Evolution of Freedom
Part IV: Collective intelligence - Chapter 51
Omega Point
A definition of a major transition in evolution, according to John Maynard Smith, is when individual organisms join together in a new cooperative unit that eventually becomes a new organism itself. Units that were previously competing for the same resources choose to join together into a new team in order to increase their evolutionary fitness. Better outcomes are achieved by new forms of cooperation by reducing realized conflict and dividing the benefits of the cooperation in an equitable manner.
Major transitions span both biological and cultural evolution. Single-celled organisms joining together to form a multicellular organism is a classic example from biology. According to Smith, a major transition in evolution “involved changes in the way information is stored and transmitted.” The invention of spoken and written language exhibited just such changes as they enabled the creation of larger and more complex human organizations.
This is also true of the digitalization that has brought profound changes in the way we communicate. Thanks to digital technology, we have finally been able to shed the analog constraints that have restricted human cooperation for the last 5500 years. But the major transition in evolution promised by digitalization is not yet complete. The new organizational complexity we have created is mostly superficial as we continue to rely on the same institutions pioneered by the Sumerians, the inventors of written language.
The cooperative platform proposed in this book seeks to change that. Implementing these ideas will enable us to transition into a multicellular society that spans the globe and take charge of our own cultural evolution.
The key to its success is that those who choose to join the new cooperative endeavor will tangibly increase their own and their communities’ well-being. Part of this is achieved through the ability to suppress free-riding, exploitation, bullying and other disruptive forms of selfishness and by sharing the benefits of that cooperation with all participants.
Once we learn the optimum way to organize digitally that maximizes human well-being within the planetary boundaries, everything will change. We can reconfigure or abandon institutions that produce suboptimum results. We can walk away like we walk away from every obsolete tool and technology that has been replaced by something better. The only people clinging to the old system will be the people who now control or unduly benefit from our existing institutions. These are the people for whom our suboptimum system was optimized in the first place.
For everybody else, the new system offers a great release from most of the problems that the old system carries with it. This includes both the intended and unintended consequences of war, famine, crime, environmental destruction etc. If we use our digital organizing tool as intended, these don’t have to be a part of our existence in the future.
We can debate whether this constitutes the Omega Point as described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and David Sloan Wilson, but it does seem to fit the description Wilson gives in the prologue of his book, This View of Life:
Major transitions span both biological and cultural evolution. Single-celled organisms joining together to form a multicellular organism is a classic example from biology. According to Smith, a major transition in evolution “involved changes in the way information is stored and transmitted.” The invention of spoken and written language exhibited just such changes as they enabled the creation of larger and more complex human organizations.
This is also true of the digitalization that has brought profound changes in the way we communicate. Thanks to digital technology, we have finally been able to shed the analog constraints that have restricted human cooperation for the last 5500 years. But the major transition in evolution promised by digitalization is not yet complete. The new organizational complexity we have created is mostly superficial as we continue to rely on the same institutions pioneered by the Sumerians, the inventors of written language.
The cooperative platform proposed in this book seeks to change that. Implementing these ideas will enable us to transition into a multicellular society that spans the globe and take charge of our own cultural evolution.
The key to its success is that those who choose to join the new cooperative endeavor will tangibly increase their own and their communities’ well-being. Part of this is achieved through the ability to suppress free-riding, exploitation, bullying and other disruptive forms of selfishness and by sharing the benefits of that cooperation with all participants.
Once we learn the optimum way to organize digitally that maximizes human well-being within the planetary boundaries, everything will change. We can reconfigure or abandon institutions that produce suboptimum results. We can walk away like we walk away from every obsolete tool and technology that has been replaced by something better. The only people clinging to the old system will be the people who now control or unduly benefit from our existing institutions. These are the people for whom our suboptimum system was optimized in the first place.
For everybody else, the new system offers a great release from most of the problems that the old system carries with it. This includes both the intended and unintended consequences of war, famine, crime, environmental destruction etc. If we use our digital organizing tool as intended, these don’t have to be a part of our existence in the future.
We can debate whether this constitutes the Omega Point as described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and David Sloan Wilson, but it does seem to fit the description Wilson gives in the prologue of his book, This View of Life:
From a purely secular perspective, Teilhard’s Omega Point corresponds to the vision of a world where governments work together for the good of their citizens and live in balance with the rest of life on Earth. … Teilhard described the Omega Point as not just a theoretical possibility but a sort of heaven on Earth worth pursuing with one’s heart and soul.
While the proof needs to be in the pudding, simple reasoning proves that we now know a superior way to cooperate. From the perspective of game theory, it is likely to produce a dominant strategy, and from the perspective of evolutionary game theory, it is likely to produce an evolutionary stable strategy that cannot be outcompeted by a mutant strategy. This is still very much conjecture, but the odds that it will shake up competition in a profound way are great.
A well-functioning society needs effective feedback loops. The main purpose of the various communication channels is to bring the system into balance and optimum alignment by enabling it to respond to changes in its environment. When we optimize how the feedback loops function, the positive output of our system can be consistent and enduring. This is the design challenge we took on in this book.
First, we started by articulating a better incentive system that financially rewards people for creating well-being for their community. The first mechanism we designed was the workshare, which aligns the incentives within a team. Thanks to workshares, it is in everybody’s interest to produce the best possible result with the least amount of input. As there is a simple way to share the benefits of team work equitably, every team member has a direct incentive to help their team succeed.
The second mechanism we designed was the machine-readable reputation system. When we connect it into an online market, we create a strong feedback loop that rewards us for serving our communities. The good reputation you’ve accumulated creates more demand, which can be monetized as higher rates. Bad reputation, on the other hand, has to be compensated for by lowering prices. By looking at ourselves in the Mirror–our own machine-readable reputation–we can adjust our behavior and increase well-being around us.
What unites the workshare and the machine-readable reputation system is that they make us compete in our ability to cooperate with our own team and community. As an incentive system, competitive cooperation is an obvious game theoretical improvement on systems that promote either pure selfishness or pure altruism.
Pure selfishness prevents higher-level cooperation from even forming, while pure altruism makes the cooperation unstable. What we need is selfish altruism and altruistic selfishness. This is what makes cooperation stable and enduring. By turning our economy into a team sport, we get the best out of people. Simple logic tells us that it will outcompete the incentive systems we currently use.
To maximize physical well-being, we proposed a UBI that simulates the properties of the solar energy that flows through our ecosystem. Money is information, but in the digital space we can simulate the thermodynamic properties that solar energy has in our physical reality.
By balancing the UBI with a basic expense, our version of entropy, we can create a renewable UBI that emulates the “renewable” energy emitted by the Sun. We receive this income at the beginning of every week, and by the end of the week it has been completely absorbed by the economy and exited circulation. With the UBI having this particular design, we can create tremendous well-being without touching anybody’s existing money or property.
Our aim was to create a pro-social marketplace that is both free and fair. The marketplace is a genuinely even playing field where all producers and consumers start with the same basic resources–an equal amount of time and money. What you do with your time and money will ultimately determine how you live in the future. Those who prioritize their time will forgo the use of additional goods and services (energy/matter). Those who prioritize goods and services have to forgo their free time. We need both people and I believe we can find an ideal balance of the two.
With a subscription-based economy, we can create a flow state in which our material resources change hands at an ideal pace that allows them to achieve their maximal utility within our society. This is a necessary step in any attempt to maximize physical well-being.
Finally, we maximize our collective intelligence by reinventing how our democracy functions in the digital age. Instead of separating legislative, executive and judicial power among three branches of government, the proposal is to separate them equally among all citizens. Now, every citizen has an equal amount of money, votes and evaluations to start with, and by serving others, we can all earn more. These signals, and the incentives and feedback loops they create, help us organize our society from the bottom up.
By incorporating these beneficial features into the way we organize, I believe we can take a step up in evolutionary complexity and maximize human well-being within planetary boundaries, the goal we set for ourselves at the beginning of the book. If we want to give this system a name, I propose Biodemocracy. Bio refers to its biological inspiration and its compatibility with life’s processes. Democracy because it aims to create a level playing field that allows citizens to govern themselves.
If we want a political slogan to express these ideas, I can think of two:
A well-functioning society needs effective feedback loops. The main purpose of the various communication channels is to bring the system into balance and optimum alignment by enabling it to respond to changes in its environment. When we optimize how the feedback loops function, the positive output of our system can be consistent and enduring. This is the design challenge we took on in this book.
First, we started by articulating a better incentive system that financially rewards people for creating well-being for their community. The first mechanism we designed was the workshare, which aligns the incentives within a team. Thanks to workshares, it is in everybody’s interest to produce the best possible result with the least amount of input. As there is a simple way to share the benefits of team work equitably, every team member has a direct incentive to help their team succeed.
The second mechanism we designed was the machine-readable reputation system. When we connect it into an online market, we create a strong feedback loop that rewards us for serving our communities. The good reputation you’ve accumulated creates more demand, which can be monetized as higher rates. Bad reputation, on the other hand, has to be compensated for by lowering prices. By looking at ourselves in the Mirror–our own machine-readable reputation–we can adjust our behavior and increase well-being around us.
What unites the workshare and the machine-readable reputation system is that they make us compete in our ability to cooperate with our own team and community. As an incentive system, competitive cooperation is an obvious game theoretical improvement on systems that promote either pure selfishness or pure altruism.
Pure selfishness prevents higher-level cooperation from even forming, while pure altruism makes the cooperation unstable. What we need is selfish altruism and altruistic selfishness. This is what makes cooperation stable and enduring. By turning our economy into a team sport, we get the best out of people. Simple logic tells us that it will outcompete the incentive systems we currently use.
To maximize physical well-being, we proposed a UBI that simulates the properties of the solar energy that flows through our ecosystem. Money is information, but in the digital space we can simulate the thermodynamic properties that solar energy has in our physical reality.
By balancing the UBI with a basic expense, our version of entropy, we can create a renewable UBI that emulates the “renewable” energy emitted by the Sun. We receive this income at the beginning of every week, and by the end of the week it has been completely absorbed by the economy and exited circulation. With the UBI having this particular design, we can create tremendous well-being without touching anybody’s existing money or property.
Our aim was to create a pro-social marketplace that is both free and fair. The marketplace is a genuinely even playing field where all producers and consumers start with the same basic resources–an equal amount of time and money. What you do with your time and money will ultimately determine how you live in the future. Those who prioritize their time will forgo the use of additional goods and services (energy/matter). Those who prioritize goods and services have to forgo their free time. We need both people and I believe we can find an ideal balance of the two.
With a subscription-based economy, we can create a flow state in which our material resources change hands at an ideal pace that allows them to achieve their maximal utility within our society. This is a necessary step in any attempt to maximize physical well-being.
Finally, we maximize our collective intelligence by reinventing how our democracy functions in the digital age. Instead of separating legislative, executive and judicial power among three branches of government, the proposal is to separate them equally among all citizens. Now, every citizen has an equal amount of money, votes and evaluations to start with, and by serving others, we can all earn more. These signals, and the incentives and feedback loops they create, help us organize our society from the bottom up.
By incorporating these beneficial features into the way we organize, I believe we can take a step up in evolutionary complexity and maximize human well-being within planetary boundaries, the goal we set for ourselves at the beginning of the book. If we want to give this system a name, I propose Biodemocracy. Bio refers to its biological inspiration and its compatibility with life’s processes. Democracy because it aims to create a level playing field that allows citizens to govern themselves.
If we want a political slogan to express these ideas, I can think of two:
YOU MAKE ME FREE!
Because it’s time we took charge of our cultural evolution and completed the major transition in evolution we are currently undergoing.
EVOLUTION NOW!
Because it’s time we took charge of our cultural evolution and completed a major transition in evolution.
But can it bring world peace? That is a separate question.
But can it bring world peace? That is a separate question.
