JAMES PETHOKOUKIS – James Pethokoukis is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an official CNBC contributor.

AUG 24

Explaining humanity’s societal evolution is the goal of the marvelous new (and preliminary) paper “The computational power of a human society: a new model of social evolution” by David H. Wolpert (Santa Fe Institute,) and Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma, Santa Fe Institute.) It’s a big-picture, big-think analysis that syncs well with what I write about both in this premium newsletter and in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. But more on that later. First the paper’s summary:

Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of investigating human history, just as advances in complex systems science and computer science saw the emergence of powerful new conceptions of complex systems, and in particular new methods of measuring complexity. We propose that these advances in our understanding of complex systems and computer science should be brought to bear on our investigations into human history. To that end, we present a new framework for modeling how human societies co-evolve with their biotic environments, recognizing that both a society and its environment are computers. This leads us to model the dynamics of each of those two systems using the same, new kind of computational machine, which we define here

Again, Wolpert and Harper are trying to explain how societies have grown and become more complex in ways that broadly apply to all cultures. They find to be inadequate the many theories that mainly focus on how societies have gotten better at harvesting energy (like through better technology) as the thermodynamic key to human expansion.

Necessary, perhaps, but not sufficient.

Information + Energy = WOW!

To really understand how human societies have grown and changed, we need to look at how we’ve gotten better at using energy and how we’ve gotten better at handling information. The authors argue that understanding this thermodynamic relationship is key to explaining how human societies have grown from small hunter-gatherer bands to our current global civilization. That, despite no significant changes in our individual cognitive capacities.

The formula: Better energy harvesting (allowing societies to do more work and support more people) + improved information processing (allowing societies to use that energy more effectively and to coordinate more complex social structures) = greater complexity (which manifests in various ways such as larger populations, more diverse occupations, more advanced technologies, and more intricate social organizations).

The Industrial Revolution? Not just about coal. Not merely the story of steam and iron. It was about blueprints. About knowledge. About turning potential into power, ideas into reality. It was the marriage of energy and information, giving birth to a new world. Coal became available, yes, but it was the creation of “blueprints” for technologies like steam engines that truly revolutionized society. (To that I would add: the freedom to innovate and reap the rewards of entrepreneurship.)

The Second Industrial Revolution? Basic science unleashing a tsunami of innovation. Light bulbs banishing the night. Electricity rewiring our cities. Telecommunications shrinking our world. But it wasn’t just about the end products. It was about the fundamental discoveries in chemistry and electromagnetism that led to these innovations. Fertilizer synthesis, polymers, pharmaceuticals, internal combustion engines — each a testament to our growing mastery over energy and information. Each a step towards greater complexity, greater capability, greater humanity.

Adam Smith, Futurist

To measure all of this stuff — social complexity, computational capabilities, and evolutionary development of human societies throughout history — the researchers look to occupational specialization as a proxy that reflects the total stock of knowledge and information processing capabilities in a society. (The paper uses this famous Adam Smith quote: “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labor, which occasions, in a well governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”) They suggest that an occupation can be considered an “ensemble of algorithms” for interacting with other humans, occupations, technologies, and institutions.