The Need for Science-Based Organization

Some time shortly after the invention of the graphical Internet, it became ripely apparent that humanity was fucking itself with its own technology and was on the fast path toward societal morbidity. We maximized energy extraction without perfecting clean use, accelerated manufacturing technologies and global supply chains without developing socioeconomic models to cope with the disruptions, and modified life itself without having any perspective on what modifications would actually, in the long run, be desirable. The creation in the 1990s of a global information network put humanity on the path to becoming transhumanity, but it also enabled a lot of bad behavior and exposed, suddenly and shockingly, through mass access to news and data, the degree to which our civilization was breaking down, eroding, self-harming.

Worse, the personalization of content delivery based on past consumption habits divided societies by creating alternate realities in which citizens of opposing political persuasions couldn’t even agree on basic facts. There was a fundamental misalignment between opposing parties—manipulated by big data solutions with ulterior motives—in conflict after conflict. Inability of the aggrieved parties to align on what color the sky was during negotiations fed the civil disorder and bloody interstate conflicts that weakened transhumanity prior to the Fall. It was as if transhuman culture’s collective memetic immune system had crashed—and meanwhile, the noösphere had contracted a prion disease.

It looked like even money from back then whether we’d become what we in the x-risks field jokingly call a Kardashev Type Zero civilization. Kardashev Type Zero is bad. It means your species (or collective of species, in our case) is like that player in a realtime strategy game who’s stuck in one corner of the board with a shitload of defense towers, all of their resources mined out, and no hope of reaching more. Don’t be a KT Zero. You’re like the aardvark men of Luca II then—the universe’s clowns. And KT Zero is far from the worst thing on the list of sucker prizes for a civilization that doesn’t have its wits about it. Mutation into something awful or total annihilation remain well within our collective reach.