The Transhuman State
Apr. 21st, 2007 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI'm one of those science fiction writers who often ponders the question, "What's it like to live with a conscious entity that is wildly different from anything humanity kicks out?" The AIs and their peers in the Journal Entries is the obvious exploration of that theme; some of the preconditions of having an AI superculture that hasn't wiped out humanity is creating one in which the AI superculture, for arbitrary reasons, wants to keep human beings around.
But we already live with conscious entities that have interest in our world and power over it, and that we ordinary human beings have a hard time struggling with every day. They're called institutions. They exist in a Darwinian niche made up of human beings, they persist only through Darwinian struggles with other institutions, and the ones that cannot survive get selected out. Just as one of the big realizations of evolutionary psychology is that the evolutionary pressure of the human niche consists primarily of other human beings, the evolutionary pressures of instutitions comes from other institutions.
An obvious consequence of this line of thought is that institutions have desires and behaviors that aren't really in the best interests of human beings. An example of this was brought to me by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird when the state of Colorado, to discourage illegal immigrants from taking jobs Americans won't do, decided to ask for "volunteers" among prisoners to work the fields instead.
It's important to realize that if you give the state the power to collect fines or impose labor punishments, and the pressure of the purse means the state always needs more money and more labor, then it is not in the best interests of the state to limit those penalities or inform the populace of them. If you knew all of the things that you could do wrong, you wouldn't do them. Heck, you might get agitated and fight against them. You should be even more concerned when agencies have the power to make miscellaneous sublaws called "regulations," which have the same penalizing power as laws, because legislators are so overwhelmed that they turn over their responsibility to bureaucracies.
One of the points of my last point about anarchism and other governmental isms is that there comes a point in a institution when it becomes impossible for the average person to know everything he needs to know to deal with it. At that point, the institution has taken on a life of its own, a consciousness independent of the human beings of which it is made. And that consciousness, when it's the state, has the power of the gun. Turning prisoners into serfs is just one of those abuses of power about which we should be extraordinarily aware.
I remain convinced that the fewer laws the state has, the more likely it is that the agents of the state will be able to apply those laws meaningfully.
But we already live with conscious entities that have interest in our world and power over it, and that we ordinary human beings have a hard time struggling with every day. They're called institutions. They exist in a Darwinian niche made up of human beings, they persist only through Darwinian struggles with other institutions, and the ones that cannot survive get selected out. Just as one of the big realizations of evolutionary psychology is that the evolutionary pressure of the human niche consists primarily of other human beings, the evolutionary pressures of instutitions comes from other institutions.
An obvious consequence of this line of thought is that institutions have desires and behaviors that aren't really in the best interests of human beings. An example of this was brought to me by
solarbird when the state of Colorado, to discourage illegal immigrants from taking jobs Americans won't do, decided to ask for "volunteers" among prisoners to work the fields instead.It's important to realize that if you give the state the power to collect fines or impose labor punishments, and the pressure of the purse means the state always needs more money and more labor, then it is not in the best interests of the state to limit those penalities or inform the populace of them. If you knew all of the things that you could do wrong, you wouldn't do them. Heck, you might get agitated and fight against them. You should be even more concerned when agencies have the power to make miscellaneous sublaws called "regulations," which have the same penalizing power as laws, because legislators are so overwhelmed that they turn over their responsibility to bureaucracies.
One of the points of my last point about anarchism and other governmental isms is that there comes a point in a institution when it becomes impossible for the average person to know everything he needs to know to deal with it. At that point, the institution has taken on a life of its own, a consciousness independent of the human beings of which it is made. And that consciousness, when it's the state, has the power of the gun. Turning prisoners into serfs is just one of those abuses of power about which we should be extraordinarily aware.
I remain convinced that the fewer laws the state has, the more likely it is that the agents of the state will be able to apply those laws meaningfully.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-22 05:26 am (UTC)Well, sure, prisoners have it pretty good. They also get a bonus helping of race-related violence, a shiv in the belly while standing in the chow line, and gang-rape in the showers. That's living the good life, right there.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-22 11:51 pm (UTC)