Generative Pluralism

Description

Breaking Smart:

"the principle of generative pluralism,

"Generative pluralism is what allows the virtuous cycle of surplus and spillover to operate. Ephemeralization — the ability to gradually do more with less — creates room for the pluralistic expansion of lifestyle possibilities and individual values, without constraining the future to a specific path.

The inherent unpredictability in the principle implies that both technological and social determinism are incomplete models driven by zero-sum thinking. The past cannot “determine” the future at all, because the future is more complex and diverse. It embodies new knowledge about the world and new moral wisdom, in the form of a more pluralistic and technologically sophisticated society.

Thanks to a particularly fertile kind of generative pluralism that we know as network effects, soft technologies like language and money have historically caused the greatest broad increases in complexity and pluralism. When more people speak a language or accept a currency, the potential of that language or currency increases in a non-zero-sum way. Shared languages and currencies allow more people to harmoniously co-exist, despite conflicting values, by allowing disputes to be settled through words or trade4 rather than violence. We should therefore expect software eating the world to cause an explosion in the variety of possible lifestyles, and society as a whole becoming vastly more pluralistic.

And this is in fact what we are experiencing today.

The principle also resolves the apparent conflict between human agency and “what technology wants”: Far from limiting human agency, technological evolution in fact serves as the most complete expression of it. Technology evolution takes on its unstoppable and inevitable character only after it breaks smart from authoritarian control and becomes part of unpredictable and unscripted collective invention culture. The existence of thousands of individuals and firms working relatively independently on the same frontier means that every possibility will not only be uncovered, it will be uncovered by multiple individuals, operating with different value systems, at different times and places. Even if one inventor chooses not to pursue a possibility, chances are, others will. As a result, all pastoralist forms of resistance are eventually overwhelmed.

...

The broader lesson of the principle of generative pluralism is this: through technology, societies become intellectually capable of handling progressively more complex value-based conflicts. As societies gradually awaken to resolution mechanisms that do not require authoritarian control over the lives of others, they gradually substitute intelligence and information for power and coercion."

(https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/the-principle-of-generative-pluralism/)