Can 'Hackstability' Save Civilization?

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. The Third Future

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/04/18/hacking-the-non-disposable-planet/

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So what is the hackstable future? What reason is there to believe that hacking can keep up with the downward pull of entropy? I am not entirely sure. The way big old cities seem to miraculously survive indefinitely on the brink of collapse gives me some confidence that hackstability is a meaningful concept.

Collapse is the easiest of the three scenarios to understand, since it requires no new concepts. If the rate of entropy accumulation exceeds the rate at which we can keep hacking, we may get sudden collapse.

The Singularity concept relies on a major unknown-unknown type hypothesis: self-improving AI. A system that feeds on entropy rather than being dragged down by it. This is rather like Taleb’s notion of anti-fragility, so I am assuming there are at least a few credible ideas to be discovered here. These I have collectively labeled autopoietic lift. Anti-gravity for complex systems that are subject to accumulating entropy, but are (thermodynamically) open enough that they might still evolve in complexity. So far, we’ve been experiencing two centuries of lift as the result of a major hack (fossil fuels). It remains to be seen whether we can get to sustainable lift.

Hackstability is the idea that we’ll get enough autopoietic lift through hacks and occasional advances in anti-fragile system design to just balance entropy gravity, but not enough to drive exponential self-improvement.

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