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Klaus Philipsen
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The arc of history bends towards progress
Most people born after the age of Enlightenment take it for granted that progress is inevitable. Science, technology and medicine lead to ever more health, wealth and mobility. Productivity and education increase hand in hand, only the sky is the limit.
Democracy unfolded, social justice and civil and women's rights became goals including more people into production, education and decision making. Not only did more people grow old but the human body grew taller and athletes break ever new records. Human brains and senses attune remarkably well to new environmental challenges, from driving cars to exploring space, being able to handle complicated computer interfaces or understanding quantum physics. In spite of mind bending global population growth, global hunger was reduced and more and more people benefitted from some level of prosperity.
This gave the nostalgic notion that "the good old times" were "better" little currency. Realizing how limited those old days were for people of color, women, children and people with disabilities sustained a widespread sentiment that the future will be better than the past. The teleological arc long held by religion with a promise of a better afterlife was replaced by the prospect of a better life right here on this earth, for us, our children and children's-children. Whatever losses in the environment and biodiversity seemed offset by the advance in prosperity. Cultural critics' suggestion that pressures in the natural environment would inevitably telegraph into the human condition, in as much as the human is just another animal and part of the natural systems surrounding us, were rarely taken seriously and washed over by consumerism and ever more materialism. The past seemed to prove that mankind can power through whatever challenges there are and come out better in the end.
The strong cohort of baby boomers rode on this wave of optimism through most of their post WWII lives, and, indeed, there were largely protected from catastrophes on the scale of WW II. This makes the current reckoning so much harder.
The current reckoning
Could it be that humanity's upward trajectory is not inevitable? This is a shocking question. Optimism is baked into the American DNA. Smile, believe, hope, work hard and things will turn out ok, or don't they?
Long periods of backtracking have happened before in history. After the Roman Empire sank into irrelevance came centuries of comparative stagnation during which there was not only not as much progress in science and technology, but some of what had already been achieved was actually forgotten. At least this is the lore. Some scholars now think that the term "dark age" for that period is an exaggeration and misconception created in the Renaissance. Regardless of how dark it really was, large swaths of Europe saw economic, political, and cultural infrastructure decline, manifesting itself in provincialism, lack of trade, decline of literacy, primitive cooking and feudal strive. The large underclass of peasants brought the 30-year war, a revolt against feudalistic oppression. Pestilence ravaged the continent and the power of the church combined with religious fervor fueled witch hunts and burnings on the stake. It wasn't a global darkness, though. In the same period the Islamic world leaped ahead in mathematics and the sciences, in part by building on the foundation of Greek and other ancient texts translated into Arabic. The German poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) had thought that the human spirit goes through four "epochs", which the cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler applied to history as well: The four stages are the poetic (in sync with nature), the theological (god as an explanation), the philosophical (rational explntions) and the prosaic (materialism). In this rather pessimistic, or cyclical view, culture crashes and reverts to primitive stages.
Is the US the current day Rome or at the end of the prosaic phase? Stagnant incomes for large swaths of the populace, homelessness, social isolation, obesity and cancer rates grow, while life expectancy and literacy sinks. America seems to be tripping over itself when global collaboration, from which it had benefitted a long time, is dismantled. Ever more people see the nation going down the wrong path. It is easy to extrapolate this to the human race altogether having taken the wrong turn.
Many threats are, indeed, global: The health of the entire planet is in danger thanks to excessive CO2 emissions and unchecked resource depletion. The new journey to the moon once again illuminates the fragility of our planet with its relatively small size and thin layer of an atmosphere.
Technology has become a threat to many as well. Some say social media make us dumber. Artificial intelligence looms as a threat that could get the better of us while we push it forward in a wild race without any guardrails. AI could pose more immediate challenges like the bursting of the inflated investment bubble or data centers which use all the electric energy we need for CO2 reduction, but it is entirely possible that AI takes control from us. Already it appears that some AI controlled weapon systems operate in the heat of war entirely without human oversight.
Success and failure often reside in close proximity. They often come in the shape of cascades or waves. In the case of failure these accelerating self propelling cascades are known as doom loops. We all have had the experience where success begets more success and things seem to be going smoothly almost by themselves. The things tip to the other side. A single mishap appears to initiate an entire chain of failures, a downward spiral from which it is hard to recover. What if societies have similar phases, only that they may last hundreds of years? Are we in a doom-loop where humanity not only stagnates but backslides? What if our falling behind on knowledge, and prosperity is not limited to the US but indicates a beginning global trend? If productivity slips, food, peace, mobility and access become scarce and the riches dwindle.
Religion holds that the forces that set off one loop or another (think the seven plagues) are fate and inevitable. Enlightenment says, no, we can shape our future, these things are not inevitable but the result of bad choices that generate particularly poor conditions. The US may be a good canary in the mineshaft. The country likes to see itself as a country with a destiny and as the most developed nation in the world. Indeed, we exerted a huge cultural and economic influence across all continents. If this powerhouse struggles, it will not go unnoticed.
Outside religion explanations for the causes are manyfold. Frequently a theory about the rise and fall of empires is used but even for the decline of the Romand Empire there are as many reasons given as there are papers written.
But in spite of ominous indicators, most behave like crew and passengers on the Titanic who thought they were on an unsinkable ship even after an ominous shudder just played the music louder. But just as on the Titanic this won't help. The problem is a lack of imagination and sufficient fantasy to consider scenarios where a different course would be better than full steam ahead.
In the same way we couldn't imagine that the World Trade Center towers could be felled in the manner they fell, nor could we imagine how Baltimore's Key Bridge could be brought down in seconds by a single ship. It is also a lack of imagination to consider Iran conquered through bombing or that the Strait of Hormuz would really be closed to world trade. In the matter of climate change the entire world is still moving full steam ahead on the wrong course, in front of all the US.
We also fail to imagine or prevent that AI could enslave us or that a cascade of climate tipping points could render the planet largely uninhabitable. The exception are artists, by definition the experts of imagination. Dystopian or apocalyptic novels, paintings often articulate widespread sentiments that were looking for a way of getting expressed. The British author Ian McEwan placed his latest novel "What We Can Know" 100 years from now in which his British characters post nuclear war and horrendous floods look back on today's time as a relative paradise. Travel in his future is impeded by ever present water, pirates and tribal strive, just as in medieval times. Dystopian artistic expressions appear to have increased in recent years as a prominent cultural aesthetic expressing anxieties over technology, political instability, and perceived social decay, spread across literature, visual arts, fashion, and media. A phenomenon one could also observe in the art of the so called "golden twenties". (Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, 1927)
Doomsday or Speed-bump?
So what is it? Are we only passing over a historic speed bump or are we condemned to doom? For most of history humans have oscillated between the "the end is near" and the hope for salvation. In fact, in human story telling and religion the end and salvation were always inseparably intertwined. They would happen in sequence, leaving salvation to the afterlife. Enlightenment moved this from an individual experience to the collective societal salvation through progress right here on earth. At the same time society began to lose sight of the individual death, the destruction and tragedies of the less fortunate cultures, classes and geographies and ignored these existential facts in favor of visions of a system of material opulence and abundance.
After centuries in which apocalyptic pessimism and idealistic optimism alternated in art, philosophy and beliefs the world still turns, the end never came. Humanity always came through and most were better off than before. Humans learned to split the atom but after one devastating dramatic lapse learned to keep the menace in check. Keeping hope alive became a model of thought not just of priests and ministers but became an engine for philosophy (Ernst Bloch, the Principle Hope) and politicians (Obama) as well. Hope appears to be the principle with which societies across the globe approach artificial intelligence with the promise that it will come to the rescue and solve climate change, the scrooge of war and disease, and whatever shortage of resources once and forever. Yet, the same technology has also the potential for doom on many levels. For example by becoming a menace that by "thinking" on levels humans can't achieve eventually taking control of them. We see a mad race of getting AI to higher levels before there is any concept for how a monster could be prevented from taking over; an apocalyptic outcome is seen as possible even by AI's creators.
Similarly, climate change runs its course without real effective CO2 reductions. Combined the world is racing towards ever new CO2 emission records. The US administration has traded any concern for emissions with dropping a billion dollars worth of bombs per day which are not only unleashing terror but also untold carbon emissions. The expressed desire to bomb a civilized nation "into the stone age" may very well be a harbinger of a world sliding back of destruction and tribal strife.
The challenges of climate change, AI and global aggression are different from past scenarios of human doom which were more local. Except for imagined natural catastrophies such as a collision with a giant meteor, a huge volcano eruption causing global winter. Unlike the course of the Titanic which could have been altered with a single decision, current threats require a level of international collaboration which is hard to achieve and which we are clearly not seeing. So apocalyptic outcomes appear quite possible.
We have insufficient data to know if we have already passed critical tipping points in climate or in AI to which would make reversal or control impossible.
This leaves the possibility for a change of course. It is possible that things can get worse before becoming irreversible so that large scale collaboration could still materialize. It is also possible that we have overlooked forces in the global or galactic natural systems that balance out some of the ill effects humans have created. It could be that geo-engineered interventions such effective large scale carbon-capture in the air or the oceans can be invented and managed, possibly with the help of AI. It is possible that AI hits some insurmountable threshold in which it doesn't get smarter than humans or that it collapses due to lack of electric power which, of course, would defang it in a very ironic way.
Ironically, the better technologies may become in capturing or creating clean energy, the quicker AI will evolve. The world of abundance, peace, happy life and natural diversity is still a possible outcome. This prospect should keep us motivated, right now, when the celebrations of Passover and resurrection are nearly drowned by the sound of sirens, and bombs. Crisis is always an opportunity to rethink, retool and correct course
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
YouTube +3
Most people born after the age of Enlightenment take it for granted that progress is inevitable. Science, technology and medicine lead to ever more health, wealth and mobility. Productivity and education increase hand in hand, only the sky is the limit.
Democracy unfolded, social justice and civil and women's rights became goals including more people into production, education and decision making. Not only did more people grow old but the human body grew taller and athletes break ever new records. Human brains and senses attune remarkably well to new environmental challenges, from driving cars to exploring space, being able to handle complicated computer interfaces or understanding quantum physics. In spite of mind bending global population growth, global hunger was reduced and more and more people benefitted from some level of prosperity.
[td]
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[td]
Apocalypse or Paradise. A custom image created by ChatGPT
[/td]This gave the nostalgic notion that "the good old times" were "better" little currency. Realizing how limited those old days were for people of color, women, children and people with disabilities sustained a widespread sentiment that the future will be better than the past. The teleological arc long held by religion with a promise of a better afterlife was replaced by the prospect of a better life right here on this earth, for us, our children and children's-children. Whatever losses in the environment and biodiversity seemed offset by the advance in prosperity. Cultural critics' suggestion that pressures in the natural environment would inevitably telegraph into the human condition, in as much as the human is just another animal and part of the natural systems surrounding us, were rarely taken seriously and washed over by consumerism and ever more materialism. The past seemed to prove that mankind can power through whatever challenges there are and come out better in the end.
The strong cohort of baby boomers rode on this wave of optimism through most of their post WWII lives, and, indeed, there were largely protected from catastrophes on the scale of WW II. This makes the current reckoning so much harder.
The current reckoning
Could it be that humanity's upward trajectory is not inevitable? This is a shocking question. Optimism is baked into the American DNA. Smile, believe, hope, work hard and things will turn out ok, or don't they?
Long periods of backtracking have happened before in history. After the Roman Empire sank into irrelevance came centuries of comparative stagnation during which there was not only not as much progress in science and technology, but some of what had already been achieved was actually forgotten. At least this is the lore. Some scholars now think that the term "dark age" for that period is an exaggeration and misconception created in the Renaissance. Regardless of how dark it really was, large swaths of Europe saw economic, political, and cultural infrastructure decline, manifesting itself in provincialism, lack of trade, decline of literacy, primitive cooking and feudal strive. The large underclass of peasants brought the 30-year war, a revolt against feudalistic oppression. Pestilence ravaged the continent and the power of the church combined with religious fervor fueled witch hunts and burnings on the stake. It wasn't a global darkness, though. In the same period the Islamic world leaped ahead in mathematics and the sciences, in part by building on the foundation of Greek and other ancient texts translated into Arabic. The German poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) had thought that the human spirit goes through four "epochs", which the cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler applied to history as well: The four stages are the poetic (in sync with nature), the theological (god as an explanation), the philosophical (rational explntions) and the prosaic (materialism). In this rather pessimistic, or cyclical view, culture crashes and reverts to primitive stages.
[td]
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[td]
The Gutenberg press was instrumental in access
to knowledge
[/td]to knowledge
Many threats are, indeed, global: The health of the entire planet is in danger thanks to excessive CO2 emissions and unchecked resource depletion. The new journey to the moon once again illuminates the fragility of our planet with its relatively small size and thin layer of an atmosphere.
Technology has become a threat to many as well. Some say social media make us dumber. Artificial intelligence looms as a threat that could get the better of us while we push it forward in a wild race without any guardrails. AI could pose more immediate challenges like the bursting of the inflated investment bubble or data centers which use all the electric energy we need for CO2 reduction, but it is entirely possible that AI takes control from us. Already it appears that some AI controlled weapon systems operate in the heat of war entirely without human oversight.
[td]
[/td]
[td]
Technology, a Trojan horse destroying humanity?
[/td]Success and failure often reside in close proximity. They often come in the shape of cascades or waves. In the case of failure these accelerating self propelling cascades are known as doom loops. We all have had the experience where success begets more success and things seem to be going smoothly almost by themselves. The things tip to the other side. A single mishap appears to initiate an entire chain of failures, a downward spiral from which it is hard to recover. What if societies have similar phases, only that they may last hundreds of years? Are we in a doom-loop where humanity not only stagnates but backslides? What if our falling behind on knowledge, and prosperity is not limited to the US but indicates a beginning global trend? If productivity slips, food, peace, mobility and access become scarce and the riches dwindle.
Religion holds that the forces that set off one loop or another (think the seven plagues) are fate and inevitable. Enlightenment says, no, we can shape our future, these things are not inevitable but the result of bad choices that generate particularly poor conditions. The US may be a good canary in the mineshaft. The country likes to see itself as a country with a destiny and as the most developed nation in the world. Indeed, we exerted a huge cultural and economic influence across all continents. If this powerhouse struggles, it will not go unnoticed.
Outside religion explanations for the causes are manyfold. Frequently a theory about the rise and fall of empires is used but even for the decline of the Romand Empire there are as many reasons given as there are papers written.
But in spite of ominous indicators, most behave like crew and passengers on the Titanic who thought they were on an unsinkable ship even after an ominous shudder just played the music louder. But just as on the Titanic this won't help. The problem is a lack of imagination and sufficient fantasy to consider scenarios where a different course would be better than full steam ahead.
In the same way we couldn't imagine that the World Trade Center towers could be felled in the manner they fell, nor could we imagine how Baltimore's Key Bridge could be brought down in seconds by a single ship. It is also a lack of imagination to consider Iran conquered through bombing or that the Strait of Hormuz would really be closed to world trade. In the matter of climate change the entire world is still moving full steam ahead on the wrong course, in front of all the US.
We also fail to imagine or prevent that AI could enslave us or that a cascade of climate tipping points could render the planet largely uninhabitable. The exception are artists, by definition the experts of imagination. Dystopian or apocalyptic novels, paintings often articulate widespread sentiments that were looking for a way of getting expressed. The British author Ian McEwan placed his latest novel "What We Can Know" 100 years from now in which his British characters post nuclear war and horrendous floods look back on today's time as a relative paradise. Travel in his future is impeded by ever present water, pirates and tribal strive, just as in medieval times. Dystopian artistic expressions appear to have increased in recent years as a prominent cultural aesthetic expressing anxieties over technology, political instability, and perceived social decay, spread across literature, visual arts, fashion, and media. A phenomenon one could also observe in the art of the so called "golden twenties". (Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, 1927)
Doomsday or Speed-bump?
So what is it? Are we only passing over a historic speed bump or are we condemned to doom? For most of history humans have oscillated between the "the end is near" and the hope for salvation. In fact, in human story telling and religion the end and salvation were always inseparably intertwined. They would happen in sequence, leaving salvation to the afterlife. Enlightenment moved this from an individual experience to the collective societal salvation through progress right here on earth. At the same time society began to lose sight of the individual death, the destruction and tragedies of the less fortunate cultures, classes and geographies and ignored these existential facts in favor of visions of a system of material opulence and abundance.
After centuries in which apocalyptic pessimism and idealistic optimism alternated in art, philosophy and beliefs the world still turns, the end never came. Humanity always came through and most were better off than before. Humans learned to split the atom but after one devastating dramatic lapse learned to keep the menace in check. Keeping hope alive became a model of thought not just of priests and ministers but became an engine for philosophy (Ernst Bloch, the Principle Hope) and politicians (Obama) as well. Hope appears to be the principle with which societies across the globe approach artificial intelligence with the promise that it will come to the rescue and solve climate change, the scrooge of war and disease, and whatever shortage of resources once and forever. Yet, the same technology has also the potential for doom on many levels. For example by becoming a menace that by "thinking" on levels humans can't achieve eventually taking control of them. We see a mad race of getting AI to higher levels before there is any concept for how a monster could be prevented from taking over; an apocalyptic outcome is seen as possible even by AI's creators.
Similarly, climate change runs its course without real effective CO2 reductions. Combined the world is racing towards ever new CO2 emission records. The US administration has traded any concern for emissions with dropping a billion dollars worth of bombs per day which are not only unleashing terror but also untold carbon emissions. The expressed desire to bomb a civilized nation "into the stone age" may very well be a harbinger of a world sliding back of destruction and tribal strife.
The challenges of climate change, AI and global aggression are different from past scenarios of human doom which were more local. Except for imagined natural catastrophies such as a collision with a giant meteor, a huge volcano eruption causing global winter. Unlike the course of the Titanic which could have been altered with a single decision, current threats require a level of international collaboration which is hard to achieve and which we are clearly not seeing. So apocalyptic outcomes appear quite possible.
We have insufficient data to know if we have already passed critical tipping points in climate or in AI to which would make reversal or control impossible.
This leaves the possibility for a change of course. It is possible that things can get worse before becoming irreversible so that large scale collaboration could still materialize. It is also possible that we have overlooked forces in the global or galactic natural systems that balance out some of the ill effects humans have created. It could be that geo-engineered interventions such effective large scale carbon-capture in the air or the oceans can be invented and managed, possibly with the help of AI. It is possible that AI hits some insurmountable threshold in which it doesn't get smarter than humans or that it collapses due to lack of electric power which, of course, would defang it in a very ironic way.
Ironically, the better technologies may become in capturing or creating clean energy, the quicker AI will evolve. The world of abundance, peace, happy life and natural diversity is still a possible outcome. This prospect should keep us motivated, right now, when the celebrations of Passover and resurrection are nearly drowned by the sound of sirens, and bombs. Crisis is always an opportunity to rethink, retool and correct course
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
YouTube +3