Ask A Genius 853: Large-Scale Human Institutions
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/07/26
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was having a percolating thought. Large-scale human institutions; everyone believes in them, has shared values around them, and these structure everything we do in terms of the course development of our lives, the fine-tuned stuff like little interactions. Things like the United Nations, the World Bank, nation states, democratic systems, autocratic systems, anarchic systems, economic systems; these are big systems, they function slow, over months and years and decades and centuries. They impact everyone’s lives. What will the future of these primarily human-based institutions look like in an artificially hyper-intelligent relative to us feature?
Rick Rosner: I’ve been writing about this or trying to write about it in fiction where I’m trying to imagine a near future world and one of the reasons it’s tough to do is that the present keeps getting stupider. We’re at a weird point in history, it’s like the 1930s where there are large factions actively trying to undermine humane and human institutions with autocratic intent. Russia has spent 300 million bucks on these since 2014 that we know of, trying to destabilize Western democracies and gotten a great bargain. It’s not just because of Russia, it’s because people make a lot of money off of it. Fox News makes a ton of money. Their most popular hosts make more than 30 million dollars a year. And in conjunction with billionaire political donors, the right wing in America is actively trying to establish autocratic systems and poo poo humanist ideas as being Woke and queer. Anyway it’s a shitty flavor of politics and human organizing that is much worse now than it was 10 years ago.
In America, at least there are apparently tens of millions of people who are irretrievably lost to autocratic bullshit and what I fantasize about fixes for this, I’ve quit fantasizing any reasonable solution, I’m not even Christian but I fantasize about Jesus showing up and taking the 10,000 biggest assholes on earth and rapturing them to the ice moon of Jupiter where they can’t fuck up humanity anymore. But in terms of realistic solutions, I think AI will be part of what happens for good and for ill. I think people who embrace technology most effectively will have increasing advantages and because those people are mostly not the fascist lunatics, they’ll gradually build societal structures that are less vulnerable to autocratic organizing than they are today. I feel like national politics particularly in America will never be able to keep up with technology and the societal structures created via technology. The government may be able to benefit and be strengthened by these AI aided structures but big U.S government will never again be at the forefront of understanding the tech and reasonably addressing it. The US government will from now on lag behind tech and what tech is doing to society.
I’ve read a lot of science fiction that presents fallen land; parts of the U.S that have fallen into and have become backwaters dominated by autocratic governments possibly in conjunction with science distrusting Evangelical… the worst versions of America’s worst states. Florida is getting increasingly autocratic, Arkansas and a lot of the states that fought for the Confederacy. Set 20-50 years from now, has these places sometimes being no-go areas where they’re just dangerous for outsiders to go into and they’re just kind of left alone by the rest of America and that’s probably too glib and severe a picture because even in shitty states, there are plenty of smart people who can figure out technology, also who aren’t down with the fascism. On the other hand you can imagine areas packed with… like Idaho, the 80s and 90s the people would go up there and form these breakaway communities that denied the authority of the U.S government.
So you may not have entire states but you might have breakaway patches of America that might be 50 miles by 50 miles if they can hold that area or even if they can’t, if it’s largely uninhabited. Isis proclaimed dominion over big uninhabited swaths of the Mideast American lunatics could do the same thing but I think in general those chunks of society presided over by fascist lunatics will be outperformed by people who embrace modernity which includes a lot of tech and AI. Any comments?
Jacobsen: No comments.
[Recording End]
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