Like you I have worried more and more about issues like human extinction within ten years due to problems we can
we on internet, like what AI and new aerospace technology and movements like
IRGC seem to be talking us to.
In the past hour, I have been at the Iwo Jima
park, with my wife, a good foundation for meditation. All the George
Washington stuff here reminds me of what I see when I engage in "backwards
recursion" thinking. Start from where we need to get, to survive. I should never
forget "cybersocial contract" and all that that implies and requires.
The
concept of social contract is a prerequisite, a key building block which can be
understood by building up from people like Locke and Max Weber to Von Neumann to
Thomas Schelling (one of my many important teachers at Harvard). The US
Constitution, as developed by Washington and Jefferson, is a great historical
example of a social contract built on that intellectual foundation (with some
additions and later understandings). But when the food chain, the input-output
coefficients, and the means of production and destruction change radically, a
contract which harmonized society at one time may simply no longer be powerful
enough. That is where humanity is today... even in the next decade.
[And then I
take the bus back home, where I continue.]
AND so: the target we would need to
reach, to survive at all as a species, is what I have called CYBERSOCIAL
CONTRACT. I have discussed it before, but need to keep it at the top of my
thinking and never let myself be distracted from it. Von Neumann (and Schelling)
taught us to be aware of n person nonzerosum games, which is what a social
contract can harmonize. The new technology mainly adds new players, the
Artificial General Intelligence AGI actors, and also the collective intelligence
connecting our entire solar system and the universe as we humans now change and
are changed by them more than ever before. A sustainable cybersocial contract
must harmonize all these enough to survive.
More precisely, following the vision
of Von Neumann and Schelling, we are called to move ahead step by step to a
higher and higher level of partial agreement/contract up to true sustainability
and Pareto optimality. The present trends in internet technology, aerospace
technology and human culture beset by conflict of interest and neurotic inertia
all over the world represent the kind of Nash equilibrium, war of all against
all, like what has made many top dog species on earth go extinct. (See Robert May, stability and complexity in model ecosystems.) It is easy to see that
playing out now, if one has open eyes and one understands the prerequisites.
The
path TO sustainable intelligent internet (SII) is much harder to discern, but
that is what we are called to work towards, called by every deep emotional
driver deep within who we are. Because the new challenges are all global,
success in developing SII must be international, and deeply directly grounded in
foundations developed by Von Neumann. FROM MY long experience in development of
new technologies at NSF and public interest organizations, AND from today's
news, I can see how programs like Trump's Golden Dome and Artemis efforts are a
path to failure and disaster unless supplemented. Given the new splits even
between US and EU, my best hope this year has been creation of TWO unique new
crossdisciplinary centers like what the old NSF (before 2013/2014) was great at
developing, centers capable of integrating all the essential foundations needed
to lead the development and use of SII. In a way, that is still my best hope,
and my answer to your question. But the full path to that goal is a
"minefield+scattered_hopes" challenge in strategy, a highly nonconvex
strategy/game. Every day we are called to remap the territory between where we
are and the SII goal. AND yes.. I see UNESCO as an essential player, given the
international dimensions and the recent degradation of the chain of S&T
information reaching the US President. I remember a time in 2020 when I hoped
Kamala Harris would solve that problem, but I learned how much she dances like a
puppet to instructions from people I met in person fully embodying the worst
fears of the MAGA people. Only new international arrangements have hope of
saving us.
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By the way, we now have new mathematics for "quantum RLADP", one of the five universal claims in my 2025 patent. (Also see the google version.) No SII limited to the capabilities of human brains could survive nonconvex decision problems as life-threatening as what humanity faces now, but an SSI integrated by quantum RLADP could do it. But who in the world would have that capability, especially given the need to move as fast as possible? For now, Budapest and Virginia have interesting hope... maybe... but they would of course need great new partners and supporters.
