living in Santa Fe, you're a different human being in a certain sense than you are living in New York. But you can go one step further and realize something interesting that if you separated New York is about 15 million people, if you took that 15 million people and you treated each one as an independent sort of guru and you put them on top of the mountain to contemplate the universe, you could ask how many patents were the 15 million people, each one independently not interacting with anybody else produced. Of course, the answer is zero, produced none. There's no socioeconomic interact.
So none of the great things happen. That happens importantly because of interactions bringing people together. The more people that you bring together, the more socioeconomic output you have, the good, bad and ugly. It turned out that it's not just the growth of us as a biological object.
It's us plus all our infrastructure. That's the energy use that drives us and that gets this hyper-exponential scaling curve about energy use. And so we divided the core of the representation parts between maintenance and growth, but not about just the biological individual, but also that extended individual. So that means you plus you have contribution to the technosphere.
If I look at you here, there are a lot of technosphere objects in the background. It took energy to make and add a part of your extended self in that sense. So that became the essence. And so in that sense, it became extremely logical to say that in our human evolution, we cannot just look at it as an individual species.
We can't even look at any animal or plant just as an individual species because all of them have to be contemplated with in their connectivity and with in their constructed niches of this outside the technosphere. Greetings, future fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 212. The podcast that explores our place in time.
For those of you who enjoyed the deep time perspective as much as I do, you know that this time, broadly speaking, is the so-called Anthropocene, the geological age defined by humanity's impact in the record of the rocks of our planet. The funny thing about the Anthropocene as any longtime listener of this show can attest is that the impact of human activity is actually determined by and made by greater than human forces. And the fossils we leave behind are traces of our technological activity on the surface of this planet, shaped by economic factors, and driven by the self-organizing agencies of states, markets, corporations, and other institutions. Anyone who lives in a city can tell you that the city has its own needs and wants.
Anyone who works in a company can tell you that the company has a mind of its own, a drive, and a metabolism. So we can call this the human age, but late historian William Irwin Thompson, whom I interviewed in episodes 42 and 43 of this show, would likely be quick to remind us of the sunset effect, how things flare before they vanish. A motif, visible time and time again in the latest Netflix series Life on Our Planet, which I highly recommend. Today, I'll talk to two of the scientists best disposed to ask questions about this condition.
Physicist Jeffrey West, an evolutionary biologist, Manfred Laubichler, both of whom are professors at the Santa Fe Institute, where I used to work alongside Jeffrey on a daily basis delightfully, and both have more titles than I can possibly list here, so check the show notes to explore their profound and in-depth research. But before we dive into this conversation, I want to thank I-Diri for signing up at the top tier of my Patreon support, and William Gill for his generous contribution as well as for filming a five-camera shoot of the first concert with my new band. More details on that later, as well as NoAnnotics.org, where I now sit as an advisory board member for their support of this program, and the Regen Network and Regen Foundation, who are doing vital, creative, and brilliant work to battle the worst-case outcomes we discuss in this episode by making land and ocean stewardship profitable. This talk goes deep and gets dark, but do not give up, do not lose hope.
We are working on it, and you can work on it with us. Hi, Michael. Gentlemen, here we are, and we are sitting squarely in the Anthropocene. Manfred, I've been less familiar with your work historically, so I've been binging videos and works of popular writing and a couple academic papers of yours, and just getting a sense of the curriculum that you taught with Jorgen several years ago, and just getting a sense of how deep your work in this area has really goes.
I would like to start this conversation by giving you, and then Jeffrey, giving you, the opportunity to provide whatever kind of background on you as a person in your life you feel. I can't assume that anyone listening to this listened to our conversations on complexity podcast, Jeffrey, so I'm going to try and move from a position of naivete about some of this stuff. But yeah, knowing nothing about your audience, who are you, and what forces animated you to become a researcher pursuing the kind of questions that you're pursuing together and separately? Yeah, that's a complicated question or a complex question.
My background is in evolutionary theory, and there is a long history of how I got there that might not be completely relevant at this point. But in the context of evolutionary theory, we were always interested in major transitions or real evolutionary innovations. So my dear friend, Eric Davidson, late Eric Davidson, always used to say, I don't care about petunia fences, how you get a different color on a plant, I care about how we get a new body plant in evolution. And so that was the sort of space within which I grew up with in evolutionary theory, and did some of the early mathematical models trying to do this very limited data decades ago, trying to get some more complex systems sinking into population genetics, and then realizing that this avenue will lead to, I think, very soon, either alcoholism or mental breakdown, because population genetics is the wrong approach to understand those questions.
And so then I did a little bit with, by continuing to do evolutionary theory, I also moved into history and history of science, because I was interested in the evolution of systems more generally, and that was audio plans or the way to knowledge systems. And once you are in that space, then you realize first of all that it's interconnected and you end up at SFI, but then also that there are deeper historical movements that we need to understand about the time we live in and the transition that got us to where we are. And that's why I was very early on, I was part of this discussion grout that sort of investigated the Anthropocene from various points of view. And mine was always looking at the Anthropocene as a result of a co-evolutionary dynamics between different elements of the system.
And so that then got us to what we did to amuse ourselves during the pandemic. And that was basically the Anthropocene equation and the Anthropocene engine. I guess that's what we are talking about today. But first, Jeffrey?
Yes, thank you. First of all, delighted to be here and great to doing this podcast with us, the treat to see where it ends up and how it goes. But I'm a physicist, a theoretical physicist, and I spend much, most of my career doing a classic high energy fundamental physics, meaning quarks and blue arms and string theory and dark matter on all these wonderful questions. And there's a sequence of accidents that got me interested in what I consider big questions in biology.
I should say, as a background to that, I've always been interested in questions beyond the field that I was working. In fact, one of my frustrations in general in academia was that you always had to focus on something very specific, not only a specific field, not only a specific subfield, but some specific set of problems within that subfield. So I always had this frustration. And so I got intrigued by these extraordinary scaling laws in biology, which I came across just accidentally because I was teaching physics for, it used to be called physics for poets or physics for medical students, physics for biology students.
And I was looking, for example, in the biological area that sort of had a physics-y taste to them. And I came across these extraordinary scaling laws, namely that despite the image of natural selection and evolution, the arbitrary and capricious of producing anything you want, just depending on a bunch of historical accidents, somehow when you actually measure things and you measure physiology of animals and their life history and so on, all the various things you could possibly measure. Amazingly, when you look at how they change with size, they have this extraordinary systematic, regular behavior. And not only that, the mathematics behind it is these very simple, power law scaling relations.
And this intrigued me enormously, that kind of long story short, I started working on it and quickly realized that the one commonality that might be able to explain it, since it, by the way, it not only was across the entire biosphere, but it was across the entire biosphere. It was across all these multiple variables, so it had a kind of universality to it. And the explanation I started working on was the idea that this was a reflection of the mathematics and physics of networks, namely the networks that supply energy and information across a highly complex system, such as an organism, which has enormous number of customers, so to speak, that have to be serviced efficiently. That got me involved with the SFI with the SFI Institute, basically, and it actually matured into a serious piece of work with collaborations with Jim Brown and Brian Inquist through what the SFI Institute brought me into the orbit of SFI.
And so to speak, in terms of my life, the rest is history, because I unwittingly migrated from traditional physics into questions of biology, and that led to questions in social systems, because it was very easy to extrapolate conceptually that if you start to think of cities and organizations, and so on, they too have, at least metaphorically, much in common with organisms. And in fact, so that work took on a whole dynamic of itself, and I started the collaborations looking at cities and discovered that they too satisfied similar meaning mathematically, scaling laws. But these scaling laws had a very interesting consequence, as this thing from biology, because in biology, the bigger you are, generally, the less per capita, or less per cell of most things, and that's called sublinear scaling. But in these cities, so these social systems are for things that involved information exchange, the bigger you are, the more per capita, and that's called super linear scaling.
And to cut a long story short, that led to something quite fascinating that if you asked how did the system grow, it grew faster than exponential, which was extraordinary. So it was great, because that's what we see. So that was very satisfying. That was the good news about it, but the bad news was it gave rise to these so-called finite time singularities, which effectively meant through the theory the system is destined to collapse.
That was within that context. Again, unwittingly, I began to realize that this is obviously what's going on in the entire planet. It's not just in a social organization or a city, it's the whole bloody planet is like this. And we should think about applying these ideas to the planet, and that this faster than exponential growth, which is what we've seen for the last couple of hundred years, is inevitably leading to these so-called singularities, which means either you collapse or you make some major innovation and change in order to somehow avoid it.
But that's what we're up against. And that's what I realized what the Anthropocene from this viewpoint was all about, except that in the way, since I got into it, through thinking about cities, I felt a bit much more as the Obanossean, rather than the Anthropocene, but Anthropocene is the word people use. But it's in fact this idea that the growth of the population expansion, the expansion of urbanization is behind the Anthropocene and all the problems that we have. And indeed, one of the nice things about it is the very dynamic that has led to enormous success during the Anthropocene, namely the kind of quality and standard of life we all participate in, we're privileged to participate in, is also the origin of all our problems.
And if we don't address them, it's going to kill us. So that's where I came to, and then came together with Montford, Derek, and Chris, you can talk about them to form this collaboration during COVID. And it's been quite exciting. Excellent.
Manfred, this being the first time I've really had the opportunity to have an actual conversation with you at length, I just want to celebrate this common interest. We have major evolutionary transitions. This question of the emergence of new levels of individuality and new regulatory networks and how this is all related to the evolution of communication and of intelligence and of society. These are the things that got me into complexity science back in 2005 as an undergrad.
And it's a criminal disappointment that took me so long to find your work. Looking back on it now, what I would love to pluck at with you both is how you've situated this within the extended evolutionary synthesis. And the way that I link in the show notes to your writing on the growth and differentiation of metabolism in extended evolutionary dynamics in the technosphere, the Anthropocene being something that as Jeffrey pointed out, is defined by relationships between humans and technologies as well as non-human organisms. And yeah, this question of the externalization of regulation and regulatory states from organisms into the environment and the internalization of regulatory processes through the way that they exert pressure on individual behavior or they change the functions or the adaptive processes of organisms.
What I want to aim at is where both of you seem quite comfortable in this much broader more general thinking about adaptive system processes and nesting these thoughts about the biosphere in a physical framework and an informational framework. And yeah, so I guess this is just the invitation to roll out the basic conceptual framework that you've formalized in your work and to talk a little bit about the Anthropocene engine and niche construction and all that stuff. Yeah, so let's continue what Jeffrey started. There's an interesting intellectual history.
If you think about the foundation of the Santa Fe Institute, one of the foundational ideas by Anderson, you know, that more is different. And what that basically means is that once you are in that sphere of complex systems, and so let's take living systems, the prime example here, that you cannot simply extrapolate some highly abstracted rules and believe that will give you an explanation. So there needs to be a different set of principles. And so that was a deep theoretical insight, and that was very difficult to realize what that actually means.
And Jeffers and others work scaling provided one of the first ways of identifying what that different actually means as an explanatory principle. So we are basically there that there are emergent properties that govern those complex systems that are a consequence about the network of the network architecture that those systems have. There was an independent development that focused on the role of networks in understanding complex biological system that came about in trying to understand what genes actually do. And the answer is nothing by themselves, but only as part of highly complex regulatory network architectures can be basically understand how the genome is a highly multi-dimensional complex systems in interaction with other systems all the way to the environment builds an organism.
And so the similar operating principle here where they are both governed by network structures. And so then the point was if you then look at biological systems, so you have those intrinsic network architecture that you need to understand in order to understand how those complex phenotypes come about, then you realize that the whole mathematical theory of population genetics, which is basically a Newtonian discipline in the sense that it has simple particles and describes their dynamics or time, doesn't really cut it. And so you need to understand how those networks transform. And then you realize that you can just look at the genome in isolation and say that gives you an explanation of phenotypes and organisms because those networks interact with their environment, they interact with their context.
And that gives you still in the same framework of more is different and not a set of explanatory causal mechanisms. And namely the feedback mechanisms between how the intrinsic organismal structures construct their environment and if their environment then persists through time, how those construct their structures provide feedback back into the way those complex regulatory systems operate. So this is where we arrived at that model of extended evolution that you alluded to, that interaction between intrinsic networks and extrinsic networks and the feedback relationships that originate as part of that dynamic. And this is what we call externalization and internalization.
In a way, how we then got to study the Anthropocene? So you have Jeff's trajectory from metabolic scaling to the application into cities and social systems trying to identify those emergent network properties as the different that we need to understand and us coming from understanding more traditional evolutionary theory, realizing that we are basically hit the same kind of conceptual framework. And then once we roll in more that feedback between the constructed niche and the intrinsic system, then we really start going and trying to apply that to culture and social dynamics and the interactions between the constructed environment or the technosphere, the natural environment and the social environment and what actually are the feedback mechanisms inside of that system that we need to understand that overarching dynamics that we call the Anthropocene. And the nice thing as it turns out from a scientific point of view that with order complexity, there is a very straightforward and simple actually mechanism that drives the whole thing.
And that's what we then call the Anthropocene engine. And we got through that mechanism by looking at large diverse datasets and applying those principles for scaling analysis that allow us to identify those different regularities. And then we found one as they did in metabolic and urban scaling that is actually relatively simple, but that has those dangerous consequences because the exponent in many of those systems is even larger than it is in urban scaling. That means that the acceleration dynamic that Jeffery was referring to is really coming into play in those Anthropocene systems.
Do you want to stack on that, Jeffery? Yes, no, you're sitting very well, one for it. Yes, just one or two points. I think one thing that is I think is quite interesting in terms of conceptually for the moment is that just going back to basic ideas about complex systems is that it's maybe a bit of a platitude, but it's anti-reductionistic and it's outlook because the traditional form of doing much of science and certainly physics and the background from which I emerge is that you have these elementary constituents, whatever they are, the corks, it could be atoms, it could be all the social systems, it could be people.
And the many body system, the collective system is built up from those constituents. And if you know the properties of the constituents and something about the way they interact, you can in principle as the idea that you could determine something about the collective. So one of the things that comes out of this network stuff is that it's a simple example of what Manfred was saying. It's not exactly top down and it's not exactly bottom up.
So for example, the metabolism, the metabolic rate scales as so-called, just to use the technical phrase, it's mass to the three quarters, which simply means roughly speaking, if you double the size of an organism, doubling the metabolic rate, which you would naively expect from that sort of reductionist view, you've doubled the number of cells, you expect to double the metabolic rate. So you don't, you only increase it by three quarters, about 75%. So you have this nice saving every time you double the size of about 25%. But that means that the fundamental constituents, in this case, the cells, even though quote, they are the same, my liver cell at this level of granularity, my liver cell is the same as that of a mouse or whale.
In fact, they're behaving differently in those organisms. There's downregulated in the whale because of this economy of scale and they're relative to me upregulated in the mouse much faster. And so the network is in fact interacting back on the constituent from which it was made. So there's this interesting interplay and it's crucial.
And so it is with cities and indeed the planet, that is, for this super linear scaling, there's positive feedback in social networks that gives rise to super linear behavior, namely, the bigger you are, so to speak, the more socioeconomic activity per capita in a systematic way. So that, for example, just to give you a simple example, New York is about 100 times bigger than Santa Fe, it's about 100 centafaces in terms of population. But New York produces twice as many patents per annum than Santa Fe. It's much more inventive than Santa Fe.
And so it is with also economic metrics. So the number of crimes is also twice as much and so on per capita and so forth. So there's the human being in Santa Fe. And it's obvious it's a no brainer.
Living in Santa Fe, you're a different human being in a certain sense than you are living in New York. But you can go one step further and realize something interesting that if you separated, if New York is about 15 million people, if you took that 15 million people and you treated each one as an independent sort of guru and you put them on top of the mountain to contemplate the universe, you could ask how many patents were the 15 million people top each one independently not interacting with anybody else produced? Of course, the answer is zero. Produce none.
There's no socioeconomic interact. So none of the great things happen. It comes, it happens importantly because of interactions bringing people together and the more people that you bring together, the more socioeconomic, living in Santa Fe, you're a different human being in a certain sense than you are living in New York. But you can go one step further and realize something interesting that if you separated, New York is about 15 million people.
If you took that 15 million people and you treated each one as an independent sort of guru and you put them on top of the mountain to contemplate the universe, you could ask how many patents were the 15 million people each one independently not interacting with anybody else produced? Of course, the answer is zero. Produce none. There's no socioeconomic interact.
So none of the great things happen. It happens importantly because of interactions bringing people together and the more people that you bring together, the more socioeconomic output you have of good, man and ugly. And that's the thing that is, of course, led us to the place we are in the Anthropocene, including the threat of collapse because that's the thing, as I just wrote people like I said earlier, that's the thing that drives this faster than exponential growth. And just the last thing from just a riff on what Manfred said, the wonderful thing is you can write down the theory mathematically and make predictions about these things.
And I think the thing that really stimulated this recent burst of work beginning as I said as we said at the beginning of COVID, unfortunately, was that there was this lovely dataset that was put together by a man named Wolf Stefan who died last year, Australian, who put together dataset on global metrics, all kinds of things, everything from the obvious to energy use, total energy use to how much fish have made shrimp of being harvested and so on. But anything he could get his hands on, he put together in this way and he drew these little graphs, you see these big hockey sticks of their growth, their super exponential growth as predicted by this theory. But also, he didn't take it any further. One of the great things that we did, I think, exciting things is that we translated these data into the scaling framework and remarkably, these things scale in a very systematic way and they confirm the theory, the predictions of the theory, in terms of we're headed towards singularity.
It's unequivocal. And so that's very exciting and the question is to put more meat on this. I would like to sidestep here for just a moment and talk a little bit about the technosphere specifically because you're talking about, I'd like at this point, a human in Santa face, different than a human in New York, cousin lives in Brooklyn. So I know what you mean.
Listening to your talks, Monfred, one particular talk that you gave on the Anthropocene campus about technosphere coevolution presented with Jurgen Ren, you talk about something that, and then there's this other talk, a talk on the technosphere on that Anthropocene curriculum. These two pieces, I was looking at them, you asked a couple of questions, I want to paraphrase your questions and I want to solicit your reflection seven years on and all the research that you've done since. And these are a lot like work that you did in anchoring all of this in metabolic processes, the 2019 piece that you wrote, citing Olivia Judson, who's had a conversation with very early on at SFI and her way that she's thinking about major innovations in energy source identification and utilization, the age of flash, the age of fire and chemical energy and so on. And now we're now at a point where we're utilizing all of these things.
And so again, there's a very deep layer here at which, one of the things I'm constantly poking at on this show is this assumption that people grew up with that we are separate from our technologies in some way. And everything that you just said about the evolutionary framework in which this is abstracted out to regulatory interactions suggests otherwise. What am I saying? I'm saying that one of the questions that I heard you bring up, love to hear you address, is this question of when the technosphere actually began because you talk about the production of oxygen in the atmosphere by cyanobacteria.
There's this obvious kind of analogy with that and the anthropogenic climate change and atmospheric pollution. And it's not at all clear to me where there deserves to be like a hard line, a qualitative distinction being made between the quote unquote industrial processes of microbes and those of human beings except for, as you've already indicated, that the scale of these processes makes them behave in a new emergent distinct fashion. So that's part of it. The question of the body of this post-human organism or whatever it is, you think of all of civilization, the body of that thing living inside it means that our behavioral repertoire, our possibilities as humans are very different than the possibilities that we had as humans a thousand years ago or maybe a thousand years from now if we managed to live through this.
But the sense that I get meditating on all of this stuff is that we actually have far less agency as these like rational modern individual actors than we thought we did maybe 300 years ago. I love in conversation with David Krakauer for instance, his points about how modernity could be defined as the age in which the aggregate knowledge increasingly outpaces individual understanding. What are we even capable of doing? Do you think?
This is an adontingly large question. But so yeah, where did the technosphere start? And then what agency do you think people individually or collectively really have in steering this sort of emergent telos or directionality in the evolutionary forces that generate new regulatory layers in the whatever we're calling this thing, the biosphere technosphere interopocene? I think this is a whole bunch of very interesting questions.
So let's try to construct a narrative answer because I think that's what we need to have here so that anybody can still follow what we are talking about here. Well, starting with this Olivia's reconstruction of the major energy transitions. That basically ties it right into the framework of major evolutionary transition where something truly interesting happens that changes the dynamics. But one interesting lesson is if you look at that chart and it looks great.
So you have the anaerobic sort of chemical geochemical energy then you get oxygen into the mixture then you can metabolize flesh in that sense and then we start burning things. But they are not replacements. They are basically nested because none of the previous energy systems disappeared. And so what that also means to one of your many dimensions of the questions about how that creates more and more complex individuals in the sense that an aggregate becomes an integrated individual and we are composed for instance now of our cells but we also are composed of ten times more bacteria cells so we are this aggregated system of complexity and each one of them different energy usages and the like.
So it is a cumulative but also integrative evolutionary process and many speak this up in our age where we burn things in our human history, quiet different types of energy sources from keeping warm, extracting more energy out of our food that we have. It is a cumulative system and in each of those steps the boundaries of what we consider the individual shifts and becomes more aggregated and integrated in as part of this core evolutionary framework. And that gets us then to the technosphere and the Jeffery statement that an individual in Santa Fe is different from an individual in New York because we can just look at the individual outside of their social and also material connectivity. The built environment in New York is different than the built environment in Santa Fe.
That means that extended individual in Santa Fe what we utilize in terms of the technosphere, the built environment is distinct from New York for instance. So that makes us different living in those different places because it is not just us, it is us plus everything surrounding us. And so that became a very important insight in getting to this entropolis integration and entropolis in India because once we did the transformation of those hockey stick graphs into scaling, that means we basically substituted time by population which is what you do with scaling analysis. And then we had to figure out now what is that individual that actually drives the whole thing.
And then doing the inspired by the work on metabolic scaling is writing down a growth equation. It turned out that it is not just the growth of us as a biological object. It is us plus all our infrastructure that is the energy use that drives us and that gets this hyper exponential scaling curve about energy use. And so we divided the core of the representation parts between maintenance and growth but not about just the biological individual but also that extended individual.
So that means you plus you have contribution to the technosphere. And if I look at you here, there are a lot of technosphere objects in the background. It took energy to make and add a part of your extended self in that sense. So that became the essence.
And so in that sense, it became extremely logical to say that in our human evolution, we cannot just look at it as an individual species. We can't even look at any animal or plant just as an individual species because all of them have to be contemplated with in their connectivity and with in their constructed niches of us as the technosphere. So in that sense, the question of the origin of the technosphere, you can go all the way back. That was the argument that I made that Berlin and drop us in campus.
But then at some point, in that evolutionary history, you have major events that sort of introduce something qualitatively different. And so that's when we had this growth dynamic and we saw that generally the relationship between individuals and the environment has interesting feedback relationships. And in any ecosystem, they are positive and negative. Every species would exponentially grow if you let them.
But then there are regulatory interactions that prevent this. And then we realized that at some point, roughly 8,000 years ago, in our evolution, we have managed to close a positive feedback cycle between population, knowledge production and energy use. And that engine has been running ever since, sometimes faster than others, but generally accelerating. And so that then allowed us to bring all of the experience that Jeffrey and others have with those scaling laws and the growth equations.
And also it identified the difference that characterizes the Anthropocene, the associated technosphere. And that is namely that we took out as part of cultural and knowledge evolution, a lot of the regulatory feedbacks that were originally in the system. And that puts us on that trajectory towards collapse that Jeffrey was talking about. Jeff, do you want to?
Yes. Yes. I think Montfred has articulated very well thinking, I think one of the, I think in terms of the development of our ideas, I think formulating was already in the air kind of thing. It was certainly in some of our implicit, at least in some of our previous work on cities.
But really, I think one of the big leaps conceptually was in fact this idea of the extended individual. That is that the individual, all the baggage you carry with you, because you carry with you, not just the stuff we can see in the picture there, your microphone and headphones and your guitar on the wall and the split air conditioner on the road. But you carry when your refrigerator and your car and the roads and the airplane, you carry all that with you too, actually. That is you.
And as Montfred says, that's why it's why. A citizen of New York is actually different in some ways from a citizen in Santa Fe and so forth. So that's crucial. And associated with that is also the idea in terms of thinking about metabolism and metabolic rate that the analog to your individual metabolic rate, your biological metabolic rate, 2000 food calories you eat a day to stay alive, you actually are being supplied by 11,000 watts, which is some humongous amount of calories per day as your social metabolic rate.
There's some analog to that. And that's the thing that's driving the system is your, so to speak, social metabolic rate. So it's quite analogous to thinking about the growth and life history of an organism in many ways. The new thing is just to reemphasize what we've already said, this extraordinary event or sequence of events about discovery or invention or evolution of language, the fact that we could start to communicate with each other and the discovery of economies of scale that by working together, therefore exchanging information, we can accomplish more than each was working individually, and then coupled that with the evolution of agriculture, becoming century human, century organisms forming communities, that was the beginning, beginning about 10,000 years ago.
And in many ways, that is the beginning of the technosphere, because I think that's where all the things that we associate with technology, as primitive as it might have been all the kind of sophisticated things we do today really began in earnest. And we've been on this extraordinary trajectory ever since, and we've, and as emphasized by Munford, and we began to separate ourselves from the rest of the biosphere, because up to that point, anything you measured in terms of these scaling laws about us, we fit to where we should be for the kind of mammal the size we are. Now we no longer do, we're completely separated, and we've discarded those constraints, we're unhindered, and that's been marvelous in terms of being able to do those kinds of things we're doing at this very moment, but it has these dire consequences, and those dire consequences very threatening. And one of the other consequences that we haven't really mentioned up to now, and that is that it is associated with it, it doesn't get enough exposure, I think, is that this positive feedback in social dynamics and social networks that drives this at a sort of fundamental level also gives rise to the increasing pace of life.
That is, everything about life is inextricably been speeding up in a systematic way, including the rate at which we innovate, and the rate at which we have to innovate. And that goes a little bit to your question about this question, is the technosphere, therefore the amount of innovation that's going on if you like, about its own independent dynamic? And I think the answer is yes or no, I hate to put it that way, because after all, it does come from us, it is us, and it comes from us interacting and doing the kinds of things where we've institutionalized that positive feedback, at universities and at our research labs and our whole structural society. Institutionalized is that positive feedback, and that positive feedback is the source of the entire technosphere.
So in the sense that the technosphere has its own dynamic is actually a statement that all of that social interaction, that positive feedback and continually reinforcing itself in social interactions is an inevitable consequence, presumably, of the discovery of language. And they go along handing love. And so if we magically could all stop talking, but not communicate, the technosphere would stop. It doesn't have a obvious statement, it can't go on.
In the same way, by the way, there's got nothing with anything. AI could not go on if we stopped. I'm so glad you led me right up to the doorstep of this question, because there is this anxiety that one friend I've heard you speak to in some of your talks about the question of the autonomy of the technosphere from the biosphere. And if you really believe, have as much curiosity as I do as a kind of like cultural anthropologist about, you know, I'm going to watch these names, Emil Torres, the two philosophers of coin this term, test kriol, the transhumanism, extrubianism, this long list of cosmism, long termism, et cetera, that there is this, it strikes me, hold on, let me back up.
So something you said, Monfer about, actually, both of you said this, pointed to the successes of civilization leading to the interruption of negative feedbacks in the biosphere that prevented the way, like outcome in which so many people today talk about humankind as an invasive species on our own planet, where they talk about humans as a cancer. And while I'm not willing to do this, the sort of anti-natal conclusions of looking at things in that way, there are good, there's some sound reasoning behind the analogy, right? There is this issue that I think I saw, it was John Pepper from the National Cancer Center that came and gave a talk at us a few years ago about energy utilization and drew that kind of connection with the discovery of fossil fuels and so on in his talk. And yeah, it's a disruption of the checks and balances, right?
It's like the, also equivalent to the proliferation of executive orders in American politics upsetting legislation and judicial branch agency in the sort of trinity of things that hold each other in check. And so it's like this, the anxiety around the machines taking off and destroying us all or leaving us in the dust to go live their own independent transcendent thing seems to me, I don't know, this is more of a philosophical question maybe, but I'd love to hear you anchor it scientifically. Seems rooted in a pathological over emphasis on individuality at a particular layer that shows up in so many of the more extreme modernist kinds of thinking, like Ayn Rand's objectivism, how she can enter the acknowledgments of a book, she can say, no one helped me. She's a refugee, like how do you get away with saying that?
Like how do you, how is it that you think that? And yeah, it makes sense if you understand that that kind of thinking is adaptive to and emerges from within a kind of information processing ecosystem. And this is one of those instances where, just to give a nod to some of the folks that work with you at ASU, Monfred, I heard a talk about the Center for Science Imagination at ASU, who had Jeff VanderMeer, Caitlin Smith, and Merlin Sheldrake on, for a conversation about the sort of implications of psychological research on culture and on the way that we understand the self in the 21st century. And the term they kept coming back to was networked and porous selves.
This accelerating innovation flywheel that we're on right now is one that is making us more transparent to, or porous to one another. And it's changing the way, like you've already made clear about the extended phenotype of a person, this extended kind of colonial selfhood that each of us partake in now, that this is getting us back to something that maybe more closely approximates, at least it seems to me, a kind of pre-modern worldview of participation in these systems and in relational dynamics that's maybe a little unfair here. But it strikes me at least on the first pass more like an indigenous way of thinking than it does a continental European enlightenment way of thinking. And so I guess what I would love to hear you speak to if I can is something that you in a piece that you wrote for Salon, Monfred brought up the reintroduction of negative feedback into socioeconomic technical systems, not radical population control, you say, or war, but in the form of norms, values, and regulations, as on excess greenhouse gas emissions.
I had a similar conversation with Tim Coler and Martin Sheffer on complexity podcast back in 2020, where they were trying to look at the work that had been done to rapidly change people's thinking around smoking in public, and they were looking at that as a case study that was maybe hopeful here. It strikes me that there is this weird viral proliferating, extropian kind of religion that we're still at the wheel, that we're only becoming more agentic, that by merging with the advanced computational technologies in some kind of science-fictional way that we will transcend all of this stuff. And I don't know. I don't know.
I guess I would love to hear you speak to bringing rules back into the casino or like limiting the rate which a cancerous cell can requisition resources, a salary caps or growth caps or rate limiting communications processes. The last thing I'll say about it is that I was just listening to this author, Jor Polleg, on Jim McShaughnessy's podcast, talk about the future of work, and talk about how as the economy scales and more and more becomes automated, fewer and fewer people will be responsible for a larger and larger fraction of the production. And that just seems to be in a way just extrapolating historical trends into the future. But we see this in anthills too, right?
Really big ones. Fewer ants are doing anything at a time. And yet, I don't know. Is that actually a desirable future?
A future? I don't know. I've thrown entirely too much at you, but I'd love to hear you take what of that you want and riff on that. You'll tease us both with AI and the machines will take over.
And I just am very relaxed about this by pointing out what I said before about the energy transition in Olivia Judson's work that they're all nested and dependent on each other. If we would believe our sort of pure sense of self, and that is just us, and we would really practice that to the extent we would all be dead because we can't digest anything without the 10 times more microbial cell in our gut. So that's the dependency. And so if you begin to understand that as a consequence of co-evolutionary history, then I want to know what pure modernist machine wants to take over and say we can live without the supporting humans in that sense.
So it's always a ridiculously silly discussion. Reminds me on a quote that at his late age, the cantankerous Conrad Lawrence once said about humans, and he said, to believe pure nonsense is a privilege of humans. Because no animal could do that. It would be a dead animal.
So we have to create a nichas. And you see this now with political polarization and all those echo chambers in social media, where you can get away with believing pure nonsense and acting on it because we have a way to my society. I would say that it would be a very straightforward way to just make, since we are basically back in some medieval times in this country, we might as well go to medieval practice and everybody who denies reality, they would take up on the roof of a building and so since you don't believe in science Trump, and we will see where the gravity wins. And take care of the problem immediately.
But anyway, so that's cynical aside. But to your point that what is actually happening in those emerging systems is what would be future dynamical equilibrium, we don't know. And I think we have to also be honest about that biological systems or ecological systems. They are not that much better.
They are equally stupid because we are so quote unquote because everybody in there also has this intrinsic gross dynamic and they are not all harmonious. It's just as the timescale for finding a dynamical balance, so to speak, appropriate for the system. And so we are going back to what Jeff has started out very early, one of the consequences of what we studied is this great acceleration of life. And that is really the problem because that means that the time frame in finding an appropriate sort of confused but somewhat dynamically stable equilibrium gets shorter and shorter.
And so that is where the challenge is. So we very quickly moved from a world of isolated tribes connected with some trade routes to a more and more integrated globalized world of over eight billion. And while we have certain institutions that we begin to understand how they culturally emerge that regulates smaller groups, we don't have a clue how to socially regulate eight billion people. But we got there very quickly and what we didn't build up and there was not enough time for that to naturally in a very emerge.
The appropriate regulatory structures that will allow those people to meaningfully interact with less friction and somewhat more peaceful tendencies. So that's the problem. The problem with what Jeff has said, acceleration. Let me just build on that a little bit because one of the things that is so remarkable is that this has all happened as we've emphasized in what best 10,000 years.
In fact, most of it's happened quite recently, of course. And indeed, I was thinking earlier, in fact, for just reminds me of it, there's now over eight billion people on the planet. When I was born, which is not that long ago, I feel I'm old, but it's over 80 years ago, there are already two billion. That is what is extraordinary is that we have adapted and incorporated the six billion people in such an incredibly short period of time.
In fact, it speaks extraordinarily about the ease with which we have been able to adapt. And so here's the problem. 10,000 years ago, we made this transition, this beginning transition. Now we're going through multiple transitions, which we've put in terms of the technosphere.
Our biology is exactly the same. In fact, our brain is essentially exactly the same. You have the same brain that you did when you were hunting and gathering, sitting around in those little tribes and so on, and a pace of life that was on today's scale, very relaxed. You may have had greater anxieties about different things, but it was basically the same organism.
And yet, the pace of life is just zoomed since then. And socioeconomic life has increased faster than exponentially, whereas biological life has basically stayed in very insane. And that brings up another sort of technical, even conceptual question. At what point, independent of any of this, are we simply not able to adapt fast enough?
And I feel that's what we're approaching. And that's one of the significant problems that we're approaching. And so I also want to go back thinking about your earlier question, which is related to this change, and you introduced it by trying to ask whether son of bacteria producing oxygen, polluting the earth with oxygen, is that actually much different than a bunch of human beings producing all this junk in the air now, in that sort of essence of your question. And I think the fundamental difference is that the great change that took place during the Industrial Revolution is the Industrial Revolution was, of course, the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, and the change that has taken place and that distinguishes us from those that produced oxygen and polluted the planet in what we now think of as a healthy way a long time ago.
The difference is that we're burning up the planet. Those everything up to 200 years ago, operated from the energy of the sun, and we were totally open system. We operated totally from that. Beginning 200 years ago, we started burning energy that is already stored in the classic stored energy problem, and we're simply burning the planet.
And that is categorically, thermodynamically and conceptually quite different than anything that's come behind us. And in some ways is the most fundamental law and constraint that we've broken. And that's one reason I, and I'm presuming many others, so passionate about getting back to a state where we're dependent upon the external energy source rather than continually burning the planet. And so having one of the obvious things that, of course, many of us are proponents of is, in fact, getting quote renewable energy sources to return, which is basically a return to our biological origins and deriving source from the sun directly rather than burning the stuff that's been stored here.
So that's just one of the biggest examples of where we've broken the law. And now the time is to restore that law. Do I have time for one more quick question with you guys? I have to run in about seven or eight minutes.
Okay, that's plan to take part. So I guess this all really comes down to Jeffrey, when I first had you on complexity podcast and so many times I've heard you speak, the whole thing ends with, but what are we going to do about it? And you've given us a taste of might be done, really want to bring this question into a cute focus. And Monfred just ripped a quote directly out of one of your talks here, because I thought you really, you said this so parsimoniously, the consequences of the Anthropocene or the product of innovations.
And yet somehow we think the way out is through even more innovation. This, you say euphemistically is a predicament. Innovation has to be looked at critically. One of the interesting things in the history of life is the oppression of innovation.
And of course, this is just to be restating the last question I asked the two of you, but there is such a powerful root in contemporary thinking toward the agency and the liberty of the individual or a trust in the dynamics, the fairness of free markets and these kinds of things. And yet here we are where your thinking brings us directly to the doorstep of question about where do we need to reinstate oppression in order to make this thing work? I'd love to know what your closing thoughts are on how we can continue to benefit from the gains of progress, of social progress, technological progress, while mitigating not only the externalities we're producing at a given time, but getting ourselves out of this cycle that sooner or later we can mathematically guarantee is going to come back and bite us if it's not biting us already. Like that would get to a point where even with the assistance of AI, we're having to make decisions faster than the cognitive layer of the Anthropocene can handle.
Like we really put the pressure on this thing to bring things back into balance. That is, I think you've ended with what might be the subject of a subsequent conversation because we can always really put a few points on the map here. I think the important thing is that we have, and this is historically very relatively recent, that celebration of let's say individuality and innovation as a value in and of itself is historically not very old. If you look into biological systems, they have very elaborate mechanisms to suppress innovation.
If you simply look at the number of mutations that we carry that do exactly nothing because they are a layered system in an organism or in a cell that do not allow that genetic innovation to be expressed in a certain way because it might potentially be very harmful, then you already begin to see that this is something that we should also consider. And if you look at the evolution of constitutions or legal systems, something that David and others specify are looking at too, then you see that the main structure of those documents is to strive a balance between freedom and obligations. We have forgotten the obligations part in that sense. So it's not that this is heard of at unknown, it's just that I would say over the last several decades we have entered in the West primarily, but now being copied at other places, an interesting ideological trajectory that sort of forgets half of that equation.
And it's not that we have to completely reinvent something from scratch. It's that was always be part of a cultural tradition that sort about what is just and what is a good life and all those things. And there were almost those balance arguments go back to the hypocrites, it's still the only reasonable definition of house that we have. It's basically some sort of balance.
And whatever that then means in concrete terms remains to be seen, but I think that will be an interesting subject for a follow up discussion. Can I build on that a little bit? Yeah, take a look. I agree with everything, one for a second, but I want to add slightly radical view about what might get us out of this.
And that is that the thing that's the problem at least that we seem to be facing is that we have this kind of inevitability that as I just repeat again, this dynamic that's led to our success leads to this extraordinary super exponential growth that leads to this singularities. And to avoid that singularity, we have to make a paradigm shift, a major innovation. And that's what we've been doing. And the problem is that would be great.
We've done it and we will hopefully continue to do it. But the real issue is we have to do it faster. And that's the thing we can't keep up with. So eventually the system, if you just take it a face value, is doomed to collapse unless you could intervene in that dynamic.
So that's first point and month for it is brought up on this possibility that one of the reasons for this is that we've been breaking the law a little bit relative to biology, relative to the biology. Now, I want to bring a slightly different take on it is that when you think of the word innovation these days, the last 20, 30 years, you immediately think innovation means technology. It's almost become synonymous with technology. And innovation means another one of these, which has got a bloody number 15 has just come out yesterday to drive us nuts.
And it just continues and we'll go faster and faster. And of course, an innovation is much more than that. An innovation, of course, is ideas, but you have social and cultural innovation and paradigm shifts. Many of those in the past have happened because of the role of leadership and individuals.
And one of the problems we have today is we don't see that. We don't have individuals or even small collectives of individuals who have enough charisma and presence to change our way of thinking because that's fundamentally what we have to do. We have to return to a different state or go into a new state where instead of always thinking individually and how much more can I get the idea of greed where both positive and negative being a driving force in the system to seeing things as much more as not just giving, but not just taking, but giving, not just, but also being conscious of the collective of one of the better phrases, love like neighbor. And this of course has been done in the past by the role of individuals.
We just met Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Martin Luther King and so on. They played these major, so crystallizing roles of tapping in to this positive feature of human beings to change the way in which they relate to each other and they relate to their neighbors and to the collective as a whole. And none of them have lasted very long in terms of what was originally supposed to be that dynamic, but nevertheless they've had profound effects. And we need something like that today.
The kind of leadership that we have is exactly the opposite. It tends to be authoritarian in nature. It tends to emphasize individuality, the role of the individual. More is better.
It believes in fake news. It doesn't tell truth. It doesn't even believe in science and the culture which is developing by individuals that have arisen for good reason in trying to attack these problems by providing extraordinarily simplistic answers which are very much a throwback. And so what we need now is really a sort of some modern version of one of those charismatic people that can somehow crystallize the, I sound very 60s, 70s here, the good, crystallize the good, make love not war, the kind of image.
Because we all know each individual has this expect from each of us has a murder inside of us. Each of us has a Jesus Christ inside of us and it's the, it sounds medieval, the battle between good and evil taking place, not just within individual, but among the collective. So I'm going way outside my comfort zone, but certainly by any expertise. But the only way I can see out of this is that somehow we need some mechanism which usually has been an individual to galvanize the forces of good to overcome the forces of evil so to speak.
And that is the paradigm shift and the innovation with which we can start to re-address these problems. Thank you for taking it there, even though, and perhaps especially because it wasn't a place that we could have ever gotten away with taking it on complexity. I think my biggest area of interest has always been what are the metaphysical implications of the complex. So that's good.
I'm not as a change. Yes, I'm willing to step out of my role as a scientist. I realize I'm way, it's not by expertise, but this is just me as an individual. This is not science.
It's not what science particularly tells you what we're all about. Science does tell you that if you don't do something, you're in deep mood. Fair. Thank you both so much for this.
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