[ExI] breakout culture (Was: ambition)

[Anders Sandberg]

On 20/01/2013 23:57, spike wrote:
> What really got me to pondering was how the hell is it that a stone 
> age culture reaches an equilibrium, and why does it stay right there, 
> doing the same thing, using the same technologies for 100k years? The 
> modern Ohlones had not one thing that they couldn't have had 100 
> millennia ago: they had no metallurgy, they made homes and boats out 
> of reeds, they made spear points out of flint and used those to fish 
> in San Francisco Bay. Why didn't they ever want something else? Why 
> did the Europeans break out and invent stuff, but the native Americans 
> generally did not? How does a society reach equilibrium, or 
> technological stagnation? Can we even imagine reaching some kind of 
> equilibrium now, short of a singularity?

I think this is one of the big anthropological, sociological and 
historical questions for our community. We think about this quite a lot 
over at FHI, and usually wish there was an anthropologist in the house.

Jared Diamond made a rather neat argument in "Guns, Germs and Steel" 
that it takes a combination of material factors to enable a culture to 
invent the "next level" - agriculture was invented several times, but 
only in special regions with the right climate and animal/plant species, 
the geography shapes the size of the local world of interacting 
countries, and this in turn influences how diverse it can be or how much 
surplus stuff can be applied to civilization. One can debate any detail, 
but I think the overall picture works. However, that only explains 
preconditions: within such regions people can go on for 100K years 
without changing their lifestyle.

I am working on a paper on the Tasmanian technology trap: small 
populations have a hard time maintaining a complex culture. (If you are 
few, then the chance of losing the only guy with a certain skill is 
pretty high) This is another factor that no doubt keeps many cultures 
down. They are too few to develop and use certain technologies that 
would allow them to gain the calories needed to grow to a larger group. 
Yet this model mainly works on islands where there is a pretty fixed 
limit: on mainlands it is enough that a single group gets large and 
dense and things will happen. This is one popular explanation of the 
Neolithic revolution, in fact.

So in the end, I suspect that it is really down to ideas, culture and 
memes. Most humans are conformists and happy to keep what they have. 
Those few cultures that go for change are wildly unstable and mostly 
fail. But occasionally, rarely, they form new kinds of dynamical equilibria.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University