A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 30 – Feedback Effects

The anatomy of booms, busts, and the Epochs of the human journey

Yesterday, I had planned for today’s post to be about feedback effects, and then I read the last chapters of The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. The authors made feedback effects the centerpiece of how humans progressed through the Epochs. Their view of what I call Epochs was very close to mine. They even suggested something like my Fifth Epoch, but without free energy, which makes their vision dubious, and they freely admitted that humanity might be on the brink of a global collapse. But I want to back up a little into feedback effects in general, before getting into the Epochs.

Interacting dynamics can amplify or reduce their resultant effects with feedbacks. A feedback can be positive (amplifying) or negative (dampening). Positive feedbacks can result in runaway conditions, and negative feedbacks can help dynamics stay in equilibrium or even collapse. An example of a positive feedback is a nuclear chain reaction, such as in a nuclear weapon. As an unstable atom disintegrates into simpler elements, it releases subatomic particles such as neutrons, and high-energy radiation such as gamma rays. When that happens in nature, the effect impacts whatever it hits, often tearing electrons from atoms or causing other damage, but the process soon ends. But when a disintegrating atom does it near other unstable atoms, such as uranium or plutonium, the ejected neutron collides with nearby unstable atoms and causes them to disintegrate. When enough radioactive material is brought together, it forms a “critical mass” that will produce sustained nuclear disintegration. Make it even more concentrated, and the decay becomes “prompt critical” and produces the runaway conditions that make nuclear weapons work or result in disastrous nuclear accidents.

Organisms generally maintain chemical and temperature equilibrium through negative feedback processes, such as hunger pangs when a body’s energy is running low or the release of hormones that trigger effects that reduce high blood pressure. The Gaia hypothesis is that Earth itself has negative feedback processes that keep Earth inhabitable, while the Medea hypothesis is the idea that runaway conditions created by life can lead to mass extinctions of life.

In human affairs, positive feedbacks can produce virtuous or vicious circles. In ecosystems and human societies, feedback effects can produce boom and bust cycles. In evolutionary terms, adaptive radiations are booms that result in a “golden age” for the fortunate species, and mass extinctions are busts that clear ecosystems for the next boom, often enjoyed by a survivor of the bust that was previously a marginal member of the ecosystem.

Long ago, I simplified the human journey to the interaction of three basic factors:

1. Our ever increasing levels of energy consumption;

2. Increasing intelligence, both individually and collectively;

3. The rise of tools, which continually became more sophisticated.

All art, writings, and today’s Internet are cognitive tools, intended to interact with human minds. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is an energy-hungry cognitive tool, which combines all three of those above factors. Free energy is the key to the Fifth Epoch, and I foresee that AI can play a major role.

The authors of The Human Planet discussed (in their chapter 10) the human journey as a series of positive and negative feedbacks, and how an energy boost would take the system to a higher-ordered steady state. Those were the energy breakthroughs that I have long written about: the rise of tools and fire in the First Epoch, conquering Earth in the Second Epoch, domesticating plants and animals in the Third Epoch, and exploiting fossil fuels in the Fourth Epoch. The main negative feedback that can collapse it all, at least as those authors discussed, was Global Warming. But running out of fossil fuels, wars over the dwindling resources, or a global pandemic (perhaps hatched in a lab) are other threats, in our race of the catastrophes scenarios.

Make no mistake: the technologies that I write about are very real. As I wrote this post, I was made aware of this account, of somebody whose paths and mine crossed long ago (we worked in the same building). That person’s father was involved with electrogravitic research before it all went black in the 1950s, which Steven Greer has discussed. My friend saw commercial-level antigravity technology, along with free energy and other mindblowers, in the 1990s.

The authors of The Human Planet discussed how energy, intelligence, and tools would interact and reach new levels of wealth, health, and collective skills, but they were always subjected to the negative feedbacks of genocides, pandemics, famines, and the like. Each Epoch was a relatively steady state of higher energy consumption and its attendant effects, at least until the energy ran out, and the many collapsed civilizations of the human journey are testaments to the negative feedbacks.

In their foray into the future, those authors discussed how a universal basic income (UBI) would mute survival issues and could precipitate radical changes in our capitalist societies, which those authors predicted would be almost all positive. People would not just sit around, get fat, and pursue addictions and perversity, as those are all reactions to scarcity, and a UBI could break that vicious circle. Their vision fell far short of the Fifth Epoch, but I have yet to see an academic who envisioned something close to what I have. My vision is not really all that imaginative. It just presents some easily foreseeable outcomes of the arrival of free energy and attendant technologies for public use. Free energy would propel human societies to a new steady state, with a floor of wealth and wellbeing that is higher than the world’s richest people today enjoy, just like today’s average American is richer than Europe’s richest man of three centuries ago.