Submitted by practical_ussy t3_10oetss in singularity
The shortcomings of capitalism is currently being blamed for causing worldwide grievance in developed and developing nations is the result of humans following their inherit nature. We will never break away from capitalism regardless of how many alternatives economic systems humans come up with.
Humanity has implemented a variety of economic systems in its attempt to insure its continued survival. These economic systems have ranged from simple hunter-gather societies to globally interconnected ones and although the differences might seem stark, since the very start humanity has always been interconnected and has been a global society. Humans like any other representation of information must evolve in the universe for it to continue its survival. Whether it’s simple fundamental structures in the universe such as quarks or hypothesized vibrating strings, its more macro level representational structure chemicals and then biology, or meta structures such as information stored in a computer or in a human brain (i.e., ideas), all things must evolve for them to continue to exist in the universe. This law is universal at every level of the universe.
Because everything must evolve it must adapt and this includes humans and its meta information. Meta information is information that describes some underlying informational structure and for it to exist by its definition there must always exist some information that describes the current information. This results in an endless loop where for any information structure to exist it must have meta information. Since the idea of meta information exists and we can verify that it exists within a logical framework it must be that all information has meta information. Information doesn’t need to only have one informational structures that represents it . Just like a camera can take pictures and represent the information that is perceived by our visual systems as digital representations like formats like jpeg and png. Meta information can represent information to varying degrees of transformation and computing capacity but it does have terminal nodes. Evolution can be represented by a decision tree structures with infinite depth, that is constantly being conditioned by prior information. Once something exists it will always exist even if it doesn’t exist within the short life span of an individual human. Because it existed it is computable and since it is computable it can exist resulting which means it has meta information. From the definition of the meta information structure evolution, for something to exist it must follow the laws of evolution. Therefore, all things that exist have a meta information decision tree with infinite depth that represents them. Because no information structure can “die” due to the existence of meta data, it be traced to some other information structures meaning
Because the process describing its existence has infinite depth it will always exist regardless of the time span between splits and nodes. When it evolves it branches and does not exist in one form but one of many.
We can see evidence of this current decision tree theory within human science. In its simplest form the decision tree is a tree like structure where each node is an expected value. Our current understanding of decisions tree theory is now where we can use algorithms to learn an optimal decision tree or decision tree structure under some constraints. Our understanding of these learning algorithms is also evolving through the building of meta informations structures that learn on top of another information structure such as gradient boosted decisions trees and we have other classes of learning algorithms as simple as generalized linear models to meta learning structures like neural networks trained through stochastic gradient descent. Our understanding of this idea of meta learning algorithms will continue to increase to the point where we can understand everything to a close enough degree that it would mean being able to manipulate at will. This is the the point of all this though. The point is that all information structures evolve and that includes human societies.
Human societies are systems composed of many humans and technologies and are bounded by culture. The definition of culture is ”the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group” which for any of these things to exist technology is needed. In other words for culture to exist technology must allow it. This means that culture is dedicated by technology not the other way around. Technology as we think of it can be boiled down to a tool. A tool that optimizes something in the universe to accomplish some task. We like to think that our tools don’t control us and this is actually true at the local level but at the meat level technology controls everything because it is the form of information that can optimize itself at a speed biology and chemistry cannot. This is because technology operates at a meta level above biology and chemistry. It builds meta information structures to describe and manipulate it. Technology has evolved through humans because humans are the precursor to technology.
The political and economic systems that humans have built are the result of technological advancement which in turn as the result of human understanding of technology. Understanding that technology is the branch where everything accelerates is crucial if we are to understand our the problems in our local part of the evolution of technology.
The human society needs one thing to exist, it must at least have some meta information structures that adapts to the nature of humans or in other words a meta information (that must exist) that learns from its underlying meta information (which we know can exist due to the existence of learning algorithm theory ).
Human society, i.e., economic and political systems, are at a meta level, systems for optimizing technology through the organization of humans. Humans have used various forms of economic and political organization but none have been as obviously successful as variants of capitalism and this is because the goal of capitalism isn’t to maximize profits, it’s to maximize the progress of technology. We can see this at our very local level in the technology evolution tree through the proliferation of information technology in financial markets and the endless feedback loop it creates. Technology improves the allocation of capital and the better allocation of capital the better the technology gets resulting in an endless loop of improvement.
This results in systems that learn to optimize its self endlessly. Technology is self optimization and organization. Because it can learn and organize its underlying meta information it can learn how to increase its evolution. Biology does this and has done it will but something that self optimizes at ever increasing complexity will always best the slower informations structure.
We are not arguing that capitalism is the final evolution state of an ever changing system whose main objective is to optimize the speed of technological progress but that it is the node from which a split was made deeper than all other systems. Systems like communism are composed of some good ideas but fall short due it its non compatibility with the constraints set by humans and its meta information technology. We can see this in how Russia and China adopted free markets to some degree and used that to fuel its economic growth and not the other way around. This is because capitalism is the system that leads to technology to faster and faster progress. Capitalist systems will undoubtedly adopt ideas from communism and other systems but only to improve the progress of technology.
We deserve capitalism not because of some moral consequence but because that is who we are as a species. Our purpose is to be another node in the technology evolution tree.
We deserve because we selfishly refuse to die out and will continue to improve technology because without it we cannot exist.
We cannot exist without technology and it cannot exist without us. We will follow the trees path to acceleration .
DrBobMaui t1_j6echio wrote
My thanks and compliments on this, it's very informative, very interesting, and very well written!
Would love to see a "filled-in" technology evolution tree for perhaps the last few decades or so. Hope you do one!
More nui mahalos and all the best too!