By Dee Smith
This is the first of a series of posts in which I will consider some of the largest, most difficult questions we face in the second quarter of the 21st century. I want in particular to examine fundamental, “substrate” issues that underlie our current problems. Many of these have been taken for granted until quite recently—and in some cases they still are.
I do not propose to answer any of these big questions: I propose to raise them for examination in terms that are, I hope, more timely and relevant. The reader should also understand that I am advancing these arguments analytically, with as little interpretive bias as possible. These issues must be understood unemotionally and apolitically for us to get anywhere near valid, actionable findings.
It seems clear to a growing number of people that we are reaching critical inflection points with far-reaching, even existential implications. Some of these are obvious, such as AI and its adjacent systems. Others are contentious, such as climate change. Still others are mostly out-of-mind as daily life goes on (at least until you are personally impacted), such as critical resources—not just minerals and energy, but also food, water, air and the effects of environmental degradation. We have no idea what the tremendous amounts of micro-plastics, now in every organism on earth, are doing, for example.
Others have to do with the legacy political systems we live within, which increasingly exhibit fracturing and associated crises. For example, how can we have a global rules-based system—or even rule of law within a country—when large numbers of people vehemently disagree on what the rules should be, and on how life should be lived? And of course, conflict with modern weapons (e.g., nuclear) and post-modern weapons (e.g. genetically-engineered biological weapons).
Other issues have to do with unusual recent phenomena, such as the intensive interconnection in the last 40 years of the globalized modern world, with its many single points of failure and cascade effects, or the fact that, for unknown reasons, the human birthrate is suddenly falling in every country on earth.
In 1996, American economist Robin Hanson proposed the “Great Filter” as a potential solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox originated with an observation by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in a conversation with other scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In reference to the billions of stars and planets in our own galaxy alone, yet the lack of any substantive evidence of other technologically advanced civilizations, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”
They should be visible all around us, he observed, particularly with our technological tools to detect them. Notwithstanding the evidence currently being released by the U.S. government relating to anomalous phenomena and the like, there is still no concrete confirmation. There have been many attempts to explain this absence: possible extreme rarity of advanced civilizations; relative—perhaps intentional—non-detectability to humans (this can invoke the “zookeeper mentality” in anthropology, of keeping “primitive” people primitive, in order to study them); or ubiquitous short civilizational lifespans. The Great Filter is a version of the latter.
Put simply, the Great Filter postulates that we do not see extraterrestrial species because all technologically advanced civilizations destroy themselves.
For these essays, I will take this as a serious hypothesis, not in terms of extraterrestrial speculation, but to examine some of the current elements that could, singly or in combination, cause such an outcome on Earth. Only by understanding these issues can we hope to ameliorate or circumvent them.
At the base of our civilization today is the modern idea—codified in the 18th century European Enlightenment—that human life can constantly be improved through the application of reason, science and advancing technology. At that time, not only was technology progressing so fast that this seemed possible, but the blowback of technology (such as the “dark satanic mills” of 19th century industrialization) was not yet evident for the most part.
All of this also led to the belief that, whatever problems might arise from technology, further technological progress can and will solve them.
These “progressive” concepts thus became codified as articles of faith for modern world civilization. Every current major political-economic-social system—capitalism, democracy, socialism, communism, fascism and everything surrounding them—is founded on the idea that material and technological progress is an unalloyed good. The systems differ primarily on the way to get there and how the benefits are to be distributed.
That technological progress makes life better is now axiomatic. Many people cannot imagine a way of life not based on this. And that is what I mean by a “substrate” issue. But is important to realize that just 600 years ago, life was considered a vale of tears which you got through and got out of. And not just in Europe—many other traditions hold similar beliefs, such as Buddhism’s dictum that to exist is to suffer.
Of course, it is true in many, many ways that technology has indeed made life better. Just consider dentistry. Over the last century, the care and treatment of human teeth has improved such that average modern people who live in many societies suffer from astonishingly less pain and infection than even any earlier social elite. Such a development is replicated in example after example in the modern world.
The question that the Great Filter raises is different: whether technological development reaches thresholds beyond which the dangers far outweigh the advantages.
And if so, where are these thresholds, and what can be done?