Imagine you are trying to build a city. You need to build the system that allows the city to evolve, whether that is by a planning committee or a guild of engineers. Whichever approach you take to create a system that scales, you will need intelligent people. Intelligence is one of the bottlenecks in starting a new city. You want intelligent people to manage your water and sewage systems. You want intelligent people to measure and combat pollution. You want intelligent people to maintain a political or legal system that is fair. You want intelligent people to maintain a system that can protect itself. This is why people want to move to good neighborhoods. Good neighborhoods are a heuristic that the governing system is competently working in most of these domains. Everything feeds on itself. A low pollution level in water leads to better health outcomes, which can potentially lead to more intelligent citizens (even from the moment they are born). A fair justice system leads to well-behaved citizens, which can potentially lead to more well-behaved citizens in the future as it becomes a societal expectation.
Now suppose there is suddenly an unlimited supply of intelligent people. Now the fundamental question is not of scaling, but of limits. What is the carrying capacity of planet earth? Or alternatively, what is the carrying capacity of the economic and political system that governs the population (e.g. the population size at which the economic and political system is most stable). Why is it that we have computing devices that can handle billions of operations a second, yet the basic structure of a house has not changed in 50 years? If we imagine our labor as an input to the economic system, then we can imagine that many people are trading their labor for a house. Does it really take 30 years of labor to build a house? Should a house be valued to an extent that it takes on average most of a citizen's working life to pay off? My hypothesis is that houses could be cheap if we wanted them to be (e.g. if we applied all our industrial knowledge to essentially build homes like we build cars). My other hypothesis is that houses are priced the way they are because they enable a system to build upon itself; the more desirable a neighborhood (which is a signal that the governing system is competent), the higher the value of the house (which means a higher amount of labor is required to acquire it), and the price is essentially a discrimination by the system to partition and remember itself. How much are you willing to pay to live under a competent system? Or if we imagine trading labor for value, how many years of your life will you trade to live under a competent system? And this competent system fosters a stability that allows it to maintain contracts and relationships with other entities, such that it can build power. What is the price of power, and is the price too high?
Whatever the carrying capacity, there must be a mechanism to ensure the population does not exceed it. My hypothesis is that the main retardant force currently is the economy. People are essentially priced out of having children. What would the economy look like if we removed this role from the economic system? What if the economy doesn't need to act as the control system for population growth? Would the price of things change? Would you still need to work 30 years of your life to buy a house? What if the price of a house wasn't the limiting factor in whether or not you could live under a competent system and around competent people? My hypothesis is that the economy would look radically different if we could separate the ecosystem problem from the economy. A thought experiment is, what if there was a general intelligence test that determines eligibility to live around people of similar intelligence. I suspect we would get similar organizing behavior as the ones we see in price-gated communities. Or another thought experiment is, what if there was an artificial intelligence that was capable of judging whether or not an individual should reproduce. This idea is not too far fetched, because a superior intelligence would breed something to match its level and type of intelligence. Some dogs have become quite good at learning human instructions, and an argument could be made that it is due to selective breeding. Perhaps dogs have been bred to accommodate human intelligence? Now suppose a superior intelligence could apply the same function to the human population. What would the economic system look like?
What if the economic system was driven more by desire than by fear? The fear of missing a mortgage payment, the fear of becoming obsolete, the fear of losing exclusive membership in a community, all these fears serve as fuel for action. Some could argue that such fear is necessary to spin the cogs of the economy. But what if the economy could be driven more directly by desire? Instead of questions of what one could lose, what if there were questions of what one could gain. And what if this philosophy was prevalent in all economic classes, such that the poor desire the same satisfaction as the rich. Are we satisfied with the economic and social structure of society that manufactures minds to maintain epistemic momentum at the expense of creating classes with descending levels of freedom and satisfaction? Where some are allowed to pursue satisfaction and others are essentially locked into servitude? Is the system's stability worth the scar it leaves on people? What is a human life really worth? Are humans on average worthy?
I often dream about a system that is as predictable as chemistry. It is only through determinism that we can create a sustainable system. What if every company had to disassemble each of its products, as a counterpart of manufacturing each product. What if every factory was able to capture all outputs, including pollution, such that we could reason about factories as we reason about chemical reactions, such that the outputs from one factory can be directly fed to the inputs of another and the purity of each input and output is guaranteed. It's not hard to imagine that even what we call pollution could be used as an input to another system to ultimately be put to beneficial use. What if for every tree we cut down, we planted two more? My hypothesis is that such systems are hard to realize because the universe leans towards irreversibility more than reversibility. And I mean this in a practical sense rather than a philosophical sense. The universe may very well be fully reversible, but the economic cost of reversing things could be impractically high. It may cost an order of magnitude more to clean up a pollution spill than to prevent it in the first place. It is possible that contamination of any type is somehow extremely costly to reverse. While we can imagine a world where every contaminant is removed from the food we eat, it's easier to imagine a world where we just throw away the contaminated food.
What are our expectations of human intelligence? Is human intelligence scalable? Or is there a scarcity problem? If we design our society such that we only need one highly intelligent person per one hundred people to maintain the structure of society, then how can we break the mold? Given the distribution of intelligence, maybe we cannot break the mold because most people are unremarkable and average. But what if artificial intelligence can? What if in the future we can have cities that are planned and managed entirely by artificial intelligence? What if in the future we don't need to indirectly deal with the ecosystem problem because artificial intelligence will do it for us? And what if it could all be pleasant and fun?
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