SolarCross wrote:This little snippet you plucked from a wiki article is cringingly obvious pseudo-science. It genuinely looks like it was written by a cretin. Of course that is often the case in the social "sciences". It's a step up from gender studies but no less useless posturing.
So are you a parody of partisan politics now? I don' get it, I feel like I'm talking to a social media parrot. Are you letting network algorithms and partisan echo-chambers mold your opinions?
BTW, economics is a social science.
Social systems have regulatory properties, SolarCross.
I suggest reading:
Sociocybernetics: Complexity, Autopoiesis, and Observation of Social SystemsIn an effort to shed light on recent developments in sociocybernetic research, this volume represents recent and advanced thinking in this rapidly developing field. The authors address the core problems in social science caused by increasing societal complexity and analyze the inadequacy of many of the methodological tools still used for grappling with nonlinear, self-organizing systems. Together, the 18 contributors propose elements of a new methodology based on sociocybernetic principles aimed at describing and explaining the growth of societal complexity, the contribution of autopoiesis of societal subunits to more societal complexity, and the new simulation-based methodology needed to observe complex social systems. This unique volume contributes to a greater understanding of sociocybernetics and its uses as a method for researching modern problems of increasing complexity and interdependence.
The first part of the book deals with increasing societal complexity and contains chapters on its overall development, the complexity of brain-environment interaction loops, organizational change, the development of human values, and the increasing interpenetration of societal subsystems. The second part concentrates on a current issue in sociocybernetics: autopoiesis, or self-production. The chapters included in Part II concentrate on embodied cognition, on the applicability of autopoiesis to business firms, on its roots in Aristotelian philosophy, and on the possibility of societal control and steering in democratic societies. Part III, more focused on methodology, discusses the difficulties inherent in observing complex social systems. The chapters deal with the problems of cross-cultural comparative research, simulation of the evolution of social systems, longitudinal simulation of education systems, and the methodological difficulties associated with analyzing the unexpected complexities of mutually interacting nonlinear systems.Felix Geyer and Hans van der Zouwen contribute to Kybernetes
(Kybernetes is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of information and knowledge management exploring the complex relationships between information systems and management theory and practice to determine how humans develop meaningful and satisfying roles in professional and organisational contexts.)The content is very pertinent, given my explanation for why technological systems produce authoritarian behavior.
The potential is there for there to be quadrillions of independent societies spread across millions of cubic lightyears. No one is saying they will all "favour" capitalism* but clearly a single totalitarian society is impossible. On another point, generally people prefer freedom and autonomy over slavery and the more power they have the more able they will be to make manifest that preference. Technology is nothing but the power to achieve one's goals. Consequently technology will tend to increase freedom not the opposite.
In the future, there could be pockets or islands of communism. You originally said:
Given that the conditions for colonisation beyond earth is almost complete but a project to impose a single globe spanning totalitarian state is not even 1% complete it is virtually guaranteed that the former will happen before the latter and once the former happens the latter can never happen. I disagree, in reality, we're closer to a Technocratic state on Earth. Moreover, I've thoroughly explained in other threads how and why technologies reshape societal dynamics. Thank you for noting how technology can facilitate power. Technology does enhance our ability to manage physical systems and engineer behavioral patterns. Technology is an extension of our nervous system. In a cybernetic feed-back loop, automation diminishes autonomy, because it consolidates or harmonizes energy transfer between animal and machine via intelligent systems engineering. If you're not familiar with cybernetics, I recommend:
The Human Use of Human Beings, by Norbert Wiener.
Technological societies must be driven by information, feedback, control, and communication systems. To be effective, a technological society must manage all components (social, biological, mechanical, etc) of any system (and subsystem). We already live in a world developed by the science of controlling machines and humans.
*"Capitalism"
AI will continue to augment and take over capitalistic operations here on earth, and it will incrementally eliminate human decision making. Like today, technical experts will modify and code intelligent systems (until self-repairing sentient systems go online), and average citizens will become information channels or data points living inside a technocratic society. Such conditions may give rise to major changes in production. Self-correcting and adaptive information loops can potentially reshape the global market economy. Private decisions become group decisions and investments become survival strategies for civilization. Ecologically, free market capitalism can produce a schizoid
race to the bottom. Remember, the U.S. is a mixed economy, with socialistic tendencies. Over time, It had to adopt socialistic policies to stabilize itself and protect itself from market volatility. Likewise, 1st world countries will adopt technocratic policies to manage the fragility and volatility of human systems.