Hard Questions About the Future

Seeking the next Equilibrium

If you spend time on Twitter in the post Elon Musk takeover era you’re familiar with how much mental capital the broader intellectual community is spending on the norms and laws of information sharing. One of Musk’s crusades is to turn Twitter into a neutral platform. He’s gone to great lengths to show that in the past, it has not been. All other Twitter topics find us now sprinkled in between debates over freedom of speech, government censorship, corporate governance and a long tail of other related topics. It’s both important and tedious so I expect people will move their attention away shortly and the real movement towards equilibrium will happen afterwards. In the end what Twitter ends up doing on their platform will be what Twitter ends up doing on their platform. What’s more important is that it’s resoundingly clear that the problems of information today (and from now on forever) are problems of curation, not access.

We don’t really know exactly how to have all the information we have when once we didn’t really have it. And we don’t know how to satisfy, or frankly even care if we satisfy, the broad spectrum of people now joining debates. Einstein didn’t have to convince Joe Rogan’s audience that we weren’t, in fact, traveling through ether. He mostly just needed to convince Max Planck. And as much as we like to think one global information community will bring us together in harmony, Putin still invaded Ukraine. Some of the assumptions about the future need to be updated.

We live in a world that’s about 20 years old right now. And what characterizes it differently than the ones of the past is that information exists as it never has before. What’s hard to reconcile though is that history has not been devoid of events of consequence prior to the deluge of information we have now. Things happened. Science and technology moved forward. Wars broke out. Government evolved. It all happened in relative darkness though. I don’t think we really know what happens from here with how humans are networked together. We once assumed it would move towards one happy world. And that information sharing would create more consensus beliefs. That turned out to be quite wrong.

In 1820, 12% of the 1 billion humans could read. It would be nearly a century before we’d reach 20% global literacy. Today 87% of the global population of 8 billion people are literate. About 63% of the world (5 billion people) regularly uses the internet. Which means 7 billion humans can read and 5 billion have access to the internet. In 1820 120 million people could read (the current population of America’s top 5 most populous states) and none had access to the internet. In a relative sense, nobody knew anything 200 years ago compared to what we know today. That may sound over dramatic until you spend some time with the idea that for every eight people on the planet, seven of them relied on what their eyes could see happening in front of them or what they could be told second hand by another living human for the sum total of their knowledge. Moreover, if we take into consideration the rapid development of science, technology and government over the last 200 years, what could possibly be known about the way the world worked or how things ought to be was relatively small. If you asked someone from the 18th century what it was like to live on earth, they’d have to tell you that frankly they had very little idea.

People were not stupid of course. They had biologically the same brains we have. And in some ways they were required to use it much more rigorously because they relied much more on their own brains to light their way. There was an equilibrium of pervasive ignorance though. And that enabled a certain pace and direction of progress.

I’m reminded that part of the genius that was Monty Python and the Holy Grail was how King Arthur wandered through what he believed to be the English countryside (he’s not really sure) and no one really knew who he was or that he was King of the Britons or even that they were the Britons. What did the insufferable political reply guy do before there was anything at all to know? And no one to reply to?

If we believe that the sum total of knowledge and understanding of mankind to be something that matters, and I do, then it’s hard to believe that the world will continue to exist as it once did in the future. The new equilibrium is no longer ignorance but perhaps something that resembles broad awareness with limited understanding. Which means we should assume a different sort of progress than in centuries past. And I don’t mean different at the margin. I mean something more structural. And I don’t think that structural change is likely to be something that brings us together in unity. The 21st Century feels like we’re on the cusp of something bigger than we understand just yet. 17th Century England comes to mind as the sort of tectonic shift that came after a period of rapid intellectual expansion (the Renaissance). The printing press may have been the fuse similar to highspeed internet. But we shouldn’t expect it to take 150 years.

My core belief about the world, the one that sits at the center of how I build my views and why I write them down is pretty basic. It’s this: There are rules. And finding ways to prosper within them is the core human task. As a classic Western liberal I believe in two axioms and two critical addendums to define these rules.

Axioms:

• Every human has dignity.

• We have a responsibility to avert suffering.

Addendums:

• Personal choice is a default value in as much as it supports those two axioms but not once it opposes them.

• This framework applies to all living humans and future living humans. (the future has value)

Those are the rules. And finding an equilibrium within them that either meets those standards or continually progresses towards them is the great cosmic human goal. The rest is up for debate of some sort.

I raised my hand and swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America 30 years ago, at the beginning of this new dawn of information. I did it because it was a job requirement. But since I’ve come to believe in that system as one anchored in the right principles yet flexible enough to survive the next 100 years as it had the previous 200. Whether or not I still think that depends on some potentially controversial questions that can only be answered honestly within the framework of a future that does not rest upon a human population that is the same as it has been throughout history; we’re networked; we have limitless information.

Oh, and one more thing…we’re close (as in years not decades) from AI models that will be far more consistent and informed at making complex recommendations on policy or legal rulings than any human or group of humans could ever be. Folks, it’s not the factory workers or truck drivers AI is coming for. It’s the lawyers and strategy writers. Get ready for the death spasms of those two major power centers…it’s not going to be pretty. We’ll need some more principles.

But first, we’ll need to answer some hard questions that matter within the new framework of human awareness and machine augmentation:

1. Do we believe in more or less democracy over the next 100 years?

2. What do we consider basic public goods?

3. What education requirements do we have for our kids…our adults?

4. What role does AI play in making decisions (even public policy) that matter?

5. Does an AI get free speech protection? Can it be held libel?

6. What is war without soldiers, sailors or pilots?

7. Will universal basic income eventually be required?

8. What value does the representative play in representative government?

Those are good ones to start with. There are more. And I’m certain there are parts of the world or people with aspirations that don’t believe in the axioms and addendums that I do that will have answers to those questions that aren’t the same as mine. It’s also impossible for the answers to those questions to be the same as they were 200 years ago. Or even 50…or 10… So the likelihood that we’re in for a smooth transition into the next 100 years is pretty low. I’m an optimist. But for me being an optimist has transitioned away from believing we’ll be able to preserve the current equilibrium to believing that we can find the next right one without the scaled suffering of war or famine or the sort of social upheaval that we resort to when we get it wrong first.

There’s quite a bit at stake I think. Happy New Year everybody.