Scott Sumner notes the rapid fall of dictators around the globe and asks
And of course the larger-than-life dictators (Saddam, Gaddafi) are gradually being replaced by bland technocrats. It looks like history will end at some point during the 21st century. So what comes next? Didn’t Fukuyama say something about using technology to change human nature? Will that be the next phase of humanity’s reckless journey into the unknown? I await your answers in the comment section.
Just to restate old points, I think there is a reasonable chance that we are close to the end of humanity, by which I mean this strand of earth borne sentient life. That includes any possible artificial intelligence decedents we might have or radical changes to the biology of “humans.”
That is, to be clear, I believe there is a fair chance this entire project is coming to a close.
On the other hand, if it doesn’t come to a close I have serious doubts that the future will be Democratic-Republicanism. It just doesn’t make sense in a Malthusian state and – should we continue – it is a Malthusian state to which we are surely headed.
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Sunday ~ November 13th, 2011 at 6:00 pm
rjs
you have to go a long way to use technology to change human nature; of course, that is our only hope…
http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-race-is-almost-finished/
Sunday ~ November 13th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Becky Hargrove
We have never understood the promise that technology held for us, that it still holds for us and how it would set us free – to teach one another and heal one another in equal time.
Sunday ~ November 13th, 2011 at 7:12 pm
The Daily Climb « georgesblogforum
[...] old. President Felipe Calderon’s point man in the [...] Jon-Paul Modeled Behavior FeedHistory Will Not End Unless The Human Project Does November 13, 2011 Karl Smith Politics and Computers FeedAung San Suu Kyi to run for office in [...]
Sunday ~ November 13th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
lfvoss
It seems to me the most likely state we end up in is a benevolent Matrix-like VR, carefully tended by artificial intelligence/robotics in the real world.
Sunday ~ November 13th, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Curt Doolittle
Who kidnapped Karl and wrote this post? Where is the positivist that places such infinite faith in an uncertain future that he is willing to risk the fragile system of habits and customers upon which our prosperity rests?
All social advancement is predicated on advancement of our ability to calculate and coordinate in a division of labor — calculation determines our our ability to PLAN – to outwit scarcity, time and ignorance. Whether it be the narrative, customs, writing, numbers, accounting, laws, we invent new forms of calculation to extend our senses, and allow ourselves to make judgments about the future, and plan our actions accordingly.
The commercial state is unnatural to man. It is a technical artifice that he has created in pursuit of his own ease and comfort. He invented that state. He invented the agrarian state – and the organizational unit of the family, and the absurd moral code of farmers, and the behavioral discipline and customs of farmers — all of which are counter to the nature of man as a creature of serial marriage, polygamy, tribalism, and willful predatory violence.
We do not know what urbanization will do to this structure — currently it is dismantling the agrarian moral code. And our ability to calculate and coordinate seems weaker than most economists have anticipated.
All I know is that no civilization in history has survived urbanization. I’ve spent a decade trying to figure out why. I think I know the answer. And if we find the end of history, it will be because we have failed like all other civilizations have failed, fo solve not only the malthusian problem, but the calculation problem, as well as the organizational problem of maintaining those high costs of foregone opportunity that we call a moral code, in an environment of near total anonymity — where that moral code is necessary to preserve the concept of property and its system of incentives.
In the end, all civilizations die of the tragedy of the commons – their system of property rights becomes insufficient for their population density, and the systems by which they cooperate using whatever definitions of property have evolved by accident.
And we willingly destroy ours daily… and our future with them.
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 2:19 am
anon
Why are you blathering about overpopulation?
If the current trends of urbanization continue then world population will top out at 9.5 billion at the end of the century and then shrink to 7 billion and stay stable there. There’s plenty of resources for everyone.
The real risk is stupid people insisting on not stopping an irreversible catastrophe before it’s too late: humans warming up the planet.
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Curt Doolittle
I am not talking about overpopulation. I’m pointing out the problem of maintaining a polity where the informational feedback loop is insufficient to maintain the ethical system of forgone opportunity costs we refer to as manners, ethics, morals and non-corruption on one hand and the ability to plan on the other.
Populations are sustained by cooperative technologies we take for granted because they are inexplicitly stated. ie: hayekian knowledge. We understand them in retrospect. We did not design them. And there is little evidence that we could have.
Societies fail, not as Diamond and others have hypothesized as greed and avarice, but because their institutions break down. Their institutions of cooperative calculation that allow them to manage the allocation of resources. In simple terms they lack a sufficient set of property rights and transfer principles for the level of anonymity that occurs under density.
The same peoples could starve or prosper in the same landscape because of little more than differences in ethics and informational institutions.
(I should just draw this as a set of curves where the incentive to privatize – corruption vs non-corruption — is overcome only within a narrow graduated band. Then the ISLM folks would grokk it more easily.)
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 10:29 am
Is the Future of Humanity Too Good to Be True « Modeled Behavior
[...] Some of my favorite commenters were puzzled by my post of the End of History. [...]
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Curt Doolittle
KARL SAID: “Rather than the End of History we are in an odd phase defined by the explosive growth and extensive biological and cultural diversity among humans. These things are likely to come to an end and produce a society that is stable and has no use for democracy.”
Yes, the “Society Of The Game” will fail again. Sadly.
There is nothing new about our phase and our technology. All of the cyclical historians have described this phase. Durant teats it with catholic fatality. Toynbee and Spengler with protestant longing. Quigley analyzes it somewhat formally. Schumpeter explains why : that public intellectuals are incentivized to destroy the societies that made their luxuries possible. A very few of us see the cycle of history as a problem of formal and informal institutions – of a failure of our institutions to keep pace with the change.
Yes, democracy where we elect representatives is unlikely to persist. (political theorists gave up on democracy in the 90′s, and libertarians of the classical liberal stripe gave up on it by the 30′s – that’s why we got the wacky libertarian religion of Rothbard as a epitaph of freedom.).
The only problem with your optimism Karl, is that Quigley and others make a pretty good case that there is a long period of poverty and suffering following the decline of any set of institutions from which no civilization recovers. The chinese are the outliers who managed to persist their institutions despite a multitude of conquerors – but even they needed to embrace mass murder to adapt to modern technology. The romans regressed into mystical religion in order to continue to try to keep the east at bay. The east has wallowed in vulgarity for almost all of it’s history. And the far east and the west simply do their best to keep them at bay. The fall of the ottomans due to the inflexibility of their institutions allowed both westen expansion and western guilt over having done so.
Hence why I both admire and fear you: You have the requisite intelligence for grand ideas. And you have the technology, wisdom and moral code of the west. But you also have the Schumpeterian vanity that undermines it.
You’re fascinating really.
Really one of the only fascinating people in the field. Most economists, even the best, are little more than clerks. Thank you for all you do. Hopefully we can get you a post equivalent to the NYT someday. Because the world would benefit from it.
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Curt Doolittle
KARL SAYS: “Another possibility is that the universe is ..”
Both of your postulates are predicated on one set of mathematical interpretations of the universe. But they are the populist interpretations.
The third possibility is that intelligent life is so rare that only one civilization emerges per galaxy and that distance makes it impossible for contact to overlap.
I am pretty sure this is the prevailing theory given our understanding today.
We should eat the dinner of the universe while it is warm.
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Curt Doolittle
Or let me just get to the point: “property and the institutions that allow us to calculate with it, allow us to manage scarcity and to create an equilibrium with the natural world.”
Property is our only defense against the malthusian.
It is the only system of ethics that we know of that is yet possible.
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 4:59 pm
Lord
Property and institutions are compatible with the Malthusian era which covers everything up to the 19th century. Perhaps not democracy though.
Monday ~ November 14th, 2011 at 6:02 pm
Joshua Probert
The so-called “Malthusian State” is just the third horseman.
Monday ~ January 23rd, 2012 at 2:23 am
The Daily Climb-Monday, Nov. 14th, 2011 | The Daily Climb-Daily Posting Of Relevant Content
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