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Welcome, Wayfinder.

Yesterday, we explored some of the compromised systems we experience and how they result from multipolar traps.

Today, we wrap up multipolar traps and look to the landscape of the future.

Multipolar Trap Summary

Synchronize.

A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

In a sufficiently intense competition … everyone who doesn’t throw all their values under the bus dies out … This is the infamous Malthusian trap, where everyone is reduced to “subsistence”.

In an insufficiently intense competition … all we see is a perverse failure to optimize – consider the journals which can’t switch to more reliable science, or the legislators who can’t get their act together and eliminate corporate welfare. It may not reduce people to subsistence, but there is a weird sense in which it takes away their free will.

It’s not hard to envision a better version of each environment where these traps arise.

Simply having smaller armies across all militarized nations and those funds being reinvested into infrastructure would be a better version than the experienced.

Simply not spending hundreds of billions on corporate welfare each year would be better than spending hundreds of billions.

So why then, do these outcomes that are so easy for humans to see and simple to agree upon the advantage not arise?

Because humans aren’t driving the bus.

Humans are following their own incentives.

The system of incentives is what is driving the bus, designing the outcomes.

It’s not human, isn’t concerned about human concerns, and can’t respond to them.

Like a river slowly carves a valley, the stream of incentives carves the landscape.

Humans can modify the landscape (incentives) to naturally create different outcomes.

[But we kind of need an incentive to do so, which is not guaranteed.]

Barriers to Hitting Bottom

“Ok Michael, you used the word incentives a lot. If it’s all so bad and out of control, why aren’t we living out Mad Max already?”

Great question.

Multipolar traps are races to the bottom → everything valuable that can be sacrificed in exchange for better ability to do whatever (get elected at all costs, keep the sweatshop running, etc.) tends to get sacrificed.

But we still have art, music, some forms of philosophy, and non-survival culture.

So what’s keeping those things from getting traded off?

  1. Excess Resources → as long as there’s sufficient amounts of resources, we have the breathing room for art, music, and philosophy. Imagine, though, what might happen to a system not designed to operate independently of oil once it’s no longer able to be supplied at sufficient rates?
  2. Physical Limitations → natural landscapes and human bodies have physical limitations. For example, in the Gulags of Stalin’s reign, you still have to feed a prison laborer and let them sleep, otherwise you limit yourself to only getting todays labor out of them (before they expire or cannot produce any longer) instead of preserving all of their future days labor too.
  3. Utility Maximization → sometimes “good” things like satisfying customers or satisfying citizens are partially baked into the incentive stream, and as a byproduct of agents in the incentive system acting in their own self-interest, there’s some spillover into a suboptimal outcome instead of the worst case outcome.
  4. Coordination → coordination creates superorganisms that can transcend individual incentives and act toward the optimal outcome. Coordination can occur either top-down (authoritarianism) or bottom-up (incentive redesign).

So how does technology factor into all this?

Technology and Moloch

Technology provides a wealth of new opportunities.

Both for coordination (social media coordinated protests, idea sharing and information across geography) and for tossing away value Y to optimize for outcome X (tossing away privacy [value] for illusions of security through increased surveillance [outcome: control]).

Consider also, what will happen once robots can do everything the human of average intelligence can do—why pay a human salary, health insurance and contribute to their 401K when you can pay a fraction of that for server space and processing power?

We are already seeing this with entry level software development (and many other industries)—AI tools are already good enough to either directly replace tasks that used to be performed by humans, or have sufficiently increased the productivity of existing employees to eliminate the need to hire more.

And they’re only going to get better.

Technology also empowers a whole new frontier of information warfare.

Deepfakes (generated audio or visual content that is indistinguishable to humans from non-generated content) are no longer a theory anymore.

Propaganda is legal, freedom of speech is protected, and the internet exists.

Technology empowered election manipulation (remember that whole Cambridge Analytica scandal?) was already happening before the rise of these AI tools.

The power of memetics is derived from an individual meme’s ability to replicate.

Ideas have no need to be coupled to truth to spread.

Truth is hard to even approximate anymore.

And the ability of individuals to become proficient at spotting, reasoning through, and creating psychological defenses against technologically empowered idea manipulation…

Well let’s just say many people are still losing the war of ideas to Coca Cola and McDonalds, let alone GPT powered propaganda machines.

Through Noam Chomsky’s lens, consent was already being manufactured effectively through the technological tools of media prior to the internet.

It follows that technological advancements will continue to increase the efficiency of manufactured consent, confusion, consumerism, etc.

Oof.

Nauseating indeed.

But, this is our responsibility as Wayfinders—to acquire the best maps possible of the landscape we find ourselves and need navigate.

That demands looking at the world around us as it is, not as we wish it would be.

It would awesome if the situation we find ourselves in did not have these traps and accelerants embedded in them.

This is our environment—this is our task.

To find the way through requires us to work with where we are and the topography of the land—its rivers, forests, peaks, caves, dangers and wonders.

Godspeed, Wayfinder.

~ Michael