Once upon a time, before I took an interest in investing and retired early, I was an academic. I worked with mathematical models of human genetic and cultural evolution. Dual inheritance theory, as it's called.
I came to the conclusion that we humans aren't really in control, and that we never will be, since cultural evolution moves so much faster than genetic evolution. On the time scales of cultural evolution, the human evolved psychology is a static fitness surface that cultural evolution can exploit with ease.
Between group selection, acting at the level of social systems, selects for cultural schemas that manipulate and organize individual humans in such a way as to advance the interests of the overarching social-cultural complex adaptive system. It's not a coincidence that the major religious systems that survived the ancient era emphasized population growth, in group kindness and out group nastiness. It's also not a coincidence that the modern era witnessed the emergence of social systems that prioritize economic growth above all else and rationalize away counter indications. These are all adaptations, resulting from selection acting on cultural information, vis-a-vis between group competition. We are not in control. We're merely the substrate of the process.
It's comforting to think that we can restrict AI, but any society that does will just be outcompeted by the societies that do not. Not in the near term, and not when we're talking about art and such alone, but in the long term, on time scales of hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Long term, it strikes me as inevitable that culture/technology bound complex adaptive systems will almost entirely replace DNA bound complex adaptive systems, with our particular species persisting in a state of subservient symbiosis, if it continues to exist at all. We're in the early-mid phase of that transition now, with the enthalpic input demands and entropic venting of our cultural-technological systems growing exponentially, parallel to rapid loss of diversity and mass in the biosphere. And in all honesty, I don't think there's anything anyone can do about it. A day will come when DNA is seen as an outcompeted and archaic information transmission vector. We're the facilitators of the transition, nothing more.
That, in case anyone is wondering, is why I decided to retire early and spend my life hiking and goofing off. I might as well have fun and appreciate biodiversity while it exists. It's not like I can change anything.
A.
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