Essay Abstract
Humanity is a complex, self-steering system of coordinating humans. Coordination allows humans to process information and perform actions collectively, in ways that no individual could. Humanity's performance relies on the efficacy of this coordination, and therefore improving the coordination system can help improve humanity's future. The performance of humanity as a whole is a separate issue from the performance of its subcomponents. We could have great governments, great economies, great philosophies and great physics, but if a threat like global warming destroys us, civilization as a whole will have failed. We must explicitly evaluate and improve global society as a whole. A powerful mechanism for identifying well-functioning systems is competition and selection, but this mechanism will not work for humanity, because we only have one civilization. To compensate, humans must use competition between other, surrogate systems to identify coordination processes that will likely improve civilization. By identifying and implementing superior systems for coordinating action and information processing, humans improve humanity and thus humanity's ability to find further system improvements. In this way, humans recursively improve and create an ever-evolving system of humanity.
Author Bio
Jeff Alstott is finishing PhD research in complex systems at the University of Cambridge and the US National Institutes of Health.