Our Big Oops

Humanity has a huge problem, of which few are aware.

Consider an analogy. Your ability to keep a car on a road while driving depends on key driving parameters staying within acceptable ranges. These parameters include your car speed, how curvy and bumpy is your road, and noise and delay levels in the key processes by which: (a) you look ahead to see the road, (b) you judge how much to move your steering wheel and accelerator controls, (c) you move your arms and legs to adjust those controls, (d) those controls couple to move your car wheels and engine, and (e) your engine-driven car wheels holds traction with the road. If these parameters get overall bad enough, you should expect your car to drift off the road and crash.

Humanity’s superpower is just natural selection, applied to our unique abilities to reliably copy each other’s behaviors. For this cultural evolution process to keep humanity on its road of progress, we need its key driving parameters to similarly stay good enough. In this case, we need sufficient variety and selection pressures regarding our behaviors, relative to our rates of environmental change and internal cultural drift. Without good parameters, culture should drift into maladaption.

Three hundred years ago, this parameter comparison looked pretty good at all cultural levels. Our environment changed slowly, as we doubled in population roughly every thousand years. And we had great variety in hundreds of thousands of largely-independent reluctant-to-change peasant cultures, cultures that frequently faced strong selection pressures of war, famine, and pandemics. When one such culture drifted off of the adaptive road, it was quickly replaced by neighbors.

Today, our parameters still look good re the types of behaviors that are easy to vary individually; we have record rates of innovation in tech and business practices. But they look more worrisome re the cultural norms and game-theory-equilibria parameters that are hard to change individually, culturally-set features analogous to the harder-to-evolve DNA-set features that define biological species, as compared to DNA-set features that can vary easily within such species. (Biology DNA evolves faster with more smaller species, as that better promotes these more important species-defining features.) I’ll call these features “culture”.

For well over a century now, our environment has changed quite fast, with the world economy doubling faster than every twenty years. Our greatest heroes have been cultural activists who push for big culture changes mostly unrelated to adaptive pressures, thus causing high rates of cultural drift. Our hundreds of thousands of diverse peasant cultures were first crushed into a few hundred national cultures, and then into a single dominant elite world monoculture, vastly reducing variety. And our great health, wealth, and peace have greatly reduced selection pressures; cultures hardly ever die anymore. Differential fertility, which takes centuries to impose its discipline, is our main remaining cultural selection pressure.

Together these trends suggest that today the “cultural” features of our behaviors—i.e., the features strongly shaped by conformity pressures imposed by our shared elite monoculture and thus hard to vary within that monoculture—may have long been drifting into maladaptation. This seems most plausible regarding fertility, but also seems believable re increasing mental illness and drug addiction, legal over-complexity, over-regulation of commerce, over-spending on education and medicine, and many other problematic social trends. Yes, behavior is still selected to copy world elites, but alas the status markers that drive this process also seem to be drifting into maladaption.

This cultural drift into maladaption can work via both unpredictable random walks away from once adaptive behaviors, and also via predictable drifts, wherein we revert to a human nature from which cultural selection had previously moved us away. For example, culture may have moved us away from natural human laziness, selfishness, decadence, and present-orientation. Furthermore, we may be reverting to forager styles, after the relaxation of selection pressures that had turned foragers into farmers. Becoming more forager-like is plausibly giving us more travel, leisure, democracy, and promiscuity, and less war, dominance, self-control, work, religion, and fertility.

A straightforward projection of current trends into the coming centuries plausibly results in the world population and economy soon peaking and then declining, and innovation then grinding to a halt. Today’s small insular fertile religious subcultures like the Amish or Haredim, who have been doubling every twenty years, would in a few centuries come to dominate the world, much like the Christians took over the Roman Empire by doubling this fast for three centuries. At which point they’d create new rich healthy peaceful world monocultures full of cultural activists, which again succumb to cultural drift.

You might think you don’t care if your behavior is maladaptive, if it achieves other goals. But maladaptive lineages go away. So if you want to achieve anything via your long-term lineage, you want it to be adaptive, so it can be there to do other things.

Solving the problem of cultural drift seems very hard, apparently requiring either drastic changes to our cultural evolution parameter values, to let natural selection again drive us to adaptive cultures, or even larger changes to this whole system, changes so large as to constitute an “end of culture”, after which culture is driven by substantially by something other than simple natural selection.

Both approaches seem quite hard to accomplish, and even then only at great costs. Yet the cost of failing to solve it is increasing cultural dysfunction, a headwind that may not be outweighed by innovation in tech and business practices. That is, our world civilization might actually decline.

On parameter changes, fragmenting the world into many small insular groups with deep cultural differences would help, but seems quite hard to enforce, and comes at a great cost to innovation. Greatly reviving poverty, war and disease might also help, but at obviously severe costs. High human fertility might help revive competition, and poverty. And human level AI (or ems) would naturally have Malthusian wages, though only add to cultural selection pressures when free to evolve their own AI (or em) cultures independently of human cultures.

However, all of these approaches run real risks of not actually improving our cultural parameters enough to return us to good adaptive driving on a road of progress. After all, we may now be pretty far into the bad driving parameter region. However, replacing the whole natural selection system we’ve used for a million years with some other process requires even more radical changes, which I’ll leave for another post.

Humanity has accidentally done a big hard oops. We’ve broken our superpower, i.e. cultural evolution by natural selection. Few are aware of this problem, and those few can’t yet see attractive ways way to fix it.