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The Future of Humanity: AI, America, China, Indians, or Islam?

The Five Futures

In the course of observing recent human events, humanity’s future can be best described as going down one (or more) of five possible paths, none of which are watertight and mutually exclusive. We certainly have not reached the end state of humanity’s social, political, or technological development. The future civilizations that are most likely to thrive will be those that synthesize antifragility and decentralization — in order to survive shocks and systems collapses, the unraveling of complex, interconnected societies — whilst also managing to assimilate new technology and cultural practices. By antifragility I mean the capacity not merely to survive shocks but to grow stronger from them. This is a hard balance to achieve: a society must be both rooted and resilient enough to weather changes and dynamic enough to learn new things.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Technology

This is a technological future. Technology will continue to progress rapidly, and our goals and methods will become increasingly intertwined with technology. In the “hard” AI future scenario, humans will stop mattering so much, especially as the AI singularity is reached (moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human capabilities). AI will learn how to replicate itself. Humans will become superfluous. In the “soft” scenario, humans will continue to matter but human endeavor will continue to be heavily technology dependent. Humans will expand into space, build things there or on other planets, and figure out ways to harvest ever greater amounts of energy and produce ever larger scale industries and structures. This requires an enormous amount of resources, capacity, and sociopolitical conditions to pull off continuously. It is for this reason that I think that a purely technological future will unlikely be the dominant future path because it requires the persistence of an enormous amount of complexity and coordination.

Of course, if a civilization (or industry or companies or economic sector) can continuously pull this path off for a long time, it will have a major advantage. This is the scenario which most science fiction presupposes, after all. I do not think that technology will necessarily cease being important but its path will branch off into one that is more antifragile, local, and less supply-chain dependent. This is clearly the direction that humanity is moving in, after a century of increased centralization, and more state capacity that was necessary for states to provide all the amenities of modernity: roads and power grids and phone lines and heavy industry to supply the population and mechanized armies. Complexity is hard to maintain and when the same results can be achieved through less sustained coordination, that will happen. What need for power grids and phone lines if individual houses or towns can use solar panels and cellphones?

Systems collapse, the unraveling of a complex and interconnected society, is more likely to happen as complexity grows. When there are so many moving parts that need to come together exactly the right way for modern society to function, it is at risk in a way that a medieval village that grows its own food and uses local wood to light itself is not. This is not an argument against trade — which is good — but an observation about complexity. Therefore, advanced technologies will have to find ways to become increasingly local and less dependent on supply chains and simpler to pull off. The drone revolution — the ease with which drones can be made — and the private spaceflight revolution point in this direction, although there are a few more steps that are needed. It is not impossible to assemble complex technology, such as drones, at home, or in small, local factories, but supply chains and components that go into these still need a level of complexity and precision that requires significant state and industrial capacity: the making of silicon chips and lithium batteries.

We should not think of de-complexity as a “step backward” necessarily. A useful analogy is the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age by way of one of the most famous systems collapses of all-time, the late Bronze Age Collapse, which was caused by a cascading failure of interconnected networks and societies to deal with famines, invasions, droughts, and storms. Iron is actually a more “advanced” technology insofar that iron is stronger and more versatile than bronze and requires hotter fires in order to be smelted. But bronze is actually a more complex technology that requires knowledge — copper and tin must be mixed in a 9:1 ratio and functioning trade networks in order for a society to get enough tin and copper to make bronze. Iron, on the other hand, is an abundant metal and can be made anywhere. It is thus more of an antifragile input.

America

It is a characteristic of state-driven modernity for life to become increasingly bureaucratized and layered. Not all that long ago, one could just walk into a shop and start working without dealing with human relations departments or build a company without a long process of permits and compliance. This is happening anywhere that the state has grown. The paradox is that the state and state capacity needs to grow for the conditions of modernity to be achieved: transportation, industrialization, universal laws that are actually enforced. The alternative is a weak state that cannot create the conditions for a society to leave premodernity. But the strong state, the bureaucratic society, also creates the conditions for stagnation. The economic, technological change, and society will all eventually stagnate. This is seen in Europe.

America — more the set of principles and ideas that guide it rather than any specific government of the United States — is a way to at least partially avoid that trap. It can sustain modernity without becoming sclerotic. It maintains an element of premodern freedom of action— wherein large parts of life were unregulated and spontaneous — without reverting to premodern conditions. It allows for ease of business and risk taking in a controlled environment, and if one American state doesn’t step up, others will. Socially, it allows and even encourages risk, entrepreneurship, and the pursuit of one’s dreams and ideas. Just as Rome was studied for centuries after its empire fell and its ideas were emulated, discussed, and augmented, so it will for America and its sociopolitical and economic ideas. It seems to me that any thriving society in the future will at the very least borrow from some American ideas, the core of which could be described as ordered freedom of a frontier society. Let us say that humans do indeed begin to settle space, the Moon, Mars, various asteroids. The value system that is most likely to initially populate these nascent polities and societies, that will be key to the desire for them to be founded, and for their survival, will be American. These dreams to experiment with building new societies from scratch and push human frontiers outward are pretty American in their ideology, and are rarely heard in China or India.

Of course, America is not easy to emulate. Neither was Rome. It isn’t the way it is just because of its laws or structure, but because of the attitude and spirit of its people and a general tendency of its system, contrary to human nature perhaps, toward freedom, lowering control, and fewer rules. Mayhap man has an inborn tendency toward complexity, control, and bureaucratic creep — this can be seen in all spheres of life, such as increasing intricacy in ritualism as a religious system develops. At the root of this is a desire to manage risk and control outcomes in an uncertain world. Yet taken too far, regulation, barriers, licensing — ultimately these are, to some extent, all forms of rent-seeking that are not actually necessary for society to function. Exams for entry and licensing for most professions, layers of civil servants, these are all artificial barriers to getting things done, and are ultimately, ways to waste time and talent.

China

China is often discussed as the model of the future. It has built a state and society that in many ways seems anticipatory of this future. It is the foremost model of what happens when a state maximizes its capacities and brings all the elements of modernity to bear in one system. Even in premodern times, the ability of the Chinese state to commence and complete large projects — the Great Wall, the Grand Canal — was impressive. The present Chinese state demonstrates to us the marvels and possibilities of our current technological abilities, a state that can build buildings and transportation infrastructure at a scale unmatched in history, a state that can provide the conditions necessary for the supply chains and factories necessary for much of the contemporary world to function. Due to historically contingent conditions — flat plains in the Chinese heartland coupled with incessant warfare necessitating efficiency and the destruction of much of the aristocracy during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) — China developed an unusual emphasis on state capacity and meritocratic bureaucracy. There have been many periods of disunity and decentralization in China, but each reconstituted dynasty attempted to centralize and bureaucratize again.

This has proven useful in an era of states and state capacity, because efficient states are much better than nomadic tribes at building tanks and assembling airplanes, whereas a millennium ago, both types of polities could forge sharp swords of steel. Thus, in many ways, the imperial Chinese state anticipated much of what we see in contemporary modern states: civil services, meritocratic education, and the like.

But such a centralized model takes a lot of effort! Imagine all the resources and manpower and man-hours necessary to keep such a system functioning efficiently, and on top of that, to maintain ever greater elements of control, as the Chinese government has sought to mold many aspects of the society it rules over, from religion to video game usage. But efficiency can also throttle industries and initiative because it can bring to bear pressure and regulation prematurely, as is happening with Chinese AI today.

A lot of the purported efficiency of China is through state initiative, which makes it the mirror image of antifragility: if the state cannot bring its resources to bear to keep the complex system going which requires a number of intricate transportation, supply-chain networks, and electricity inputs to work in tandem, then a sudden or unexpected jolt could be devastating to an unprepared society. By way of example, take the Roman state, which was fairly efficient and fielded a good army. But when the army was defeated and the state apparatus withdrawn, as eventually happened in many provinces, the masses of unarmed Roman peasants were often quickly overrun and new social structures had to be improvised to ensure survival.

Earlier, I mused if man has an inborn tendency to bureaucratic creep. That may be true because of the nature of bureaucracies and the need for certainty. But here, I also shall muse that man, as a biological, familial, and embodied animal, has a tendency toward localization, paternalism, nepotism, blood-ties, aristocracy, and helping out friends, all of which erode centralization and state efficiency over time. In fact, both of these things may be true, two sides of a multifaceted human nature, things that work at odds with one another.

But even though antifragility is core for a future society to persist, from time to time, states may need to adopt elements of traditional Chinese governance and efficiency, especially if they need to coordinate and bring many resources to bear on a certain project. But it is an open question as to how the antifragile, decentralized element can alternate between or coexist with or balance the centralizing, hyper-efficient project. The American historian and anthropologist Joseph Tainter suggested in The Collapse of Complex Societies that complexity is a problem solving strategy with diminishing returns. Societies adopt it because it works, then collapse because they continue to add sociopolitical complexity, which then yields diminishing returns and costs more to maintain than the benefits it delivers.

Indians

The way of Indians is a possible future path. Here, I specifically say Indians to describe the social structure and norms of the people of India and not the Indian state itself or a specific ideology associated with any Indian polity. In fact, Indians are very good at cohering and making do without a functional state apparatus: that is one of the functions of the Indian social system, after all, to work on its own without an efficient government. What is meant hereby? Indians know how to survive and make do as individuals and families in almost any modern environment, regardless of the sociopolitical conditions around them. This is useful in any future scenario, because they are not a people to get swept away by adverse conditions.

There are a few things to this future. There are just so many Indians that the talent pool of individuals who can be plugged into any company, polity, or economy around the world is very large, even if this may only be a small proportion of the actual global Indian population. Because Indians are not an overtly ideological people and because India’s social conditions foster a managerial mindset — navigating between and negotiating with myriad familial and varna-jati (caste) groups — it is easy to plug Indians into the corporate and political structures of many other non-Indian polities. But this is not a section that is solely about a future in which Indians migrate throughout the world in order to revitalize demographics and economies, though this is obviously happening. It is about aspects of Indianness itself, which is another antifragile phenomenon.

Take the idea of jugaad (जुगाड़) which involves making creative use of limited resources to come up with new things, innovative fixes, simple workarounds, and solutions to problems. Often, it involves bending rules. It is basically a way to manage the problem discussed earlier in this essay regarding expensive and resource-intensive technology: how to localize and simplify expensive technologies so that they can become more widespread and easier to use and maintain.

While jugaad is universal — this is how Elon Musk thinks, and Ukraine has latterly become very good at it for manufacturing battlefield weapons and drones — Indians show that it can become a cultural norm and a way of life. If the United States creates the societal and regulatory conditions for entrepreneurship (“we won’t interfere with you”), the Indian way is the necessary cultural mindset for this to take off (“why build this expensive rocket with multiple components when you can do it more frugally”).

One would have expected market conditions to erode caste faster, but here, a counterfactual needs to be examined. Indian society is characterized by caste-like structures, even though the specifics and hierarchical nature of it have changed over time. What remained fairly constant, however, was the largely hereditary division of society in a large number of jātis, which maintained their own customs whilst mostly eating and marrying with their own. Groups that have migrated to India from elsewhere, such as the Saint Thomas Christians and Parsis (Zoroastrians of India) have effectively become local castes. Caste-like structures are useful because they consolidate and provide ready-made social capital that incubates deep expertise and connections that allows a group to operate anywhere, and in any environment, so long as they have their kin and community. In a fragile world, this structure can be antifragile. I don’t expect traditional, classical Indian varna-jati (caste) to survive — and I prefer a free market of individual associations, which is obviously more pleasant for individuals — but I can see as possible the spread and consolidation of weaker forms of caste-like structures even within a market society as those specializing in certain industries and technologies mingle and mate with others in their bubbles, thus leading to the concentration of certain mindsets and skills within these bounded entities.

Islam

New sociopolitical developments and technologies will only be truly universal and herald a new era of humanity — just as it moved from being a hunter-gatherer species to an agricultural one — when they are effectively universalized. But they cannot be universalized until they are enmeshed in a structure and philosophy legible to the bulk of humanity. In other words, they must be synthesized and incorporated with the daily philosophies, which take the form of religion. Technology mediated by ideology. Religion itself — in its many forms — as an organized system of beliefs, practices, rituals, and worldviews will provide boundaries and taboos and prescriptions that will define human life in the ages to come.

Religion is the structure through which a people both holds together and decides what to let in. Its boundaries and taboos have a dual purpose: fortifying the group against a changing world, and curating which of that world’s novelties to absorb. Islam is a good example of how this may work.

Islamic civilization has a major lesson to impart to humanity as it moves forward to the future: the role of ideology in shoring up individuals and social norms and cementing antifragile practices. These are not particular to or limited to Islam, but it is the clearest example of this phenomenon.

Most of humanity does not dwell in an efficient state like China or inherently share American values. But some form of religion is everywhere.

One can see the power of a coherent, deeply held ideology in fortifying a people and keeping them grounded in an ever-changing world. It enhances their ‘asabiyya (عصبيّة), the concept of the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun that refers to the social solidarity, group consciousness, and tribal cohesion of a people. And those with the strongest ‘asabiyya will cohere in an ever-changing world. It is by cohering that a group survives. It is only after surviving that a group can assimilate and eventually master the methods and technologies to thrive, thus synthesizing tribalism and modernity, and paving the way to spread, as other groups disintegrate.

Does this specifically mean that the future of the world will see the spread and triumph of Islamic civilization per se? I think not. That ship has sailed with the emergence of Western modernity, though if an alien visited the Earth in 1500 CE, that is the conclusion they may have arrived at — Islam would soon be spreading into the Sahel, Balkans, Java, and the Deccan! But what can be gleaned from this is the power of ‘asabiyya fortified by a clear path: see the growing popularity of ideologies in the West that provide coherent and simple systems to understand and experience modernity.

And in a tumultuous world, one made all the more so for human minds and the human spirit by new technologies, one of the few workable fortifications possible is the path of fixing one’s mind on the straight and narrow, and this way of boundaries and taboos may be one of the few ways to curate what to adopt and what to reject. It is no surprise, then, that in Dune, Frank Herbert frames so much of the future in Islamo-religious terms.

Conclusion

The way of the future — the society that thrives in the future — will be one that masters one of these paths, or as I suspect, contain elements of all of these paths. For this is how society will assimilate and master new technologies whilst also remaining antifragile and functional. Everything will be needed: the occasional state-capacity of China, the ‘asabiyya of Islam, the jugaad of Indians, the entrepreneurship and frontier-spirit of America, and the technology and AI of the future, adapted to, and filtered by the other paths.