A matter of scale

The Covid 19 virus has completely derailed economic progress on the whole planet. It will likely diminish as a problem in time, but there are others that will not, indeed they can only get worse.

The worst of the problems that beset the world currently – environmental collapse, economic fragility, increasingly powerful AI and nuclear weapons proliferation - are essentially due to one cause: a shift in the basic ways of civilization from national to global scale. The main drivers of civilization, including socio-cultural change, economic growth and technological development, are now global in scale, but our key political processes remain mostly national and only partially international. As such they cannot deal with the problems that are arising with the advent of global scale civilization.

In a real sense the story of humanity is the sustained, although not even, growth in size and complexity of our key processes and institutions. The core driver has been population growth and the associated growth in necessary resources and waste. This process of expansion in turn generates complexity, especially in those things required to control growth. Greater complexity then enables another round of growth, which demands even greater control capability, and so on.

Also important, the growth of population and expansion of resources and systems to control growth in turn generated an increased propensity for developing related ideas and intellectual products. This kind of developmental growth only increased the demand on resources and waste, thus accentuating the efficacy of the overall effect. The changes were in human heads as well as the material world.

For instance, the expansion of railway systems in the nineteenth century was driven by economic development promoted by accelerated population growth. But this expansion in railways was only possible due to the development of telegraphy systems for control. This enhanced control capability decreased accidents and improved productivity through more efficient scheduling. The scientific and technological forces that generated telegraphy later spawned telephony and radio, and ultimately the whole digital revolution. Better control systems always generate greater complexity as they enable larger scale operations.

This increased control has two main aspects, intensiveness and extensiveness; that is, better overall capability increases in terms of time and space. Each new control technology tends to be either notably faster, cover more area, or both. Electricity, radio and electronics were breakthroughs in control capability bringing enhanced capability in all dimensions. Electrical and then electronic control systems have culminated in the Internet which is increasingly ubiquitous and ever more powerful thanks to Moore's Law (i.e. information processing power doubles every 12-18 months and costs diminish proportionately).

Let us go back to the beginning of this phenomenal process of expansion and ever-growing complexity. By about twenty thousand years ago human development had stopped being driven by physical evolution and was being driven increasingly by cultural evolution. By about ten thousand years ago it was increasingly being driven by organizational and technological change as first villages, then towns and then cities appeared. So over a period of millennia humans went from being organized into small hunter-gather bands of 20-50 people to villages of a hundred or more to towns of hundreds to cities of a thousand or more to kingdoms of hundreds of thousands to empires of millions. For millennia more empires rose and fell, then more concentrated nation-states arose in the Middle Ages in Europe, and then globe-spanning empires arose in the sixteenth century as representatives of the nation-states of Europe sailed the great world ocean.

And so about five hundred years ago the modern era that eventuated in the current phase of globalization began as Portuguese and Spanish sailing ships ventured out into the rest of the world, soon followed by British, Dutch and French vessels. Aboard were sailors, soldiers, traders and priests all with profit and/or aggrandizement (for themselves or their God) on their minds. The commercial revolution ensued as Europeans exploited the resources, and the non-Europeans, that they encountered, and a period of trenchant warfare followed that as the European countries fought it out for dominance in the fast expanding world economy. This shift in perceived importance from cultural elaboration and enhancement to economical advancement created a demand for increased volumes of land along with an increased sense of ownership, dispossessing native populations.

In the end Britain won out, basically claiming hegemony over the seas and ultimately creating the largest land empire ever known. After 1815, when Britain defeated the other main claim to hegemony, France, a period of relative peace and stability occurred over which time, commerce, and capitalism, became central.

After 1880 two rising industrial powers, Germany and the US, challenged Britain's global hegemony. With the advent of the 'long war' from 1914 to 1945 the United States inherited from Britain a, by then, incipient global empire but it was challenged by a Euro-Asian power, the USSR. The arrival of nuclear weapons made outright war between major industrial powers too dangerous and so the emphasis shifted to economic and propaganda activities. In the early 1990s the Soviet Union, losing in both arenas of rivalry, fell apart and the US seemed supreme as global hegemon.

The US global hegemony is now in dissolution, increasingly challenged by a group of nations which show a willingness to cooperate to replace American power, led by China and Russia. The international ruling class which grew up over the last century and a half and which bases its success in the structural power of high finance is now wealthier than ever, even surviving almost total financial meltdown in 2007-8. But the core structural arrangements - political, socio-cultural, environmental and administrative - that underpin that wealth creation are changing.

The most immediate threat takes the form of a new US president of outstanding incompetence. Although presenting policies and attitudes that ostensibly promote wealth creation, the Trump presidency threatens the underlying socio-political structure both within the US and globally. Trump's incompetence puts the basic socio-political consensus in the US at risk, undermines the international arrangements that have bolstered support by US allies, and encourages the aspirations of China, Russia and certain other nations to challenge US dominance.

The main reason Trump was elected was the desperation felt by a sizable sector of the American working and middle classes who have already been hammered by globalization or fear they soon will be. Trump's election to power signifies both the fear of collapse and an eagerness for deeper change in this sector. They do not wish to feel any greater effects of what they see as a socio-political storm that stands to threaten their economic viability and they want a reaffirmation of their deeper moral values.

Certainly this sentiment was helped by the bankruptcy of the globalist technocratic elite who dominated the Democrat Party (so clearly manifest in the Clintons) but Trump's whole program was aimed at the growing fears of those losing out to globalization. The response was presented as a nationalist 'America First' concept.

Consequently, Trump has been threatening free trade at various levels, he has trashed any concerted effort to deal with global warming (such as the Paris agreement), and he has reasserted US military adventurism, even in space. Of course this approach will end in tears, but he will likely set back any attempt to consolidate governance at the global level for decades. Even the immediate costs are potentially catastrophic: there is a strong chance of a miscalculated nuclear exchange, and even more worrying, a squandering of the time needed to prevent runaway global warming. Ironically, Trump's desperate focus on the bottom line is costing a tremendous figure that is growing in correlation with this destruction of progressive ideology, free trade and climate change acknowledgement.

The phase of economic globalization that begun in the early 1980s has done exactly what the very rich wanted: it extended mass-industrial capitalism around the world and increased the amount of profit accrued by the wealthiest. But it also exacerbated environmental damage and heavily influenced the rise of certain nations (China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, etc) for whom maintaining national integrity, not maximum profits, is the priority. Survival in increasingly difficult times is their main concern, either to provide for (and control) huge populations as in the case of China and India, or to maintain specific forms of national development in the case of Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The unilateralist Trump program may force at least some of them to cooperate more, but the absence of the US from global cooperation in other ways presents huge problems for the continuation of a global scale civilization on Earth.

Even if the Trump experiment is curtailed early, it is doubtful that enough time will remain for viable solutions to arise to deal with global problems. Good will and hard work by the international administrative class can defuse the nuclear arms threat and stabilize the world economy to a degree, but global warming is already underway and approaching criticality.

In addition the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), in both information processing capability and in the form of versatile robots, throws another potent ingredient into the mix. In fact AI may be the solution to the world's environmental problems with an age of hyper-efficient management of just about everything, but the cost may be the end of what we think is meaningful about being human, like individual autonomy. In any case, this issue is, as yet, just too dynamic to be understood in any useful way. A reliance on artificial intelligence to fix our environmental problems would be is a risky one, as we do not understand the process and implications for doing so, nor will we likely comprehend this as we require such immense processing power to be utilised in order to create a solution. At this stage, such a hope for this application of AI is not comprehendible or useful without the technological advancements. Despite the warnings of some eminently smart people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, as things stand we are still just going along for the ride as the pace of research in AI only accelerates.

Throughout history major transformations in the levels of scale and complexity in which human beings organize their various activities on Earth have always been fraught with danger. The rise of warlike city states in ancient Mesopotamia; the fall of the Roman Empire; the failure of Chinese maritime expansion and the success of European efforts in the fifteenth century; the rise of the British Empire and the development of North America after the sixteenth century; the spread of European colonization; two world wars and then global Cold War and economic globalization have all presented great opportunities for development but also great disruption and hardship for the affected populations. Each shift in scale involved new technologies and ways of organizing.

The problem of global warming represents the rise of global scale environmental issues. Essentially, there is now not enough water and atmosphere to suck up the greenhouse gases created by mass-industrial society. Similarly, the imminent arrival of general AI is, like the Internet, the result of attempts to control human activities at a global scale through better communications and information processing systems. So far the main application of the most capable (albeit still limited) AI systems has been in big science, high finance, corporate operations and global military activity, the most developed global scale arrangements we know. Soon enough an AI system smarter than humans will arrive and robots will become ubiquitous in the workplace, and just about everywhere else.

We have been living with global scale transportation, communications, trade and culture for decades at least. Human beings on Earth already live in large part as a global species but without some core organizational arrangements in place, and now things are about to get a lot more complicated.

In particular we have minimal global institutions in terms of politics and law, and into the vacuum created by this lack of effective control Trumpism (a proto-fascist hyper nationalism) has inserted itself, a process repeated in Europe, the Philippines and elsewhere. As national political systems fail (consisting mostly of functional relations between the main political parties), the extremes become viable. Of course this approach can't work (right wing reactionaryism, in particular, has already been tried and failed miserably) but it can muddy the waters for a while. As such it will use up time we just don't have to spare that is needed to urgently deal with basic structural problems.