Universal Future
Can Our Human Race Survive in its Current Genetic Version?
Humans learned to make atomic bombs before they learn how to live together.
In the whole process of evolution, Homo sapiens never had a viable strategy of individual survival. Humans became a success story and reached the bliss of Anthropocene age riding on the initial version of group survival strategy: the one enlightened by the torch of Tribal Thinking. The contemporary model of how the current 7.6 billion people live on Earth — divided in tribes of Homo sapiens fighting each other, is a logical outcome of thousands of years of human history shaped by Tribal thinking.
The functioning of Humankind in the current Tribal thinking mode is by far not optimized in terms of economic efficiency. The economically negative by-product of Tribal thinking measured by the Cost of violence in 2019 represented astronomical losses amounting to $14.5 trillion which is 10.6 percent of global GDP, or $1909 per capita in a world where 3.5 billion people are trying to survive on $2 daily. The figures do not include the even bigger indirect losses caused by the current rigid regulations that lock edge technologies exclusively for military and security purposes and do not allow their use in large-scale mass production. By rough estimations releasing military technologies for civil use might lead to 12–15 percent additional increase of global productivity. Still more difficult to measure is the potential for advance of humanity which is currently blocked by the reality that top IQ prime human brains of the world are employed in the non-productive areas of defense and security sectors.
From existential point of view more important is the fact that the exponentially increasing disparity between the consequences of technological advance and the outdated Tribal thinking, which today is still the main cause for the high tension intensively present among nations fighting for dominance, resources and wealth, already constitutes a real threat. Tensions can evolve into conflicts, and conflicts can escalate into wars. In our century, for the first time in its history, Humankind has to prepare for a civilized and exact answer to the existential question: How do we go into war if war can mean complete annihilation of Life on planet Earth?
Under the above circumstances, the current version of human race on planet Earth for the near future faces three possible scenarios:
Scenario 1: The Evolutionary Restart. Any of the following could trigger a full-scale war where advanced powerful mass destruction weapons would be used: a state actor in a fight for dominance or resources; a violent non-state actor; a technical failure within defense systems as the ones that have already occurred; or even a lonely genius in deranged condition who designs a sophisticated system technologically capable of convincing a nuclear superpower that it is being attacked by another superpower.
The Restart scenario would appear as an “end of the world” type of global tragedy only to us, the humans. To what we call “Nature”, it would be just one more of the billions evolutionary experiments that would be routinely archived as “extinct non-survivables”. And in this context “restart” means something very different from restarting a computer, for example. It took the evolutionary process some four billion years to reach the contemporary condition of human intelligence, and this represents no firm ground to predict after how long a new type of biological intelligence could eventually emerge. If ever.
Scenario 2: The Political Self-Upgrade — deep reform of current international and national political systems designed on the principles of Civilizational thinking and monitored by functionally redesigned analogue of United Nations Security Council with denationalized decision-making process.
Scenario 3. The Artificial Intelligence Assisted Upgrade. Since its very beginning Human history is the history of human tribes waging bloody wars against other human tribes. No other biological species kills recurrently and massively its own kin, with the exception of chimps, in some cases. Both humans and chimps have the latest version of neocortex — the one with added Frontal Lobe, where humans have one layer more than primates. If the “dark side” capabilities of human neocortex and its irrational products turn out to be an innate component of human nature, then, in the era when self-annihilation is technologically possible, humans themselves cannot be part of a system designed to prevent self-annihilation. In this case the only viable approach to preserve Homo sapiens on our planet in its current genetic configuration might be for humans to design and install an Artificial Intelligence implant into our political systems that completely eliminates the human factor in all decision-making processes related to violence, conflicts and wars.
Universal Future is a project aimed at avoiding the Restart scenario through re-designing the global political environment into a universal multifaceted platform, on which all polities in their ideological, political, national, cultural, ethnic, religious, racial, etc. diversity exist and interrelate with each other in non-conflict mode. Universal Future should function on principles and rules that are optimized to protect the core values of human civilization and its ultimate goal: the condition of Humankind’s sustainable prosperity.
The highest acceptable intensity of violence might be that of soccer fans clashing around pubs near the stadiums.
A new generation of Warriors is to emerge from the current national and regional military organizations personnel, police force and security structures — Heroes, inspired by the ultimate motivation to defend the genuine values of human dignity and the prosperity of Humankind.
If you are getting the impression that Universal Future is about political science fiction, just look at the perfectly functioning for centuries prototype — a comprehensive socio-political environment where people of different ethnicity, culture, religion and traditions, who speak different languages, live without violence and enjoy advanced democracy and continuous prosperity. It is called Switzerland.
The vehicle to get to the Universal Future is Civilizational Thinking — an open source process that generates relevant ideas and induces real politics adequate to the 21st century realities.
Just like the policy making in ancient Greece cities, where free people gathered on public places called Agora to live discuss and decide together what is best for them and for their future. With all human beings well and aware of their opportunities to generate civilizational values, Humankind would get access to inconceivable resources of creativity and inventiveness, and the potential to materialize even the wildest dreams ever to be born in our imagination.
Because the mission of human spirit is to confront challenges that civilizationally stand orders higher than tribes of Homo sapiens fighting each other.
