Getting from here to there is always the tricky part with coordination problems, isn’t it? I do have some (quite speculative) ideas on that, but I don’t see human society organizing itself in this way on its own for at least a few centuries given current political and economic trends, which is why I postulated a cooperative ASI.
So assuming that either an aligned ASI has taken over (I have some ideas on robust alignment, too, but that’s out of scope here) or political and economic forces (and infrastructure) have finally pushed humanity past a certain social phase transition, I see humanity undergoing an organizational shift much like what happened with the evolution of multicellularity and eusociality. This would look at first mostly the same as today, except that national borders have become mostly irrelevant due to advances in transportation and communication infrastructure. Basically, imagine the world’s cities and highways becoming something like the vascular system of dicots or the closed circulatory system of vertebrates, with the regions enclosed by network circuits acting as de facto states (or organs/tissues, to continue the biological analogy). Major cities and the regions along the highways that connect them become the de facto arbiters of international policy, while the major cities and highways within each region become the arbiters of regional policy, and so on in a hierarchically embedded manner.
Within this structure, enclosed regions would act as hierarchically embedded communities that end up performing a division of labor for the global network, just as organs divide labor for the body (or like tissues divide labor within an organ, or cells within a tissue, or organelles within a cell, if you’re looking within regions). Basically, the transportation/communication/etc. network edges would come to act as Markov blankets for the regions they encapsulate, and this organization would extend hierarchically, just like in biological systems, down to the level of local communities. (Ideally, each community would become locally self-sufficient, with broader networks taking on a more modulatory role, but that’s another discussion.)
Anyway, once this point is reached, or even as the transition is underway, I see the ASI and/or social pressures facilitating the movement of people toward communities of shared values and beliefs (i.e., shared narratives, or at least minimally conflicting narratives), much like in Scott Alexander’s Archipelago. Each person or family unit should move so as to minimize their displacement while maximizing the marginal improvement they could make to their new community (and the marginal benefit they could receive from the new community).
In the system that emerges, stories would become something of a commodity, arising within communities as shared narratives that assign social roles and teach values and lessons (just like the campfire legends of ancient hunter-gatherer societies). Stories with more universal resonance would propagate up hierarchical layers of the global network and then get disseminated top-down toward other local communities within the broader regions. This would provide a narrative-synchronization effect at high levels and across adjacent regions while also allowing for local variations. The status games / moralities of the international level would eventually attain a more “liberal” flavor, while those at more local levels could be more “conservative” in nature.
Sorry, that was long. And it probably involved more idealizational fantasy than rational prediction of future trends. But I have a hunch that something like this could work
Getting from here to there is always the tricky part with coordination problems, isn’t it? I do have some (quite speculative) ideas on that, but I don’t see human society organizing itself in this way on its own for at least a few centuries given current political and economic trends, which is why I postulated a cooperative ASI.
So assuming that either an aligned ASI has taken over (I have some ideas on robust alignment, too, but that’s out of scope here) or political and economic forces (and infrastructure) have finally pushed humanity past a certain social phase transition, I see humanity undergoing an organizational shift much like what happened with the evolution of multicellularity and eusociality. This would look at first mostly the same as today, except that national borders have become mostly irrelevant due to advances in transportation and communication infrastructure. Basically, imagine the world’s cities and highways becoming something like the vascular system of dicots or the closed circulatory system of vertebrates, with the regions enclosed by network circuits acting as de facto states (or organs/tissues, to continue the biological analogy). Major cities and the regions along the highways that connect them become the de facto arbiters of international policy, while the major cities and highways within each region become the arbiters of regional policy, and so on in a hierarchically embedded manner.
Within this structure, enclosed regions would act as hierarchically embedded communities that end up performing a division of labor for the global network, just as organs divide labor for the body (or like tissues divide labor within an organ, or cells within a tissue, or organelles within a cell, if you’re looking within regions). Basically, the transportation/communication/etc. network edges would come to act as Markov blankets for the regions they encapsulate, and this organization would extend hierarchically, just like in biological systems, down to the level of local communities. (Ideally, each community would become locally self-sufficient, with broader networks taking on a more modulatory role, but that’s another discussion.)
Anyway, once this point is reached, or even as the transition is underway, I see the ASI and/or social pressures facilitating the movement of people toward communities of shared values and beliefs (i.e., shared narratives, or at least minimally conflicting narratives), much like in Scott Alexander’s Archipelago. Each person or family unit should move so as to minimize their displacement while maximizing the marginal improvement they could make to their new community (and the marginal benefit they could receive from the new community).
In the system that emerges, stories would become something of a commodity, arising within communities as shared narratives that assign social roles and teach values and lessons (just like the campfire legends of ancient hunter-gatherer societies). Stories with more universal resonance would propagate up hierarchical layers of the global network and then get disseminated top-down toward other local communities within the broader regions. This would provide a narrative-synchronization effect at high levels and across adjacent regions while also allowing for local variations. The status games / moralities of the international level would eventually attain a more “liberal” flavor, while those at more local levels could be more “conservative” in nature.
Sorry, that was long. And it probably involved more idealizational fantasy than rational prediction of future trends. But I have a hunch that something like this could work