PART II
“With great power, comes great responsibility”.
Greater the Power, Greater the Responsibility.
Greater the Power -> greater the scope for “Work” or “Anti-Work”, or in other words, greater the scope to be “Humane” or “Anti-Humane”. This ‘scope’ might be what we experience & commonly call as “free will”, or more accurately “agency” (“free will” scientifically cannot exist since we live in a causal universe bound by consistent laws of physics, but the more powerful we are in our systems context, the greater our agency over affecting our own and others’ set of possible choices & final decisions).
Therein lies the problem of Power. If “our Humane System” has more Power, it can very well be able to make other Systems “Humane” over time through “Work”. But, if “other Systems” are “Not Humane” (or “Inhumane” or “Anti-Humane”) and are more powerful that us, then they will slow us down, stop us or even destroy us.
Let’s look at the different pages on humanetech.com again now… it would appear that the Extractive Attention Economy and Human Downgrading mentioned there can be rephrased more broadly and described as “Labor controlled by ‘Anti-Humane’ Power”, or basically “Anti-Work”, which causes further growth in “Anti-Humane Power”, and simultaneously a decline in “Humanity” and “Humane Power”, in a vicious spiral of “Decline in Humanity” or “Anti-Humane Growth”. In short, Extractive Attention Economy, when expanded to be more than just about attention, is “Anti-Work”, and it causes not the mildly termed Human Downgrading, but rather “Anti-Humane Growth”.
“With great power, comes great responsibility”. Sadly, power doesn’t lie with the responsible, or get used responsibly these days. Why? Too much greed? Too less of a will-power to take risks with a good vision? Just lethargy & inertia? A combination of all these and bad design maybe? The last makes more sense, because it is the design of our systems that is responsible for kinds of feedback effects we get, making us powerful in both good and bad ways. This is how humans as a collective race have become efficient, effective & smarter in exploiting nature. But so far, we have mostly seen concentration of power in the hands of a few humans, and been adversely affected by the corrupting influences of such vast power on those few humans (or their inability of properly using that power at the very least).
So the over-arching problem for us is: How to do “Work” so that a “Humane System” (or an alliance of multiple such systems) can get more Power than the other “Anti-Humane Systems”, so that over time we can slow down, stop and reverse the “Anti-Humane Growth”, or in other words, start, sustain and accelerate “Humane Growth”, while protecting our systems from the vulnerabilities that individual humans have?