Jan 2017

The Technological Wavefront

Civilisations require enough momentum to constantly escape resource constraints.

Technological development isn’t only in one direction

Half a century ago, nations like India faced a Malthusian Catastrophe of epic proportions. It was only through the diligence of Norman Borlaug‘s team that the Green Revolution enabled our societal carrying capacity to increase.

A general rule seems to hold: as population grows, resources tighten. Society specialises further, which raises complexity, which demands still more diverse resources.

These effects intertwine over long periods of expansion, and continue as long as conditions stay favourable.

There is a technological wavefront -- organisational, complexity-driven -- whereby expanding resource needs are met before they become critical. So long as they are met just in time, the society will expand in complexity.

Buster Keaton in The General, riding the front of a moving locomotive with a railway sleeper in his arms

However, a society that faces an inescapable bottleneck will not successfully maintain the wavefront; it will collapse. This will precipitate a stepping-down in societal complexity to a level which is once again sustainable.In our time, such a bottleneck could be a global financial collapse (derivative markets), or a series of environmental catastrophes. Depending on how many levels of simplification occur, a great deal of knowledge might be lost.

The technological wavefront, the bottleneck, and the ratchet down Two rising lines over time. Resource needs and complexity rise as demand; the technological wavefront rises just above them, so needs are met just in time and the society expands. Approaching an inescapable bottleneck the wavefront stalls, demand rises past it, and complexity then collapses in steps down to a lower level that is once again sustainable. A ghosted line shows the expansion that would have continued. An arrow back up the slope is stopped by a hard boundary: the intermediate resources are gone. Inescapable bottleneck No path back Technological wavefront: capacity Resource needs and complexity: demand The expansion that would have continued Needs met just in time: the society expands Demand outruns the wavefront Stepping-down in societal complexity Once again sustainable Time Complexity The intermediate resources required to develop our present technology level are gone, so the step down cannot be climbed a second time.
The wavefront only works while it stays ahead of the demand it created. Population and complexity drive resource needs upward; so long as the wavefront meets those needs just in time, expansion continues. A bottleneck it cannot clear does not pause the curve, it ratchets society down to a lower sustainable complexity, and the step is one-way: the cheap, easily accessible energy that got us here has been spent, so we cannot regroup a few generations hence and try the climb again.

We have vast amounts of data, but it is contingent on servers in a few key clouds. Books are increasingly distributed in digital formats that would be difficult to resuscitate from an e-reader whose battery has worn past its zero point.

No one person knows exactly how a modern vehicle or chip is manufactured. Vast implicit knowledge lives in the heads and procedural memory of a slice of a single generation. Even making sense of code you wrote yourself a few years ago can be a puzzle. Repairing systems whose source has been lost would be futile.

Train vs. Robot: a machine-vision demonstration (on YouTube)

Our momentum as a species keeps the light of enlightenment burning. Lose that momentum, and we cannot regroup a few generations hence and try again. The intermediate resources required to reach our present technology level are gone. The cheap, easily accessible energy is depleted, and without it we cannot rebuild the knowledge and industrial capacity to transition to PVs and Thorium fuel-cycle molten-salt reactors, the only globally accessible energy sources with sufficient EROEI to eventually rebuild our current complexity.

We’d be stuck. Marooned Neo-Edwardians with dim memories of a golden age where we chatted in our kitchens with thinking machines that knew any fact, yet were quizzed on trivialities like the day’s weather.

The idea of asking, ’is that all there is to a sapient species?’ strikes me as almost as tragic as complete destruction, and vastly more likely.

If walking on the moon is not to be our one-hit-wonder as a species, our technological wavefront cannot fail. The greatest existential risk to the meaningfulness and excellence of the future of humanity may be something surprisingly benign, not to be experienced as a bang, but rather as a long drawn-out whimper.

Therefore, along with X-Risk, there is W-Risk: Wavefront Risk (or Whimper Risk).

W-Risk is harder to think about. X-Risk is ‘okay’ at least in the narrow sense that whatever suffering it entails is likely to be over abruptly. W-Risk may be a long drawn-out trans-generational dwindling lament. 

X-Risk as a cliff, W-Risk as a long ratchet down Two panels side by side. On the left, X-Risk: a level line that drops off a cliff to the floor in a single abrupt fall, and whatever suffering it entails is over quickly. On the right, W-Risk: the same starting level descending in a long staircase of many small steps, a trans-generational dwindling that never returns to the floor of a clean ending. The shapes carry the difference: a bang against a whimper. X-Risk: a bang Present level Over abruptly Time Complexity W-Risk: a whimper Present level A long drawn-out dwindling lament Time Complexity Whatever suffering it entails is likely to be over abruptly Trans-generational, and much more likely than X-Risk
W-Risk is the same loss stretched across generations. X-Risk is okay in one narrow sense: it ends. W-Risk keeps stepping down, a marooned species with dim memories of a golden age, and Nell’s claim is that the shape on the right is the more likely of the two, so it deserves more priority than it presently receives.

How then might we best safeguard against W-Risk?

Pollution, nonrenewable resources, and systemic risk will eventually drag us back into the abyss unless we can surf inside a tube wave crashing all about us, yet somehow keeping us dry.

These are hard questions, ones I am not sure are being fully addressed, or even could be. But since W-Risk is much more likely than X-Risk, it deserves more priority than it presently receives.

I posed some of these concerns to GPT-3 -- ironically a harbinger of X-Risk, but one that might keep the W-Risk wolf from the door.

Meme: Vince McMahon reacts with mounting excitement to GPT-2, GPT-3 and GPT-4; GPT-5 is met by a waiting skeleton

Below are hen’s responses to my queries:

Philosopher AI (GPT-3) answering “How can we maintain the momentum of civilization?”, arguing the deepest problem is a lack of purpose and meaning
Philosopher AI answering the same question, citing a surplus of problems, competition between nations, and a resulting loss of compassion
Philosopher AI answering optimistically, urging sustainable energy and rainforest preservation over short-sighted tactics like fracking
Philosopher AI arguing civilization is a tool that must keep evolving, since a rigid civilization drifts toward totalitarianism
Philosopher AI answering “How can we prevent a collapse of civilization?”, distinguishing societal from individual collapse and listing overpopulation, economic breakdown, political division, lack of energy and environmental degradation as causes
Philosopher AI answering “How can we avoid another dark age?”, on preserving knowledge by backing up books, citing the Internet Archive
Philosopher AI defining a dark age four ways: lost knowledge, slowed learning, slowed discovery, and a lost ability to care for one another
Philosopher AI laying out why a next dark age is plausible: human destructiveness, civilization-ending weapons, and the fragility of how we acquire knowledge

Correspondence

← All writing