Is the USA on the verge of a tipping point?
- Trevor Alexander Nestor
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Collective Intelligence is roughly defined as social capital stored in complex trophic social networks. As social networks scale linearly, collective intelligence scales nonlinearly.
This is both an asset vital for stable relationship/family formation and propping up complex economies but can be bad for institutions because unconstrained growth risks undermining institutions. Self-organized criticality can challenge institutionalized power. This collective intelligence comes in part from close social proximity and also interbrain synchrony. Beyond the Dunbar limit (the max number of connections you consciously maintain) there are layers of complex social networks which prop you up.
So what is the solution? Well, you tap into the well of social capital and frack out some of the connectivity of people and reduce their networks by alienating them through a mass survellience cybernetics feedback and control loop - everybody is interacting in an isolated way. Tools can be used to maintain worker productivity to perform their complex tasks but scrambles the networks so that this can't be used to organize.
The issue with this strategy is that in order to contain workers from organizing ("alignment"), you must then scale the AI systems nonlinearly - so that increases in compute or energy each a point of diminishing returns. This inflection point is what is being referred to as the "technological singularity" - it isn't a point at which AI becomes smarter than people - it's when as a control loop it's no longer effective at stabilizing brittle institutions (K shaped economy) and there is a risk of information cascades and emergence or Spectral Collapse - information stored in social networks begins to reach a critical tipping point where it collapses in the form of sudden collective actions not mediated through institutional control loops. This is their fear.
[The Collapse of Complex Societies]
[Tipping Points in Complex Systems]
[RAND Study Describes Brittle Institutional Stability in the US] https://lnkd.in/g6H6S8gC
[Spectral Theory of Value]
[Spectral Collapse]
[Links between entropy, complexity, and the technological singularity]
[Proximity to explosive synchronization determines network collapse and recovery trajectories in neural and economic crises]
[Self-Organized Criticality]
[Tipping Point for Advanced “Knowledge Economy,”]
[On Cybernetics]
[Nonlinear Control in Econophysics]
[SPECTRAL ANALYSIS OF RICH NETWORK TOPOLOGY IN SOCIAL NETWORKS]
[Nonlinear Control in Econophysics]
[Musk's Comments on Bureacreacy and Entropy]
[Trump's Comment on Tipping Points]
In our K-shaped economy institutions have become more brittle as they are not buffered as resiliently by local social support systems and particularly susceptible to information cascades or avalanches of collectively organized behavior. As AI serves as a tool of social compression this can create a spectral collapse catastrophe of social and economic institutions.
As local connectivity of agents in the form of community and social support systems disintegrates, institutions become more brittle - less dynamic or resilient - and more susceptible to uncertainty or unpredictable events or behaviors. AI systems brute force backpropagation from the top down - while brains in synchrony facilitate efficient feedforward and backwards flows of information. This efficiently implements alignment where the brain is 225000x more efficient than AI supercompute whereas AI system models saturate.
The technological singularity is not a point at which AI becomes conscious or outsmarts people - it is when our collective intelligence supersedes that of the AI gatekeepers that they have been trying to contain - our collective consciousness - when value of lateral information transfer between people supersedes the value of everybody interfacing alienated independently with these AI tools.
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