Doc Says — Our Emotions, Institutions and Technological Capabilities Are Mismatched
Is the human species special?
Most people would agree with the comment made by astronomer Carl Sagan, that the probability of other intelligent life in the universe must be close to a 100 percent. Indeed, scientifically we know the building blocks for organic life travel in meteors and thus must be ubiquitous throughout the universe. We also know that once organic life gets a foothold it can survive in almost any environment — from the deepest, darkest, bone-crushing depths of the ocean to the boiling witches brew near thermal vents to the deep-freeze miles below the surface of Antarctica.
Similarly, we know change is the only constant in the universe, with everything evolving — from the cosmos itself to galaxies to solar systems to planets to biology to societies to technologies. We further know the processes of evolution continuously destroy and create entities and forms of life over time revealing a direction to change.
What few people know, however, is that Sagan also said the probability of any civilization surviving its technological epoch — like the one we are now living in — would be exceedingly rare; perhaps a 0.001 percent chance. In other words, 99.999 percent of all technological civilizations in the universe would go extinct. While such a high probability of civilizational extinctions might strike you as hyperbole, it is the same percentage of species that have already gone extinct on earth.
So it is worth asking, “Why would our civilization be one of the rare survivors?”
If we could take a 40,000-foot, bird’s eye view of our civilization to assess where we are in our technological epoch, it would be hard to argue with evolutionary biologist, E.O. Wilson, who says humanity’s problem today is that
we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
In other words, there is a mismatch between
- Human emotions and our institutions
- Human emotions and our technological capabilities
- Our institutions and our technological capabilities
Mismatch — human emotions and our institutions
The history of civilization is one of ongoing distrust between people and their institutions. Over millennia we have sought to evolve institutions to better match our primal emotions and better engender trust. But, inevitably, institutions calcify and become increasingly less responsive. The result is a reemergence of distrust as tensions escalate. Periodically these tensions erupt, often resulting in social unrest, terrorist acts, civil war, revolution or war.
Setting aside anachronistic authoritarian regimes, the design of even the most recent domestic institutional regimes — liberal republics as representative democracies — were initiated by the 15th century printing revolution and are a product of the Enlightenment era. In other words, what we have are, as Wilson said, medieval institutions. While international institutions are of more recent vintage, they were all shaped to be controlled by domestic institutions, and therefore live and operate in the shadow of our medieval institutions.
The primary design objectives for these medieval institutions were a basic legal codification of individual and economic rights in a representational structure. Of course, as a simple matter of evolution, these institutional objectives are not static so the operative word here is “basic.”
Today’s digital world of hyper-connectivity, with instant access to news and events globally, makes it easier than ever to recognize individual and group economic and representational disparities and deficiencies (e.g., human rights, gender inequality, economic inequality, corruption) beyond the basics. But since the design of our medieval institutions never contemplated the need to respond to such hyper-connectivity, the current velocity of change, or the ubiquitous awareness of institutional shortcomings and their consequence on people’s lives, the basics no longer suffice.
So, it is no surprise that we are living in a period of growing institutional distrust and escalating tensions leading to emotional responses against our medieval institutions (e.g., rise of extremist political parties, gun ownership, xenophobia, terrorism). Of course, despite their medieval origins, elites that depend on these institutions for benefits tacitly believe in their permanence. Thus, increasing public distrust and tensions often produces an emotional elite response that doubles-down on prior, antiquated strategies and tactics to maintain the institutional status quo.
Today this elite response means legally rationalizing increased high-tech versions of propaganda and surveillance. Of course, these antiquated strategies and tactics only exacerbate public distrust and tensions, so emotions escalate further. As a practical matter, this emotional mismatch must be resolved by a change at the institutional level. Unfortunately, historically, that has never been an easy institutional task.
Mismatch — human emotions and our technological capabilities
Our relationship with today’s technological capabilities is quixotic. Broadly speaking, we are in-love with what technology enables us to do in our daily lives. However, we never acknowledge any responsibly to employ it wisely or to step back and fully grasp its larger impact on our civilization. In effect, we are perpetual somnambulant strangers in a strange land.
Obviously, today’s technology does enable us all to live better lives in virtually every area of our existence. We now communicate and interact with each other more, better, faster, and cheaper than at any time in human history. With the equivalent of a supercomputer in our pockets, we have instant access the world’s information and events, and virtually unlimited access to goods and services globally.
Yet, instead of this technological cornucopia bringing the world closer together, what we are witnessing emotionally is less civility, more polarization, and a fragmentation into tighter tribal groupings. Instead of having more cognitive surplus and greater control over our lives, we seem to have less of both. Surrounded by a seemingly infinite present we run faster to stay in place, yet sense we are losing ground. As a result, we truncate our priorities and pare back ambitions.
In essence, our technological capabilities have led to us feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of conflicting information, relationships and obligations. Emotionally, anxieties about both known and intangible unknown vulnerabilities are now everywhere in the ether. Thus, our technological capabilities have us running faster and harder but without direction beyond more in the hope that more will provide some relief.
Mismatch — our institutions and our technological capabilities
Whether considering domestic or international institutions our technological capabilities are expanding far more rapidly than any of them can adapt in timely or constructive ways. The onslaught of diverse and crosscutting 24/7 media leaves no political faux pas unnoticed, every injustice magnified and amplified into a cause with its own advocacy group, steadily erodes the pricing power of business, and leaves geopolitics a fragile mess. The only voice penetrating the noise is cash. The only priority is staying below the radar.
Domestically and internationally the disparities between haves and have-nots is becoming ever more acutely visible. Meanwhile, as incomes stagnate and migration is seen as a threat, economies are increasingly being automated. Instead of offering constructive visions, institutional elites oscillate between massaging our self-esteem, parents scolding us for insolence and a lack of gratitude, and preying upon our fears in an attempt to create a state of suspended animation.
So, it is no surprise that such institutional rhetoric ultimately only serves to ignite the fires of religious and ideological intolerance. No surprise that new fires in the world keep emerging while the smoldering embers of older fires refuse to be extinguished.
Domestically, with medieval institutions too cumbersome to react in a timely and constructive manner, and institutional elites cocksure this is as good as it gets, the lone institutional response is to legally rationalize the deployment of ever more technological capabilities to better encircle the populace and cull out malcontents. Similarly, internationally, there has been no institutional advance to mollify or mitigate the emotional nature of tribal rivalries and conflict. Instead, international institutions, via domestic institutional proxies, have primarily succeeded in developing ever better technological capabilities to indiscriminately kill and maim other humans on an ever larger scale.
Thus, what we now have is an accelerating development and deployment of both surveillance technologies and a growing diversity of cheap, portable, stealthy, lthal technologies. Moreover, the inherent dual use nature of many of these technologies increases not only the capabilities and power of domestic law enforcement and the destructive capabilities and power available to militaries internationally, but equally to that of lone individuals and small groups.
Emotional zeitgeist –
As capitalist economics continues evolving toward ever greater substitution of autonomous technological capabilities, issues related to wages and income inequality will become still more problematic. As the pace of technological change further outstrips the pace of cultural adaptability, as ever more people find their skills no longer needed, and more people live in places left behind economically, figurative and literal attacks on intellectual and institutional elites will progress from fact-free zones to intimidation to social unrest and beyond. In other words, expect a serious escalation of distrust in institutions and tensions.
In this context, it is important to realize that the hyper-connectivity we now have will be with us forever. It is also important to realize that ever greater access to one another and information will reduce past knowledge asymmetries beyond scientific ideas to amplify populist voices challenging the authority of medieval institutions. Yet, beyond simple terrorism, institutional elites grossly underestimate the underlying emotional distrust and tensions, and thus the full meaning and consequences of the emotional challenges ahead.
So, it seems safe to assume that the cacophonous domestic and international emotional noise we now have — distrusting, anxious, intemperate, polarizing, and adversarial — could easily become much worse with advancing technological capabilities. While one can now make a gun with a 3-D-printer, the fact is we seem to be entering a world where small groups — maybe a single person — will be able to scale up their lethal capabilities to annihilate us all.
When rapidly evolving technological capabilities can so dramatically amplify the destructive power of one small group or individual, the growing emotional mismatch requires different institutional and technological choices that are more appropriate for our epoch. Since it is extremely unlikely we can or would alter human emotions at scale, it is a certainty that the pace of new and lethal technological capabilities will accelerate. So we badly need faster institutional evolution that is attuned to this epoch.
Institutional zeitgeist —
The irony is, of course, that institutional elites fail to recognize that the past is not an acceptable prologue to this epoch and yet, the buck does stop with them. Indeed, they seem to have forgotten that we create institutions not simply react to problems and fix them after they emerge, but to lead. To be out in-front of major problems clearly visible on the horizon and to steer them in a direction that reduces the emotional mismatch.
Interestingly, President Obama recently spoke of this dual institutional mandate in a speech at Hiroshima, the site of the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, saying:
Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines. The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.
Rhetoric aside, here, in 2016, the leader of the most successful medieval institutional regime in history, the world’s economic engine, the most scientifically and technologically advanced society the world has ever known is, in effect, restating and echoing what every well-intentioned leader in human history has said before about technological capabilities (e.g., Eisenhower’s farewell address about the dangers of the military-industrial complex). Yet, to date, there is no evidence of the needed institutional “progress.”
Instead, institutions and elites cavalierly inflate the episodic threat of terrorism while totally ignoring how minuscule the actual scale of its harm and costs are compared to the routine daily harms and costs from disease, accidents and governmental inaction that fuel the emotional distrust and tensions. Thus, tone-deaf institutional elites barrel forward with an obsession for perfect security and pushing an age-old arms-race race forward, harder without end.
Yet, to any rational and thoughtful person, this blind march toward some absurd, mythical utopian vision of a mutually assured destructive stalemate, or global domination to control adversarial emotions internationally, is the ultimate fool’s errand. Only a medieval institutional mindset could assume this ends well.
Wisdom race —
To the extent there is a saving grace in today’s zeitgeist, it is that we are fortunate that technological capabilities are still within our control. But that may not be true much longer. In this respect, it is imperative that we all accept the fact that human emotions are what they are and are not going to change. Moreover, this should lead us all to the simple conclusion that our medieval institutions are now at the root of all of our epoch’s mismatched problems.
One way or another, we, as a civilization and species, are poised to determine — by choice or default — to make this epoch one where all humanity flourishes as never before or moves us toward extinction. Said differently, we have entered ourselves into Carl Sagan’s cosmic race. A race Dr. Jonas Salk once described as “survival of the wisest.”
While the obsessive desire to win this race would seem like a no-brainer, clearly our medieval institutional elite’s thinking and practices are at odds — mismatched — with the realities of this technological epoch. Indeed, traditionally, global problems with enduring consequences enabled institutions to learn from their mistakes. As a result, our institutions became conditioned to accept the idea that wisdom sometimes lagged behind problems, but that they could always catch up when needed.
But the new technological capabilities we are now creating — autonomous weapons, artificial general intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, for example — are dramatically different, more powerful and dangerous than those of any prior human epoch. Thus, medieval institutional approaches to policy- and decision- making are too slow, too reactive and too misaligned with human emotions. More to the point, if our institutions do not become proactive with this epoch’s technological capabilities and get things right the first time, our institutions might do more than the usual harm and damage. They just might precipitate an actual existential crisis.
Know when to hold ’em and when to fold ‘em
Therefore, it seems obvious and wise to accept that we need to accelerate institutional evolution. To evolve toward new institutions that can proactively consider the implications of where this technological epoch is taking humanity and address it to steer our course better. Unfortunately, we have been doing exactly the opposite.
For example, at one time the U.S. Congress had an office of technology assessment (OTA). Congress killed it in 1995 and, despite spending trillions of dollars on airport security, massive surveillance efforts, and military weapons for endless wars and a global arms-race, has repeatedly refused to provide any funding to reopen the OTA. While an OTA would only be a modest, baby step in the right direction, its absence typifies the larger problem of our medieval institutions.
The real root cause of the mismatch between our medieval institutions and technological capabilities in this epoch is that these institutions provide the wrong incentives to elites driving priorities and policy- and decision- making. These incentives actively support petty, self-interest careers and partisan interests rather than any absolute dedication to civic responsibility and cooperation for the betterment of society and humanity. Worse, the antiquated design of these medieval institutions guarantees that only institutional elites who benefit from the status quo can alter the incentives. Self-interest and history does not afford us any comfort in this fact.
Do you feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
As emotions and technological capabilities change ever more rapidly, ever more institutional risk-taking is required to find ways to proactively mitigate the epoch’s mismatches. As technology gets ever more powerful, we need significantly better and stronger incentives for those who develop and control institutional priorities, policies and decisions to do the right thing — ensure our technological capabilities are beneficially steered and used.
The wisdom race will determine the fate of humanity. So it should be eminently clear that we must all learn to learn faster and better to become wiser collectively. (Full disclosure, this is what my company seeks to provide.)
Understanding our problems associated with medieval institutions is the first step toward solving them. Accepting the need to evolve our institutions is the second step. The last and hardest step is to actually address the screaming need to rapidly experiment and evolve new institutions that match this technological epoch.
Everywhere we look around the world today the temperature of emotional distrust and tensions is rising fast. So, unless I am sorely missing something, evolving our institutions is the only alternative to succeed in surviving Sagan’s negative scenario for technological civilizations.
Brace yourself!
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You can learn more about my work at https://medium.com/a-passion-to-evolve or my website http://www.dochuston1.com/ You can also find me on Linked-in.
In any case, may you live long and prosper.
