Over Population and the Techno Lithic Revolution

“When you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for million of years, and that withstood the harshest quality control test of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of million of ancestors”. Yuval Hararri

Just a hundred years ago the world population was estimated to be under two billion. In one hundred years we have added 5 billion people to this watery ball. Many say we are overpopulated. They may be right, but I am not convinced. First, I just got to this ball myself about 40 years ago. Not long enough to figure out all of the Gaian equations that makes life possible. I dismiss anyone who thinks they understand how many people the Earth is suppose to host right now with the same eye roll I’ll give any zellous fundamentalist. This does not mean I think they are wrong or that they have have invalid data points supporting their argument. I just don’t think anyone could possibly have enough data points to know something so complex. Secondly, and much more pragmatically, I don’t want to help solve the problem of overpopulation. I don’t want to be part of any well intentioned mass killing, nor do I want to die. History is full of well meaning smart people who blindly commit atrocities. I suspect many share my aversion to solving this problem, which is why the population continues to grow.

So what do we do? If we are truly overpopulated then the problem will solve itself. If the problem does not solve it self that means we may be crowded, but we are not overpopulated. Who really knows how much human life the earth can hold? This is a far more complicated situation than mold running out of room on a loaf of bread. The Earth is not a static collection of rocks, it’s a dynamic series of biochemical interaction, where we communicate information with billions of other organisms. This 4 billion year old dance forms our environment. How we interact with other lifeforms will influence how other lifeforms interact with us. How we interact with other life has an effect on how many human the earth can hold. We are not spectators in this show. Environmentalist talk about conservation of resources, maybe we should start to talk about creating conditions that promote resources growth.

That all said, I suspect that if we tripled the population of a specie as crafty as homo sapiens within a 100 year period, a mere 5 generation, we might have to restructure the global culture a bit. And by a bit I mean this may be akin to when we gained complex language, or became agricultural. Of course I an time bias. I want this to be true as it make my life more important to take place in such a crucial time.

Many people wonder why humans started farming 10,000 years ago. We went from healthy to malnourished, trading leisure time for repetitive work injuries. We became more susceptible to famines and diseases. Different social classes formed and separated people. Why would we do something that went against our nature. One theory is that it was a way to deal with overpopulation. Obvious no one really knows what the global population was so long ago, but it is thought that prior to when plant domestication happened there were heavy rains in those regions. This happened several times independent of one another. Extra rain would provide more food for people. More food for people meant populations would grow. When drier years came food supply would dwindle and populations would be culled. If however a population grew to a certain point, before the dry years perhaps they would have enough neuro-bytes between everyone to figure out the logistics of farming. It may not have been ideal. We suffered socially, biologically, and I would say spiritually from this solution, but at least we survived.

So now are we in a similar moment? There is a finite amount of information a human nervous system can process. Most of those resources will go into survival. As populations increase people can devote more resources into areas such as maths, and sciences. They can develop ways of retaining knowledge such as writing. They can simplify their writing system into something that is more time efficient to learn, such as the alphabet, as oppose to a logogram where every word has a symbol. This would make it possible for more people to access and store written information. Data stored in writing would not use human nervous systems for storage. We would only have to use our neuron to learn a code that allowed us to retrieve information. This would allow more neuro resources for creative thought, while allowing us to store more information than we could if we were using organic ram. Generation of adding to the collective pile of knowledge eventually makes computers possible. If the population was still under 2 billion would there be enough neural energy to summon the internet into the world?

The transition from being hunter gatherers to agriculturist meant going from relying on instinct to obeying laws. Larger populations that farming requires needed unifying principles to coordinate our actions. We form empires and monotheistic religions all with their own proprietary rules. As we transition from farmers to bio-tech wizards I believe we will go from laws which are breakable to being part of an algorithm. We will have no more free will to disobey the social code than machines.

No one knows where we are in this cycle. We do know that most of our search histories are catalogued, and use to influence our future search histories. Many people have voluntarily giving DNA samples to data companies to find out what their ethnicity is, or proclivity to acquire certain diseases. Also more and more people find romance and sex through online dating services. I wonder how long, if it has not already begun, before all this information is cross pollinated. Once our our browsing histories and our DNA sequences are part of the same algorithm which is under the control of corporations, which are just algorithms designed to grow as much as possible, would it not make sense that we will be breed for the efficacy of these systems? The same way that we breed domesticated animals we will be bred by some binary intelligence. What will we be bred for? To be consumers, soldiers, or maybe to play a highly specialized part in some elaborate social construct and then self terminate. Much like animal we breed, we won’t need laws, or any training, since compliance will be ensured at the genetic level.

Perhaps it need not be so dark. This system could possibly allocate resources in a much more efficient way as to improve everyone’s life. I do think we should start pondering the possibilities of the technology we are creating. It’s not enough to say something will not happen because it is illegal or unethical. We need stronger safeguards that are designed into technology to ensure we continue to be the designers and not the design. The choices we make now may have terrifying effects for thousands of generations to come. Our descendants may not even be aware of this matrix like system that completely dictates their lives, making it an all to real invisible sky god.