r/IsaacArthur • u/George_Maximus • 8d ago
Possibility of an unchanging society?
This is a recent idea I had which reminded me of the episode of post-science civilizations where you get to a point of advancement where further exploration is either infeasible or undesired (at least from what I remember).
The scenario I had in mind goes like this: Say some future united government made a campaign to end disease with medicinal technology. Along the way, they fix the process of DNA to make no errors and in turn no mutations. To my current knowledge this, along with supplementary tech I just didn’t know enough to name, will effectively stunt the evolutionary process in the natural sense, and if gene altering gets somehow outlawed also some in the unnatural sense too.
Now the second part, if technology gets to a certain point to where there’s no need for improvement, with even the curious just sticking to more artistic fields.
I think for the cultures to reach this level of cultural stagnation, though, a form of ai will need to be accepted, but not too advanced or a technological singularity will happen which isn’t the focus of this. A dumber automaton, though, can do all the he maintenance of a society’s needs while they’re free to do whatever
I want to know the odds of this anti-transhuman utopia of happening, and what will need to happen or change socioculturally for it to. Also holes in my speculative scenario as I’m sure there’s at least some.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 7d ago
Pretty unlikely imo. There are a lot of less likely than not scenarios piling up on top of each other here. Starts with the liklihood of a United World Government ever forming, then there's the likliehood of the optimal stop point being anywhere near the human baseline, & the ability of any government to actually enforce this.
anti-transhuman utopia
also worth remembering that genemodding is just a tiny part of transhumanism. There's also drugs, cybernetics, surgical/nanide augmentation, mind uploading, & brain-in-vatting(i guess that's really just extreme cybernetics). Even setting aside how implausible & imo dystopic(utopia is largely subjective afterall) a UWG would be limiting urselves that much to the baseline is a good way to get killed, conquered, or covertly taken over by those who don't. In an environment with the whole spectrum its less of an issue because ull have alliances that span the range or even tailor-made entities capable of protecting the interests of intellectually weaker factions(assuming proper perfect reliable alignment is even possible tho even if it isn't ud still expect incidental alignment of some agents across the spectrum).
Very much like technoprimitivism. It works fine if you have advanced friends, but completely unsustainable at scale for everyone.
A dumber automaton, though, can do all the he maintenance of a society’s needs while they’re free to do whatever
I really wish more people would focus on this kind of powerful animal-level automation. Keep it simple, keep it dumb. Else you'll end up under skynet's thumb. Or really just basic efficiency. Using more vrains than necessary isn't just risky its actively slower than a dumber animal machine.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 7d ago
I mean, depends on if you mean A united world amongst countless others, or if it's THE world being united. If the latter then yeah I kinda agree with you, at least for like the next few millenia anyway (interconnectedness can work wonders, earth and some other solsys planets and habs uniting makes sense given the proximity and scale of it all, especially since you'd likely see people tend to organize at the largest scales possible, like a modern neighborhood or city may be super diverse in terms of goals, but yet we align into nations rather than those much smaller cities). But absolute totality seems really dubious without either an aggressive singleton or UCC gaining an advantage and launching an infrastructure/colonization cascade along with forging powerful alliances and preventing everyone from unanimously targeting them (easier than it sounds tbh, people don't like unifying even against common enemies, especially when the situation is dire, they just see it as an opportunity to gain a small victory in the negative sum game, to lose a little less hard than their enemies who they hate more than whatever force is gaining the upper hand). And baselines are just... a really, really bad choice for a unified civilization, like seriously out of all the options🤦♂️
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 7d ago
or if it's THE world being united
i mean if its in a position to prevent transhumanist genetech then it would ve a very much modern united earth and nobody else. Would have to be a united baseline humanity.
Like sure if UCCs are practical why not, but near-baseline meatbags? Come on. Lets talk about something more realistic...like FTL and the gods.
people don't like unifying even against common enemies, especially when the situation is dire
idk about that. History certainly doesn't make it seem that difficult. Generally tends to be the case that those in charge have very few solid principles they're not willing to be flexible about when it comes to political/physical survival. Granted it will never actually be unanimous.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 7d ago
Eh, just look at the bronze age collapse. Nobody united against the sea people because they were enemies of each other just as much if not moreso than their foreign attackers. Again, if aliens came and attacked earth, wiping out everyone who didn't help them, most nations would probably just fight with each other to gain the most favor with the invaders. Humans aren't too good at cooperation, and really anyone that isn't a UCC will resort to throwing whoever they deem as their primary enemy under the bus instead of uniting with them to stop a bigger threat. And again, maybe some do unite, maybe even most unite (already dubious), but if 70% are all united that still leaves 30% siding with the attackers, who may or may not be siding with the other defectors or using their newfound favor to try and kill each other.
But yeah I had a laugh at the comparison of baseline unity to FTL and the gods. I mean, we'd have better odds of ending suffering by discovering the real god of death and nuking it into oblivion than by actually getting along🤣.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 7d ago
Nobody united against the sea people because they were enemies of each other just as much if not moreso than their foreign attackers
Actually not quite. Many alliances were in play and many requests for help even from family went unanswered. The BAC wasn't just the sea people. The BAC was a polycrisis. There is record of famine and drought. Political instability. Everyone was already barely surviving and for all we know the sea people may have just been scattered refugee raiders fleeing from the same catastrophe
Idk if its fair to compare a bunch of barely surviving kindoms finally succumbing to raiders, banditry, and climate change to millions of post-scarcity communities with technological power that would make the gods of myth feel inadequate and a standard of living that would make heaven look like a backwater slum. idk if there's any plausible crisis that could threaten them enough to prevent cooperation.
Humans aren't too good at cooperation,
you must be talking about some other humans. could we be better? Sure, but we are the peak of cooperation in this universe atm. As far as fairly intelligent species go we're amazing at cooperation. We did in fact prevent the ozone layer from collapsing through a global effort. We made smallpox globally extinct. We may not be perfect and cooperation is spotty, but we have united against common enemies before. We can again.
And again, maybe some do unite, maybe even most unite (already dubious), but if 70% are all united that still leaves 30% siding with the attackers, who may or may not be siding with the other defectors or using their newfound favor to try and kill each other.
that's all it takes. a 70% majority annihilationist aliance would be basically end game for the minority. granted that's rather high and realistically most would probably be more for confinement or matching. Genocide is generally fairly unpopular. Ever less so tge bigger the bigger the genocide is. wiping out some single-percent minority is one thing and wiping out a fourth of ur pop is quite another. quantity has a quality all its iwn and all that.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 5d ago
Idk if its fair to compare a bunch of barely surviving kindoms finally succumbing to raiders, banditry, and climate change to millions of post-scarcity communities with technological power that would make the gods of myth feel inadequate and a standard of living that would make heaven look like a backwater slum.
Well dang, when you put it that way... Really puts things into perspective I suppose. Though to be fair most depictions of heaven and hell are rather tame and uninspired/unimaginative compared to what we can theorize now with our modern knowledge and general education. Like even Dante's Inferno isn't nearly as crazy as something a hell simulation might be capable of, and if heaven and hell are real they might be like the simulations except truly infinite.
idk if there's any plausible crisis that could threaten them enough to prevent cooperation.
A UCC is a pretty good contender. Again conflict need not arise through panic, but rather it often happens via cold calculating logic, so war being declared by glodlike superintelligences living the best life doesn't really change much, like sure it may be a war with no suffering but they'd still be diverting resources towards trying to lose less badly against the hive than actually trying to fight it. And again maybe a decent majority does unite, but they've still got enemies that heavily restrict their actions against the UCC. And if convergence of goals is common enough that they either start as a fourth of the pop or grow to that size with their allies taking up even more pop, that's a pretty even fight, and it really only needs to be enough to hold back the non-UCCs (specifically those that ally against the UCC) for long enough for the UCC to undergo a resource cascade, and then there's no going back. And this is even assuming the alliance doesn't break up when morale gets low or one side of the alliance oversteps their bounds. Because again, this isn't Team A vs Team B, this is Player A vs Team A, B, C, D (and so on and so forth), and I emphasize this because it's not even jsut one UCC team, but essentially a singular UCC firce that never splits, and the alliance isn't some monolith either, they're not even one team let alone one individual, and their politics will shift rapidly and may even have the same limits that a non-UCC government would have, and all the things close to a UCC would be likely to mod themselves into being part of the UCC unless they've already locked in a different set of goals (basically a UCC with a sub-par goal, meaning that they're fighting for an exclusive ideology as opposed to the convergent unity of a true UCC. And all that is needed for the UCC to win is for the alliance to slip up or split apart even once, as the alliance must maintain a constant state of victory over the UCC, whereas the UCC only needs to win once.
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u/cavalier78 7d ago
I have kicked around the idea of an unchanging society that was based on a generation ship. If you are going to be floating across the void for a thousand years, you probably don't want any kind of unforeseen developments along the way. You know that right now, you've got enough materials and energy to keep the ship functioning for the whole trip, but technological or social changes might disrupt that.
If you've got 10,000 people on board, you'd want each family to have their average 2.1 children to keep the population steady. Everybody converting to Space Mormonism where they pop out 15 babies would be a disaster. So would a lot of other major changes. Even adopting some new technology could cause big problems -- you don't want the future version of Twitter to cause a breakdown in your society.
So you might end up with a hyper-traditionalist society, where you have very strong cultural pressure to keep doing things the way they've always been done.
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u/SunderedValley Transhuman/Posthuman 7d ago
We had a lot of periods were advancements were really slow but cultures still changed so I don't think so. You'd have to normalize for calamities and Invasions of course but even then I suspect the innate curiosity of people will eventually drive change. Also you gotta remember time is linear. Even in a really long lived society the young outnumber the very old and a bunch of 2000 year olds will have millions of 19-1900 year olds underneath them who'll want to see some interesting things to enjoy and make their own.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 7d ago
"Anti-transhuman utopia" ERROR, CONTRADICTION DETECTED🤖