Surviving Progress

Surviving progress.

In defining progress,

I think it is very important to make a distinction

between good progress and bad progress.

I mean, things progress in a sense that they change.

Both in nature and in human society there appears to be a clear trend towards increasing complexity.

As change proceeds, we tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements.

....from the human point of view.

SURVIVING PROGRESS

We are now reaching a point in which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers

threaten the very existence of humanity.

WHAT IS PROGRESS?

What is progress.....

I think..... mhm. That's too hard question....

When I think of the word 'progress'...

Progress will not come easy, it won't come quick, but today we have an opportunity to move forward.

It seems we are stuck in this trap for the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution

where we think progress is more of the same, like:

We should make our machines better and get more machines

but we've been doing it for 200 years, so doing more of that is not progress.

We're like stuck in this like a record......

Things are start out to seem like improvement or progress.

These things our seductive, there seems like there is no downside to these

but when they reach a certain scale they turn out to be dead ends, more traps.

PROGRESS TRAPS

I came up with a term 'progress trap' to define human behaviors that

sort of seem to be good things, seem to provide benefits in a short term

but which ultimately lead to disaster, because they are unsustainable.

One example would be going right back to the old stone age

the time of when our ancestors were hunting mammoths.

They reached a point, where their weaponry and hunting techniques got so good

that they destroyed hunting as a way of life through the most of the world.

The people who discovered how to kill two mammoths instead of one

had made real progress, but the people who discovered that they can

eat very well by driving a whole herd over a cliff and kill 200 at once

had fallen into a progress trap

they'd made too much progress.

Our physical bodies and physical brains as far as we can tell

have changed very little in past 50 000 years.

We've only been living in civilization for the last 5000 years

...at the most which is less then 0.2% of our evolutionary history.

So the other 99.8 we were hunters and gatherers

and that is the kind of way of life that made us.

We are essentially the same people as those stone age hunters.

What makes our way of life different from theirs is that culture has taken off at exponential rate

and has really become detached from pace of natural evolution.

So we are running 21st century software, our knowledge,

on hardware that hasn't been upgraded for 50 000 years

and this lies at the core of many of our problems.

All of this is because our human nature is back in hunting-gathering era of the old stone age

whereas our knowledge and technology, in other words, our ability to do both good and harm to ourselves and to the world in general

has grown out of whole proportion.

One thing to remember, of course, about human mind is that it's not

that fundamentally different from, say, a brain of a chimpanzee.

Most of the human brain, the basic structure of the brain

is much older than human species

some of it goes back to bacteria

some of it goes back to worm, some of it originated in first mammals

some of it within the first primates, some of it in first human beings.

Very little however changed in the last 50 000 years.

And so most of what we do, we do with hardware components

that are much older than any of the problems that we face.

When I first began to study chimps

I thought that the task was to just map out more and more similarities

to find the areas of cognition that hadn't been studied yet

and simply show that chimps were just like us.

WHY

You can imagine teaching a small child to stand up a block up right

and you can teach a chimp to do the same thing

'oh I set up a block here, set up a block here, I can see everything, it’s very, very clear'

'and I get a piece of fruit for doing it'

But what happens when you introduce a small subtlety into the situation

when you trick them and make the block off center just that the block keeps falling over.

Well, the chimp will come in, set up the good block

set up the block that we've tricked them with

but then it falls over.

Well the chimp can see that it's not the way it's supposed to be

so they try again, and they try again

and they move it to one place, and they move it to another place

and they keep trying to get it to stand up

because they know what is supposed to happen.

But they have no understanding or no inclination to ask why.

What unobservable part of the situation is causing that block to keep falling over.

The young child will enter set up the good block

try to set up the block that we've tricked them with

but when it falls over, well first they'll try again

then maybe try again, but very quickly they'll turn it over, feel the bottom of it, shake it,

try to concern what unobservable property of that block is causing it to fall over.

That's the fundamental, core difference, I believe, between humans and chimps

that humans ask why, we're constantly probing for unobservable phenomenon to explain the observable.

It's what's driven us to discover gravity,

it's what's driven us to probe into the mysteries of quasars,

and it's the same thing that drives us to probe into mysteries of each other

in our every day life’s.

'Why does she keep doing that?'

'Why does he keep behaving like that, he must think this, he believe this, I don't understand...'

'Why, why, why, why...'

So the upside of the human capacity that asks why,

to continuously probe behind appearances

and to try to find out how the world really works

is we develop fabulous new medicines, fabulous new therapeutic techniques to take care of people,

we invent the whole cascade of modern technology.

But the downside is that

we invent the whole cascade of modern technology.

Arguably we are the most intellectual creature that ever walked on planet earth.

So how come then that so intellectual being

is destroying its only home, because we only have the one home.

Maybe one day people will be on Mars, but at the moment we've got planet earth.

We are destroying, we are polluting, we are damaging the future of our own species

which is very counterproductive from the evolutionary perspective.

This capacity that seems so wonderful to us,

ability to ask 'why'

the very ability that defines modern science

as a double-edge sword.

If humans go extinct on this planet

I think what's gonna be our epitaph on our gravestone is:

'Why?'

We have the ability to think into the future

but most of our mechanisms, most of our brain mechanisms

evolved before we had any ability to think forward to the future

and when it made some sense for decisions to be short-term.

A lot of our brain mechanisms, what I call ancestral mechanisms or reflexive mechanisms

are tuned to making snap decisions, right away, like fight or flight

you see a lion, either you're gonna fight or you gonna run

no time to think about long-term consequences

and that's good when we're stressed about something immediate that we can deal with, for example

but those very systems that work by reflex

are not so good at cooperating with these more modern systems, deliberative systems

that allow us to make long-term decisions, and say

is this good for me, is it good for my society, for my planet.

NOT ENOUGH PLANETS

Between the fall of the Roman empire

and Columbus sailing it took 13 centuries

to add 200 million people to the world’s population

now it takes only 3 years.

A simple thing like pasteurization, the warming of milk so that the bacteria are killed

and the control of smallpox.

Things like that have led to a great boom in human numbers.

Overpopulation, which no one really wants talk about

because it cuts that things like religious believes and the freedom of individual and autonomy of family and so on

is something that we will have to deal with.

We probably have to work towards a much smaller worldwide population then 6 or 7 billion.

We probably need to go down to a half of that or possibly even third of that

if everybody is going to live comfortably and decently.

The other side of this problem

and perhaps the more dangerous side is

the footprint of the individuals at the top of the social pyramids

who are consuming the most.

Somebody in the U.S. or Europe is consuming about 50 times more resources

then a person in a place like Bangladesh.

If China is going to reach the level of consumption

of the U.S. or Europe it's very unlikely that the world could support the addition of billion consumers at that level

I'd say in China, maybe 200, 300 million people are affluent

they could afford a lot, all that we can in the west

in India ca. 200 million, so you add up this affluent segments of population

in these developing countries

but still what you come up with is no more then one and half, maybe two billion people.

So there is still five billion people waiting to tap into these bonanzas

of plentiful food, cars, decent housing, right education for their children.

So the potential demand for resources is immense.

For thousands of years, you know,

China has the longest continuous civilization in the world.

And it is only in the recent period of time

when the European countries started to industrialize

that China started to lag behind and therefore, you know,

between the First Opium War in around 1840 all the way to 1978

China went through a roller coaster of great humiliation, wars, aggression of foreign nations

Japanese aggression against China, Civil War, collapse of Qing Dynasty, great cultural revolution, chaos in China

that's when Deng Xiaoping reemerged in 1978

he basically pointed out the only correct path.

We need to go out to the path of growth

and China needs to modernize and insutrialize.

NATURAL CAPITAL

Some people have written about, ehm,

natural capital, the capital that nature provides

which is the clean air and clean water

the uncut forest, the rich farmland and the minerals, the oil, the metals,

all these things are the capital the nature has provided

and until about 1980 human civilization was able to live on

what we might term interest of that capital

or surplus that nature was able to produce

the fruit that farmland can grow without actually degrading the farmland

or the number of fish you can put out of sea without causing the fish stocks to crash

but since 1980 we've been using more than the interest

so we are in effect somebody who thinks he's rich cause he is spending the money that has been left in his inheritance

not spending the interest but eating into the capital.

The last time I visited the New York Stock Exchange

was in 1980 and the mood sure was different than.

Government with its high taxes, excessive spending and over regulation

had thrown a wrench in the works of our free markets.

With tax reform and budget control our economy will be free to expand to its full potential

driving the bears back into permanent hibernation.

That's our economic programme for next four years, we're going to turn the ball loose.

The world is this big.

It's not this big and it can't be this big.

It's just this big, it's a finite sub.

Instead of thinking that nature is this huge bank that we can just....

this endless credit card that we can just keep drawing on.

We have to think about the finite nature of the planet

and how you keep it alive, so that we too may remain alive.