is rapidly being pulled apart between those who want to take us back into the past and those who are advancing technology, but are largely doing so still trapped in the Industrial Age. These two groups are engaged in a dangerous feedback loop.
    As described all the way back in the introduction, technology itself simply increases the space of the possible. Pushing automation along is not automatically making everyone better off. Trapped in Industrial Age logic, automation is instead enriching a few, while putting pressure on large sections of society. Similarly, digital publishing doesn't automatically accelerate the Knowledge Loop. Instead, we are finding ourselves in a world of fake news and filter bubbles.
  • Svyatoslav Yushinhas quoted5 years ago
    Pushing decisions to the lowest level at which they can be made is especially important at a time of great change. For instance, what is possible in education and learning is changing rapidly due to digital technology. That means we should allow experimentation at the local level instead of trying to have a national education policy. By running many experiments we can figure out much faster what works well, or even what works at all, rather than running a single large experiment.
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