[POST] The AI divergence
Will the Singularity resemble Jared Diamond's civilizational divergence?
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Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) set out to answer the question of why Eurasian empires conquered the rest of the world during the so-called Age of Discovery/Imperialism. How did those empires based across Europe and Asia develop earlier and faster than those of the Americas, Africa, Australia, etc. — or all of those regions that subsequently were colonized by these unstoppable powers?
Here’s how I summarized Diamond’s (for me) breakthrough thinking on world history in America’s New Map:
Across history, geography and environment determined which continents ruled and which were ruled. With climate change cresting, they do so again along an entirely different vector.
Humans have historically viewed Earth primarily along an East-West axis because, with national power so consistently concentrated in the North, that is where the most significant action has unfolded—longitudinally. Today, all five superpowers (US, EU, Russia, India, and China) are spread west to east across the Northern Hemisphere. That has been the case throughout history, as there has never been any great tropical or Southern power. The North is where all the East-v-West system-reshaping wars were centered, while the tropics and South remain overwhelmingly the lands of small wars and insurgencies. Most notably throughout modern history, the North colonized and the rest were colonized. There has never been a compelling reason to recognize a North-South world—until now.
Climate change tilts our planet’s strategic axis from West-East to South-North in what is the biggest and most rapid environmental transformation that humanity has ever experienced. You can challenge that judgment by noting how pervasively humanity has conquered the environment over time, so why assume the planet still possesses the capacity to detour human history so thoroughly?
The answer is, the Earth has done so repeatedly to humanity in the past. Earth’s last Ice Age ended twelve thousand years ago. At that point, humans were hunter-gatherers dispersed across the world. Since then, humans, self-organizing into civilizations, have experienced what geographer Jared Diamond labeled “lopsided outcomes” in his 1997 classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Diamond asked why Eurasian imperial powers so readily conquered and colonized the rest of the world. In his analysis, the reason Eurasians had more advanced militaries (guns), stronger immune systems (germs), and better technologies (steel) did not stem from differences in race but from differences in geography and environment. Where you lived determined whether you were conqueror or conquered.
Diamond detailed how Eurasia’s development raced ahead of other continents due to an underlying environmental advantage—the horizontal (longitudinal) width of its landmass relative to its vertical (latitudinal) height. Eurasia is twice as wide (13,000 km) as it is tall (7,000 km). In contrast, Africa is proportionally taller (8,000 km tall and averaging 5,000 km in width), while the Americas are Eurasia’s opposite at 15,000 km tall versus 5,000 km at their widest—and 50 km at their thinnest.
Eurasia’s primary developmental advantage was thus its environmental sameness—that 13,000-km band stretching from Ireland to Japan. Anything (viruses, crops, animals, technologies, social advances, etc.) that thrived anywhere along that vast swath found easy transmission and spread throughout the rest simply because adaptation was only minimally required.
In tall parts of the world like the Americas, that environmental sameness was limited to much thinner bands. When traversing latitudes (heading north or south), humans encountered profound environmental differences that naturally limited such developmental diffusion. What might work at one latitude typically could not find similar purchase in significantly higher or lower climes, where the environment was too different in temperature and seasonal profiles.
Per Diamond’s telling, nature rewarded Eurasia’s wide environmental sameness with a uniquely broad array of species suitable for domestication as crops and livestock. That led to the earlier and more rapid development of farming, which enabled a sedentary life that, in turn, encouraged the concentration of people in cities. All those domesticated animals transmitted, through zoonosis, their viruses to humans, bolstering the latter’s immune systems, which, in turn, strengthened their biological capacity to live more densely in cities.
The rise of cities led to the stratification and specialization of economic roles, which triggered technological advances that expanded and accelerated all the above-mentioned developments.
These positive feedback loops propelled Eurasian civilizations to heights such that, when the Age of Exploration brought them to other continents, those adventurers were supremely advantaged for conquest. The world’s tall regions never had a chance. Because of its continental width, Eurasia ruled the world.
I have often thought about how this process of global conquest was mentally processed by those so-conquered. To me, the best fictional approximation has always been Star Trek — The Next Generation’s presentation of the Borg.
The Borg are, in my opinion, the most iconically futuristic (i.e., relevant) alien adversary in the Star Trek universe. They are a collective of cybernetic organisms, or humanoids who have been forcibly assimilated and augmented with machinery. They function as part of a singular, hive mind referred to as "The Collective." Their primary goal is to achieve "perfection" by assimilating other species and their technologies, adding the biological and technological distinctiveness of those species to themselves.
Strikes pretty close to home, right?
The Borg “infect” you with their nanoprobes and ultimately strip you and yours of your identity and resources. They consume you and what’s left over is put to the use of the hive mind. Their excuse? Their pursuit of “happiness”: defined here as the most perfect amalgamation of species in the universe. Having already integrated so many cultures and species over time, whenever they bump up against somebody new like in ST:TNG, they simply overwhelm them. They seem unstoppable and, in many ways, they are.
Any reader of America’s New Map will recognize that I am prone to Borg references in relation to globalization-the-dynamic.
As in:
And:
While China aggressively supplies hard-infrastructure connectivity and a social-control model through its Belt and Road Initiative, America offers little beyond its nuclear umbrella and preferential access to its vast market. What we expect in return is your state’s marketization, democratization, and Americanization. If you do not achieve all, you may one day find yourself demonized as an existential threat to our way of life. In Star Trek terms, we sell ourselves as the United Federation of Planets but too often act like the Borg.
In my mind, then, the Borg are assimilation and integration taken to a quasi-genocidal extreme. And I totally understand how a traditional culture, when impinged upon by globalization, looks at its homogenizing effects as an existential threat.
My point in citing Diamond here is multifold, because I see a sort of repeating pattern here:
There’s the original “lopsided outcomes” analysis of wide regions versus tall regions — an analysis that “submits” to an environmental determinism.
Then there’s my comparison of that environmental/economic determinism with modern globalization (going back to my Pentagon’s New Map analysis).
In ANM, I cite it as proof of concept that the planet’s environmental axis (long East-West) can determine human development, thus we must accept the notion that climate change’s shifting of that environmental axis to North-South will be transformational in the extreme:
Through Diamond’s analysis, we understand the power of one geographically expressed axis (East-West) over another (North-South). Once we accept that, we can imagine that power relationship being reversed through superior environmental forces. If previous, imperial iterations of globalization were fundamentally predetermined by our planet’s environmental makeup, then we can posit that US-style globalization, having so reshaped Earth’s environment as to earn its own geologic era, now determines humanity’s future path.
So, here are the citations that get me thinking about yet another iteration of this logic.
NYT: The Global A.I. Divide
SCITECHDAILY: The Rise of AI: Leading Computer Scientists to Predict a Star Trek-Like Future
First, the unsurprising bit about how AI-feeding data centers are being clustered more to the North and South than across the lower latitudes. Per my analysis in both PNM and ANM, this is to be expected.
The combo of water and power and data is just harder to locate and exploit at lower latitudes — on average.
The second piece argues for an AI pathway-dependency that favors those societies/economies most integrated to-date and most comfortable integrating even further — radically so, in the end.
Leading computer scientists from institutions including Loughborough University, MIT, and Yale have outlined a vision for the future of artificial intelligence that echoes elements of science fiction—specifically, the interconnected intelligence of Star Trek’s Borg.
In a perspective paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers describe the rise of “Collective AI”—a system in which multiple AI agents, each capable of learning and adapting independently, are networked together to continuously share knowledge and skills. This approach would allow AI systems to evolve more rapidly and efficiently by pooling their individual experiences and insights.
The authors acknowledge the resemblance between this concept and the fictional Borg: cybernetic beings in the Star Trek universe that operate as a collective consciousness, constantly exchanging information through a unified network.
However, unlike many sci-fi narratives, the computer scientists envision Collective AI will lead to major positive breakthroughs across various fields.
To me, this projection echoes Diamond’s logic: that big wide swath of Eurasia was — in effect — an early hive mind: whatever worked anywhere across that collective could rapidly be reproduced throughout the entirety, resulting in rapid evolution/development that triggered extreme divergence (wide parts of the world raced ahead, tall parts did not).
Like I argue in ANM, it is now better to be tall than wide, because that reduces your climate-change extreme exposure (Middle Earth).
Now, here’s where I don’t want to go overboard. Clued-in portions of the planet that aggressively dedicate themselves to this pathway can still succeed, and here I’m thinking about the PG monarchies and their sudden and deep embrace of AI technologies and infrastructure.
Then there’s China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the Quantum Grand Strategy I believe it both reveals and undergirds:
In short, one doesn’t want to get too deterministic on the basis of environment and geography even as one accepts the pathway biases those factors tend to determine (e.g., climate change will be harder on the Global South than the Global North — plain and simple).
But here’s another iteration of this dynamic that plops into my head: societies and cultures more given to collective identity are initially going to have an easier — and faster — time of embracing this Borg-like future of AI.
On the surface, that speaks better to the futures of collectivizing Europe and Asia than it does to the individualism of North America. In effect, our obsession with individual liberty may ultimately be our downfall — or, at least, what holds us back initially as this Singularity unfolds.
Think about it: MAGA and Trumpism reject a great deal of the technological progress and the environmental challenges looming on the horizon, and they do so on the grounds of lost identity — White Christian nationalism being the obvious push-back response.
Having said that, nobody — and I mean NOBODY — outpaces America when it comes to weird, utopian collectivist dreams and experiments. For the most part, we associate these dynamics with cults and back-to-nature extremists and subcultures like the Amish, but there has always been a forward-leaning, tech-embracing variant out there, and, in many ways, that’s what we call the Tech Bros today.
Are the Tech Bros, on average, rather flippant about individual liberty in a hive-mind future?
Yes, yes they are, often creepily so.
They’re also painfully limited by their very White and very male and very Christian take on human progress, thus, in the end, they don’t strike me as the answer.
But such an answer — a very American techno-collectivism — is out there, waiting to be articulated. And here’s where I think our upcoming generations are far more ready, able, and willing to forge this future than us oldsters give them credit for.
Seriously. I think the Millennials, Gen Zs, and Alphas are far more built for this future than the Boomers and Gen Xers, who, perhaps unsurprisingly given their non-native status, seem more and more devoted to sidelining America from this global future when we should be leading it. But again, that’s where I see the upcoming generations being the answer cause it sure as hell ain’t the Boomers and the Gen Xers … who continue to disappoint.
This is why I continue to follow, and collaborate with my longtime colleague Steve DeAngelis. There is a positive moralism to be discovered and organized and promoted as the way ahead — something better and more comfortable to the American mind than what the Tech Bros, with their adolescent machismo, currently can muster.
Yes, yes, history tends to repeat itself — at least in its choruses.
We just need new verses for the “happy endings” we hope the Singularity will provide, because, for now, there is too much dread concerning its arrival and not enough optimistic anticipation.
In the end, I remain highly confident that a society and economy and polity like ours will reach that Promised Land earlier and better than our primary competitors. There are all sorts of “deals with the (AI) devil” that will have to be forged, and I judge that our individualistic/bottom-up approach to forging those deals will outperform that of our more initially collectivist/top-down contemporaries. I foresee our upcoming generations being best prepared to meet this history-bending moment. I really do.
It’s just going to result in a far different America than the one I grew up in, and that excites me tremendously.
For America to remain great is for America to evolve — at speed. It’s what we do and who we are.
