Four Culture Fixes

Humanity has broken its superpower of cultural evolution, at least at the level of large cultural units, the units that set our game theoretic equilibria of key norms, values, and status markers. 300yrs ago these units had great variety, were under strong select pressures, and had slow rates of change of environment and internal drift. But since then, all four of these key control parameters have since gotten much worse. Unless we achieve human level AI soon, our dominant world civ’s population seem likely to decline, to be replaced by fertile insular religious subcultures like the Amish and Haredim, who have been doubling every 20yrs for over a century. (Like how Christians took over Roman Empire.) Human extinction seems unlikely, if our declining civ continues to tolerate their norm deviance. But we do risk the end, at least for a while, of many novel treasured features of our current civ, such as democracy, pacifism, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, open inquiry,…