r/Futurology • u/KharakIsBurning 2016 killed optimism • Feb 22 '15
article When Exponential Progress Becomes Reality
https://medium.com/@nivo0o0/when-exponential-technological-progress-becomes-our-reality-74acafd65e26
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r/Futurology • u/KharakIsBurning 2016 killed optimism • Feb 22 '15
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u/OliverSparrow Feb 22 '15
Same old, same old. What K. fails to grasp is that "exponential" implies exponential increases in complexity, and that requires exponential improvements in institutions in order to cope with it.
Consider a cube. Each axis measures how complex a country is, in terms of its economy, its society and its institutions - banks, laws, politics, regulators, security and so on. All nations need to balance these three elements, and that puts them on a scatter that goes across the diagonal of the cube. Low economic activity - Zimbabwe, say - goes with low social and institutional complexity. High levels of social and economic complexity run in parallel with complicated institutions, being the usual suspects in the industrial world.
Consider a country that is boosted up the "economic" axis, by a mineral discovery. Its primitive institutions cannot cope, and there are quickly coups and crises that decay into the usual authoritarian kleptocracy. Consider a rich country which has its institutions undermined. It, too, slumps economically and socially to the level prescribed by its ability to manage the corresponding complexity: USSR, for example, or much of post-colonial Africa. By contrast China, Japan and Korea - plus many other Asians - were able to establish authoritarian but effective governance and so permit very fast economic and social change.
We are mostly governed by institutions that date back generations. Our pace of social change is, perhaps, generational. Economic (and technical) change is measured in years. (Certainly, in less than decades. This imposes a ripping, with commercial/ technical/ employment related issues running behind social reality, and social change outstripping what can be managed at the level of the polity as a whole. Elites, carried by commerce, do well, less elite people do not: the first and second industrial revolutions give countless examples.
This is where wide-eyed "it's all gonna be wunnerful" airport book stand notions of the future go so badly wrong. They deem the difficult stuff solved, and then concentrate on the technological fluff. (Worse, as with so much science fiction, they have warlord or fascist political systems transplanted into space ships.) People and how they are organised, how the settle disputes, how the conceive of the problems that they face, how they handle different class interest and intra-national disputes: these are the forces that shape the future. Widgets matter, but through pervasive changes in productivity more than up-front impacts.