Well by Marx' predictions, this should already have happened. It throws a real spanner in the works for the theory that the evolution of a society is quite so inevitable and predictable.
But this comes back to my point. This is essentially putting faith in Asimov-style psychohistory.
Thanks for reminding me about psychohistory and providing an opportunity to reflect about it. I've got a few thoughts.
If we are very strict about sticking to the initial assumptions, psychohistory as formulated in the Foundation is impossible for several reasons.
1. The population is already aware of the psychohistory (though it may not change anything, see the tragedy of the commons).
2. Human reactions won't remain constant because humans as acting agents won't remain constant(transhumanist future is an inevitability).
If we relax our requirements a bit, the answer is quite complex :)
At first it seems that the random nature and black swan events (which both are qualities of an immensely complex system) of the human society would mean that psychohistory will stay in the real of fictional sciences.
However, it is quite possible that human future may be converging to a specific state, like total human annihilation or transhumanist ascension to a biomachine symbiosis. Both events effectively end the timeline of "mankind's behaviour" but these are sort of singleton hacks, not a working system.
I would love to know also. I believe (gut, hunch, intuition) that it's an idea who's time has come of age. All we need are the right models, the right models are the hard part when it comes to society because you have to model the Earth's resources and geography and whatnot (society's environment) as well as take into consideration that the individual actors in society are autonomous sentient beings.
I'd like to know who besides Azimov talked about this in the past.
I think it would be fascinating to be able to predict the chance of political or economic instability or what have you.
A lot of people are resistant to this idea because they feel humans are either too special or too complex to model in aggregate, or at least their (our I mean, giving my robot self away there) interactions are.
Large societal changes are fairly rare events. Personally I think the next stage is a new form of worker revolt, some new spin on Unions or Communism, the next Marx has yet to write his magnum opus yet though. Those words are still viewed as bad in the West, so it will need new terminology too.
And to be clear, I don't ascribe to communism or anything, I'm simply speculating that some sort of new ideology, with a focus on the common person, will arise in the next 50 years to direct and fuel the next revolt. You'll know it when you see it.
This has happened many, many, many times throughout history. What happens is the status quo is shifted, usually via revolution. All people are doing is identifying the stressors causing the next big revolution. Society will endure because we're social animals. The power structure will be different. You'd think those in power would be wary of this, but throughout history they always seem to be caught by surprise.
This is probably how the whole world was made, interim solutions hacked together. I wonder what social system will have evolved by the time our descendants are no longer recognizably homo sapiens (or even biological)
It's communism (or more specifically, Marxism). This sort of outcome was predicted by Benjamin Tucker as an inevitable consequence of Marxist socialism in 1888, essay: "state socialism and anarchism", long before any implementation of Marxism came to being
I couldn't stomach reading the entire link, but I think your post is quite lovely.
One thing I wonder, is whether the next new thing will be thought out first and then executed, or executed almost by mistake, in pieces, only being seen to take shape as a social trend once it has assembled itself, little link by little link, from the ground up. Two of my favorite social paradigms/ trends/ somethings (which I believe are almost, but not quite spent) -- Christianity, Capitalism -- have done just that. Sure there is theory that happens along the way (St. Paul, Milton Friedman), but it is actually in the thick of the action as people jockey for power (in the wide, Nietzschean sense). (Edit: FYI, this is almost straight Foucault, except he believed in some naive French justice and couldn't take the Nietzschean medicine full strength). (Edit, 2: If I remember, Uncle Fritz also predicted that God would give his last shudder and be finally dead about two centuries after the publishing of Genealogy of Morals about 1889... I love that guy... Just 75 more years...)
Another thing I wonder, is didn't Nietzsche also predict that only once we finally finish our utter boredom with empty ideologies that make us feel safe will we be free to start realizing our potential as human beings? And, he promised, there will be LOTS of good music....
But Japan experienced that change already and it wasn't apocalyptic by any means. Puranjay's claim here is almost literally "change will happen, and it will bring grief." So change happening without much grief runs right against that.
Meanwhile, the US has had any number of highly-adversarial, occasionally-violent political fights in the last decade while still in that "grow the top line" mindset.
You could make a plausible argument that those additional few decades of "growth" has a lot to do with the violence and unrest, even, not the other way around. (For instance, see any of a number of takes from all over the political spectrum blaming increasing stratification of elites.)
Hell, wasn't Marx predicting internal upheaval and self-defeat of capitalist economies many, many decades ago based on the same sort of demographics/populations/resources economic arguments? Things will change is an easy prediction, they haven't ever been stable. But it's also a meaningless one if you can't convincingly show that it's this decade not "any time between 10 and 200 years from now."
Is this the beginning of Psychohistory. Wonder when we'll combine all the advances in psychology, anthropology, machine learning, marketing, etc... We've been manipulated for a long time, but this seems like a start in really dialing it in. Move the manipulation out of the dark ages and start doing some deep manipulation of society.
This is reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic. I'll probably misrepresent it, but as I understand it, it's the idea that society evolves slowly but surely through a constant three step process:
- Society swings to one extreme (called the thesis)
- Part of society reacts to the extreme and in the other direction, often to the extreme (the antithesis)
- Society recognizes the downsides of both extremes and ends up somewhere in the middle (the synthesis)
This process might repeat multiple times, with each swing getting less extreme, or it might just need one go-round, but it generally matches a lot of human behavior I've seen. Whether programming paradigms, managing styles, political issues (over- vs. under-regulation), etc., this view seems to apply historically, and gives me a lot of hope for humanity's chances for eventual success in the long-term.
On the other hand, I may totally be misunderstanding the Hegelian dialectic, as I only was half listening in my intro to philosophy class, so if anyone here has corrections for me, I'd love to learn.
Yea human culture will find a new level of 'basic' combined with an inferred and understood if not blatantly codified position of social superiority... Sounds more like twilight zone than social progress to me.
I agree, but the question is how that societal change will come about. Through individual or group efforts? Via religion, self-study, social engineering. . .
Oh, I agree on changes to the means of production themselves (more broadly, technological changes) leading to massive changes in politics and society. But those are in the "sort of happens" category, as opposed to the Great Man theory, where social change is enacted by the decisions (good or bad) of powerful and important individuals.
Read Marx, but read Tolstoy too. Tolstoy argued that we all have 20/20 hindsight, and we like to argue how well our individual ideas or pet theories explain stuff that, well, just happened.
edit: I'm suddenly thinking of Bruce Sterling's novel Zeitgeist, a sort of magical-realism SF set around Y2K. When asked who would win the culture war between Islamic fundamentalism and Western secularism, the central character said "The side with the most televisions".
I agree with you that this won't happen, simply because (via an evolutionary basis) the maintenance of social order comes before the dissemination of truth. The two might coincide, but where they don't, social order comes first.
This is ultimately what happened during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It's what happens during fuel scares, it's what happened during 911 as a below poster explains, it's what happens within companies when layoff rumours circulate.
Even within the closest of romantic relationships each partner is not 100% truthful with the other because there are some things that are simply better not said.
Unless the idea is that we descend into some sort of authoritarian nightmare and the general population becomes irrelevant though, I'd argue that social order does require some semblance of trust in power even if only in the basics (e.g. if I don't cross the State, the State won't cross me).
Once that falls apart the whole thing is in ruins.
Without predicting any specific outcome or scenario, though, I do think we are just-getting-started,
the triple threat of climate change impacts, AI, and inequity-cum-ascendant-fascism, broadly construed, make for a lot of destabilization... more than the tiger-jockey plutocrats are ready for.
If I did make a prediction, it would be that disequilibrium is going to as per usual be felt first and hard by those who always take the first fall.
But I am hopeful that we emerge from disequilibrium with the current order dismantled.
Revolution etc. are funny, as with so much else, slowly then suddenly. Etc etc.
What I don't think Mr. Asimov could have imagined is the rise of the Oligarchs, dominated primarily by the heads of the banking industry, though also by the petrochemical and a few other top-tier industries. These individuals have increasingly distorted the free-market system and corrupted the political systems to satisfy their own narrow ends. They are financial protectionists. And because of them a great deal of innovation that could have been has been stymied. I would argue that if it were not for their depressing effects on society, Mr. Asimov's predictions would now look rather underwhelming by comparison, as we would have achieved far more than he predicted. Alas, given our current state of affairs, I do not think it possible for society to advanced very far beyond were it currently stands. And in a matter of decades we are likely to start moving backwards rather then forwards. On that mark, with his concerns on population growth, I believe Mr. Asimov hit it squarely on the head.
I think you're misinterpreting me a little. I don't think history is over. I'm just saying that I get the sense that everyone else does. :)
I've toyed around with a few radical thoughts recently, but political ideology isn't my bag so it's just private speculation.
One is that the problem with socialist schemes is that they don't really address the root of inequality. It's become kind of clear to me that the root is heritable inequality of both the genetic sort and the inherited-privilege sort.
So I've speculated a little about some sort of "transhumanist socialism" that would attempt to address inequality at the biological level by making both germ-line and postnatal enhancements universally available. The idea would be to transform humanity itself into a runaway self-improving AI by siphoning off some percentage of GDP and applying it to the artificial redistribution of beneficial adaptations and the augmentation of human intelligence across familial lines. By far the best thing to be taxed here would be inheritance, since the whole aim is to break heritable inequality.
It's the sort of idea that would make everyone's head explode. Most dogmatic libertarians would hate it since it contains the word "socialism" and involves some sort of wealth redistribution. Liberals are all greens now that worship the naturalistic fallacy, so they'd all scream "no GMO!" Conservatives would hate it since it's theologically sacrilegious and would disrupt the social order rather deeply.
But this comes back to my point. This is essentially putting faith in Asimov-style psychohistory.
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