“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
- Astronaut Neil Armstrong, putting his left foot on the lunar surface. 10:56 p.m. ET on July 20, 1969. A few days before I was born.
About 15000 years ago, people on earth were happy. Now you might say: how can we know this? So little is known about the life of people in this time. This is true. But surprisingly, we can still answer this question. We can even answer it with certainty.
How is this possible? The key is to understand where happiness comes from. We are happy whenever we do something we like to do. Today we are very much used to the fact that the things we like to do are not at all the same things which make us successful in life. This has not always been the case. The things we liked to do were once perfect strategies for survival. Let me give an example. In an environment where even minor injuries could mean death, it was important to limit physical activities to the required minimum. Therefore, to lie lazy under a tree and wait for an apple to fall down might have been often the perfect strategy. Much better than climbing up the tree to get the apple quickly. But today, where almost all professional activities have almost no associated risk of injury, it has become much more promising to work all the time. Something most people don't enjoy.
During millions of years, before the beginning of the era of great inventions, our internal reward model was perfectly adapted to our environment and what we had to do to live a successful life was identical to what we liked to do.
This is very hard to imagine today. Now we have to constantly force ourselves to behave in ways we actually don’t enjoy. There are hundreds of rules ranging from virtues („be hardworking“) over moral („don’t desire your neighbors wife“) to laws („don’t steal“) and manners („don’t eat with your hands“).
When the first humans invented plant farming about 12’000 years ago, they had no idea how much their invention would change the world. They were probably only thinking about securing the food supply for their family or clan. But they could not imagine the huge increase in population density that followed over millennia. They also had no idea that people would soon want to own land. A need which led to the development of inheritance and the subsequent radical suppression of women’s sexuality.
How could this happen? All these inventions were actually made to improve our lives. How is it possible that the final outcome was always more or less disastrous?
The reason for this can be explained using mathematics. A society can be structured in an almost infinite ways. There are thousands of „adjusting screws“ which can be turned to alter parameters. Each invention we make corresponds to an additional screw. And usually we try to turn it immediately after the disovery in the hope to improve our lives. Now whenever we turn one of these screws, other screws change their values. Sometimes immediately, sometimes i takes longer. And as the total number of „screws“ - lets call it the „dimensionality of the configuration space“ to make it sound more mathematical - is so large and as there are countless interactions between them, it is extremely difficult to predict how the other screws will change on the long run as soon as we have turned one of them.
The system is so mind bogglingly complex that the resulting „trajectory through configuration space“ is actually totally unpredictable. We must call it therefore random.
The problem of random movements in space is reasonably well understood. It is known under the names of „random walk“ and „brownian motion“. The mathematical properties depend on the dimensionality of the space. While - for instance - a one dimensional random walker will - sooner or later - come back to the value of 0, this much less likely for higher dimensional spaces:
“A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever".
- Shizuo Kakutani , Mathematician
Therefore our societies random movements through its configuration space brings us necessarily further and further away from the point where we started, the initially described „state of complete happiness“.
Somehow all this is nothing new. Every boyscout knows that building a hut in the forest and grilling a chicken on the open fire with friends is ten times more fun than his data entry job at the local library where he earns his pocket money. That the few moments of happiness („leisure time“) have to be bought with endless hours of disciplined, hard work and school.
It is therefore, based on this mathematical view of our situation, not surprising that things get worse every day. But this is actually nobody’s fault but a direct consequence of the complexity of society.
Whenever we make a step further away from the state of happiness, we have to increase repression on humans. We are forced to introduce more rigid moral or we have to convert moral which is already perceived as unpleasantly strict in to mandatory law. Or we have to enforce existing law more consequently.
It’s a vicious circle: we are unhappy. Therefore the ruling party changes something which is supposed to improve things (or we make a „great invention“ we believe will solve the problems). But, whatever it is they change, the subsequent unpredictable reaction of the system brings us even further away from the state of happiness. Additional repression is sooner or later surely required. Then everybody is upset and people elect another party for the next legislative period. They again „improve“ something and things get again even worse.
How can we end this process?
The only countermeasure we have tried so far is to change ourselves. For centuries we try to change cultural values in directions which make humans more compatible with the current „advanced“ state of society (fostering values like discipline and long education etc.). But these options are fundamentally limited (by biology) and we will slowly reach the limit of what they can achieve.
And, even if the implementation of such measures allow us to survive, they still make us increasingly unhappy and more and more stressed.
The obvious way to keep this approach effective is to change human nature even more aggressively, beyond what biology can offer. This can be done using drugs or by merging our body with machines.
Even if I don’t feel at all comfortable with this idea (seen as the obvious path by many influential and smart minds today), I think it deserves a deeper analysis. I will write about it in a future blog post.
The other option would be to find a way back to the initial „state of happiness“. But this won’t be easy too for several reasons. We cannot make our knowledge undone. And, even if the lives of our early ancestors were happy „by definition“, they were also very often short. It would be difficult to convince people to go back to a life where people would rarely get more than 30 years old and women mostly died from giving birth.
And, as mentioned in the beginning, we know little about our lives thousands of years ago. Where actually is our home? We have almost no historic records.
We cannot reverse the arrow of time. Therefore the new state which would work better for us in the future is unknown.
And even if we knew where we want to go, there is still the problem that we would need a way to control our motion through configuration space. To turn the random walk into a directed walk.
Will AI - the last and omnipotent invention - help us to go wherever we want? Or is it the final huge nail into our coffin?
To be continued ...
Image on top: Shutterstock
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