Mediocrity as an Existential Risk

Warning: this one's a bummer

Photo by Darkroomsg on Unsplash.

There’s a popular story being told by effective altruist / longtermist / rationalist / “grey tribe” / Bay Area / nerdy types. The story goes something like this:

If you look at the history of life on Earth, humans are a new species. There’s a good chance we could be around for another hundred million years. Whoa. Think of what we could accomplish with that time—brain uploads, dyson spheres, quantum supercomputers, immortality… We could fill the entire cosmos with our digital consciousnesses, enjoying simulated ecstasy beyond our wildest dreams!

Of course, this could happen, if all goes well. But what if it doesn’t?

What if we create an artificial superintelligence that breaks free of human control and murders everyone on the planet? Or what if some diabolical bioweapon escapes the lab and destroys the human race? Or what if we accidentally blow up the world in a nuclear Armageddon? These three threats—superintelligent AI, bioweapons, and nuclear war (but mostly just AI, if we’re being honest)—are our biggest existential risks, or threats to humanity’s long-term potential. What we do now, with these dangerous technologies, could determine the fate of our species for millions of years.

This is the turning point. This is our moment. We may be living in the most important century in human history.

Now, the effective altruist / longtermist / rationalist / “grey tribe” / Bay Area nerdy types have a point. They’re on to something with this idea of “threats to humanity’s long-term potential” or “existential risks” to our awesome future. All I would suggest is that they add one more to their list: mediocrity.

We may never reach our long-term, intergalactic potential because we are mediocre. We don’t have it what it takes. Stuff will keep getting worse because we won’t know how to fix it, and our stupid attempts to fix it will make things worse. We will make fewer and fewer babies, dwindle in number to the brink of extinction, become increasingly old and decrepit, run out of bold new ideas, over-regulate the few bold ideas we have, technologically stagnate, economically stagnate, lose trust in science and markets, destroy liberal democracy, forget to do anything about climate change, bungle the ensuing refugee crisis, wreck the economy, violently compete over the remaining limited resources, and slowly succumb to global institutional rot and sclerosis, perpetually collapsing and rebuilding until we slowly peter out or evolve into a more violent, less innovative kind of animal (perhaps something more religious). We’ll never conquer the galaxy. The center will not hold. The world won’t end with a bang, but with a whimper. 

This mediocre scenario—or something like it—is plausible for two reasons: 1) continued, techno-utopian progress is going to be a challenge, and 2) we are not up for the challenge.

Consider the challenge of continued progress. Scientific advancement is slowing. Low-hanging fruit are being plucked, as new ideas—and disruptive ideas—are getting harder to find. Economic growth is slowing. Innovative patents are declining. Birth rates are falling. Populations are aging. Debt is rising. Culture is drifting. Political progress—i.e. toward liberal democracy—is reversing. The climate is changing. The international order is breaking. Space colonies may be harder than we thought, and less politically appealing than we thought. New technologies may be less revolutionary and more overregulated than we thought (especially if we ban or “pause” AI, as many EAs want to do). Our ability to outcompete our elders—possibly the main thing holding our society together—is slipping away.

Social scientists have long known that all good things about a society go together—health, wealth, trust, democracy, trade, peace, innovation—making it difficult to tease apart what causes what. It’s likely that everything causes everything—a virtuous cycle of good things causing good things. But the flipside is that bad things go together too. It’s a rat’s nest of multi-causality and positive feedback loops, which means that any downward trajectory may be self-reinforcing. One small misstep could send us sliding down a long and slippery slope.

Sure, we may have lucked out for a couple centuries by stumbling into the right incentive structures, namely science, markets, and democracy. But those incentive structures are fragile. Science rewards truth-seeking, markets reward cooperation, and democracy rewards accountability (barely). But when science stops advancing, markets stop innovating, and demagoguery eats democracy, the machinery of progress will grind to a halt—or reverse. Without the right incentives, we’re fucked. 

The logic is hard to escape. Any galaxy-spanning, utopian future requires continued, sustained progress on five fronts, all of which are mutually reinforcing: 1) economic growth, 2) scientific advancement, 3) political progress (e.g., institutions that promote economic growth and scientific advancement), 4) population expansion (i.e., more people to grow the economy and do science), and 5) optimism about the future (otherwise, why invest in it with new people, ideas, and businesses?). Yet there is evidence that progress on all five of these fronts is slowing down or reversing (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), with each one potentially feeding back on all the others. Why, then, should we assume that progress will continue forever unabated, and that our destiny is in the stars? Perhaps our destiny is mediocrity.

And perhaps this is the solution to the Fermi paradox, the great filter, the answer to the question, “Why is the sky full of stars but empty of aliens?” The answer may be a shrug. The aliens are out there, and maybe even “intelligent” like us, but they’re just kind of… mediocre. Maybe a few of them built unwieldy civilizations that collapsed. Maybe a few of them boldly talked about going where no man had gone before, but then got ensnared in the losing side of a political squabble and got space travel banned forever. Culture wars, regular wars, corruption, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, regulatory capture, institutional rot, and entropy eat progress. Which means that progress is up against some very powerful enemies.

If Darwin were here, he would agree with me. It’s kind of amazing that we’ve made it this far, when you really think about it. Organisms evolve to compete with each other over status, resources, and mates in the span of individual lifetimes. Organisms do not evolve to care about the well-being of their entire species over the long-run. Genes are selfish, and evolution has no foresight. So the collective pursuit of long-term, species-wide progress—whether moral, scientific, or economic—is not one of our basic motives. It can’t be. The fact that we’ve nevertheless made some long-term, species-wide progress, despite evolution giving us no basic motive to bring it about, is a miracle. We got lucky. Which means that any aliens who do manage to make species-wide progress, for even a little while, will also be lucky. And that means, in turn, that any species-wide progress in the cosmos will be rare and short-lived.

So intelligent aliens like us don’t last long—their luck runs out. They pluck all the low-hanging fruit from the tree of knowledge and starve. They devolve into petty, internecine squabbles at the expense of long-term planning and global cooperation. They play games of thrones (or games of status) as the white walkers descend and their civilization crumbles. Or they succumb to the ultimate selection pressure: the conscious, explicit desire for relative biological fitness, which gradually subsumes all their other desires. If natural selection—our only ally against entropy—is indifferent to the long-term wellbeing of humanity, then our prospects are grim. Averting the mediocralypse, and making it to the Star Trek universe, is going to be a challenge.

Unfortunately, we do not appear to be up for the challenge. We’re tribal, factional, nepotistic, moralistic, short-sighted, close-minded, superstitious, self-deluded, and surreptitiously selfish. We aren’t naturally motivated to make the world a better place, nor are we naturally motivated to see ourselves as mediocre humans, saddled with the same flaws as every other human. We consume “interesting” information—not useful or true information—which prevents us from understanding our predicament. We defend the status games we’re winning—not the ones that improve the world—which worsens the world. We’re in thrall to bullshit political beliefs, including the belief that we’re morally and intellectually superior to our outgroup, which is exactly what our outgroup thinks of us, and what every ingroup has wrongly believed about their outgroup since the dawn of humanity. We should be troubled about this, but we’re not. We’d rather point the finger at the baddies, and cast ourselves as the heroes, than fix our broken incentives. You might have expected psychologists to help us out here, but they’re too busy doing the same bullshit.

Sorry for the huge bummer. Please enjoy these puppies.

So are we doomed? I really don’t know. Predicting the future is hard, and I’m not a soothsayer; I’m just another mediocre human. My goal is not to bum you out but to warn you about a plausible threat to our “long-term potential”—an existential risk to our species. It’s a vague risk, to be sure, but a big one—a risk I’m personally more worried about than global super-plagues or Machiavellian AIs. Maybe if we work together to understand this risk, and avoid it, or even just delay it, we won’t be so mediocre after all.