From: H C (lphege@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 01 2005 - 10:25:04 MST
The Globalization Dynamic and the Singularity
--Hank Conn
Globalization has become a powerful force in the modern era, however,
globalization has always been a force throughout history. It hasn’t been
until the advent of recent technology that the dynamic power of
globalization has really stepped up in power. What is this power? How can we
represent this power as something more concrete?
Globalization is the means of evening out the prior understandings for a
large amount of people. (<-- my thesis. here is the justification:)
Although, upon any understanding or belief (a meme), the way this belief is
represented (as something evil, something western, etc) can be and is widely
varied and on sometimes opposite extremes throughout a population
(abortion). However, as the prior understandings become better specified (as
a specific piece of knowledge or belief, however complex), and better spread
throughout the group, the better representation will prevail more often than
the lesser representation. Moreover, as better representations are more
recognized, this lead to even better representations, where the original
representations are entirely implicit within the better representation (such
that the negation of that specific representation has very feeble priors
upon which to rest = Scientific Progress).
Furthermore, those most militarily successful nations are, and will continue
to always be, those with a better military. As the definition for “better
military” radically changed during the cold war, the extreme necessity of
science demanded radical Scientific Progress. Those people who always had
the better representations (economically, politically, socially, and all the
other forces that exist, with each respective of its own utility), were
unlikely to deny any scientific progress, because as this rapidly advancing
field grew in size, as did the better representations that were created
through this process. The most important period of time in human history was
the Cold War. Not only did this period represent a time of military funded
extreme Scientific Progress, but also a time of “nation building”. The
implications of “nation building” have been the same since the dawn of time.
When one society dominates and engulfs another, drastic memetic exchange
occurs, virtually to the point of dictatorial unification. As scientific
progress was so rapid during the Cold War that thousands of new inventions
were being created every day (an unprecedented scale in history)- and the
vast majority of these memetic and material exchanges meant something very
different for the concept of “nation building”. Because, obviously, modern
life is extremely more complicated than any social, economic, political, etc
etc etc, structure that has ever existed; The adjustment of prior
understandings is extremely more dramatic. That is, a vast, not necessarily
restructuring, but at least *structuring* returns based on this event (and
in many cases during and as a result from the Cold War, RE-structuring took
place, which was even more extremely dramatic of a change).
However, in each time the structuring was a POSITIVE force, (especially a
positive force as made by the United States), this gives the restructured
nation their own independent *positive force*, such that they can socially,
economically, religiously, etc, exert positive forces on other people.
This whole new paradigm of understanding history gives entirely new light on
the existing social, economic, and government structures: those that made
people happier lasted longer. Natural selection, where the organism is any
memetic structure, and those that resulted in unhappiness of the people
lasted much shorter than those that resulted in happiness of the people.
Thus, as globalization increases prior understanding, this leads to a better
increase in technology, which leads to an increase of globalization, ad
infinitum. Human society is in a closed loop, converging upon a single event
in history which, by definition, to break this loop, either all of humanity
must be extinct, all of the knowledge of humanity disappears (a virtually
impossible phenomenon short of an extremely particular virus, designed for
such a feat, as well as some sort of global, physical destruction of
knowledge), or technology would reach the point of maximum utility, in terms
of subjective human happiness. Whether we are more likely to become extinct
or reach this point of maximum utility is questionable.
As we all know, the physical universe, as we have always been gradually
discovering (even to this day) is made up of smaller and smaller parts,
whose intricate functions are so extremely complex that we all but fail to
comprehend them. Furthermore, when we do succeed in implementing some useful
function (on some level of complexity: in the modern era is has primarily
been in electronics), this brings about radical changes in globalization,
and on such in the loop. Furthermore, the more complexity that we are
capable of handling, the more profound changes in globalization are
possible. Currently, we are just barely scraping the nano-level of
complexity. A description of times in which various complexity levels were
broken is out of the range of this document.
Also, as another optimization pressure, the capability Science has to
*implement* technology on one level of complexity, allows for the creation
of *tools* to *COMPREHEND* and *create implementations* on the next level of
complexity, and furthermore, implementations of one level of complexity
higher allow for a level of magnitude higher utility *conceptual
representations*, as well as *material products*.
The most important conclusion of this document is the convergence of
technology to its maximum utility level: namely, the Singularity. The
Singularity is what is represented as the breaking point between the
maximization of this utility curve on one side, and the extinction of the
human race on the other. With the advent of superhuman intelligence (which
could be derived from some artificial intelligence program, or human
modifications by drugs, surgery, or other means of increasing intelligence),
the Singularity occurs, and at that point we have no means of predicting
what will happen, because the level of memetic prior understanding will be
drastically different at that point, and changing very rapidly (as it
already is: every human is always in a constant flux of information of
better ideas, and constantly being provided every day with a better
product). Some single human or AI program will have the *entire* memetic and
technological loop which has powered the entire populace of humanity since
it ever exited directly within its control. The more intelligent the entity
becomes, the faster it can make itself more intelligent, as well as the more
powerful their control over the entire human race.
(As a side note: This is also my reasoning for supporting the war- it is a
powerful factor in the globalization process which has so powerfully
benefited humanity thus far)
-Th3Hegem0n
This essay is also in my blog ^_^
http://smarterhippie.blogspot.com
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