[ExI] Free societies in space

[Anders Sandberg]

Dan Ust <dan_ust at yahoo.com> , 17/6/2014 10:07 PM:

Not all that deep. One might have "airlock despotism" off world, but I think the kind of permanent edge society space settlement seems very likely to create -- regardless if all the nice details are worked on how to split a settlement (why does this have to be worked out at all? Local despotisms would likely create informal migration flows away from them; the easier this is, the harder it is for any local despotism to grow or survive).
A lot depends on the chunkiness of the technology. Imagine ISS-style, O'Neill style or Culture style technology scenarios. 
The ISS-like space settlements are small, very fragile and require everybody to do their duty, otherwise they fall apart. I imagine that humans would behave like in small tribes: fairly egalitarian, but you better conform - there is no alternative. Splitting is a very serious matter unless it can be managed in a stepwise, safe fashion (imagine a habitat-splitting ritual, with the priesthood - whether santeria priests or technocrats - blessing each step and ensuring they are done properly and with no social disruption).
The O'Neill habitats have large group dynamics: here one could have the gamut from surveillance autocracies to representative democracy to corporate states. Society is run by a layer of formal rules and institutions, and people add an informal layer. At the same time the population size is not going to be enormous: there is a real chance that culture becomes fairly homogeneous if there are no major migration flows. Making a new habitat is a significant investment of the productivity of a habitat, so it is not going to be a common occurrence. If some subset wants to leave, it has to be a fairly long-running political and economical process; if the powers that be disagree it looks unlikely this is going to happen. (Of course, they might move into one of the ISS tincans?)
The Culture style technology is fundamentally autarchic. If a person or group wants to build something, they can easily do it without having to request much from others. The social control on the personal level may discourage some behaviour, but if somebody wants to split they can. The exception is that the Powers That Be may have orders of magnitude more power - in this series of scenarios the leadership or pooled societal resources grows as we move from ISS to O'Neill to Culture. So if the Powers actually think this is a bad idea, they might apply significant (on an individual scale) resources to stop it. Whether they can succeed depends a lot on other tech assumptions.
So these scenarios might be an intuition pump: as we get better tech for living in space we should expect larger, less fragile communities. Splitting becomes easier. The forces preventing splitting all depend on what kind of society is running: small societies have scarcity reasons to resist it, larger ones are essentially just bounded by considerations of ideology and security. 
I don't think splitting is a primary driver of niceness of governments until you get far into the Culture end of this chain. Before that you have migration (Ob. ref. to "Exit, Voice, Loyalty" - migration may actually worsen some bad habitats). 

Also, Nozick was more talking about how a minarchy might _without violating rights_ enforce its monopoly on legitimate coercion. I think his argument is flimsy: it presumes that the minarchy-in-the-making has a special privilege on determining what's valid justice procedures and already has a sort of monopoly on this. Why wouldn't rival agents be able to arrive at correct (or better or as good) justice procedures? Why wouldn't they have as much right as a government on the make to correct (or stop) wrong justice procedures -- even when they were being applied by the government on the make? But these arguments against Nozick aside, I believe he meant something other than some one or group taking and keeping power; he meant a specific path that would be acceptable at each stage from a justice (by his view of justice) perspective.
Yes, it is a very typical philosophical argument. He never claimed this was what had ever happened, nor that it would ever happen in reality, nor that this would be perfect and stable: the point was to show that given certain ethical considerations one could get to a particular kind of government without violating rights. 
Constructing stable, good governance systems is a messy problem. Nozick is very much like the physicist showing a solution exists on the blackboard ("First, assume a spherical government on a frictionless plane...") while in reality we are in engineering (political scientists like white-shirt design engineers, political practitioners down in the grease-pit with helmets and duct tape...)


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140618/f68bd09f/attachment.html>