Does history have a goal? Is it possible that all the human societies that existed are ultimately a prelude to establishing a system where one entity will govern everything the world over? The Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom proposes the "singleton hypothesis," maintaining that intelligent life on Earth will at some point organize itself into a so-called "singleton" – one organization that will take the form of either a world government, a super-intelligent machine (an AI) or, regrettably, a dictatorship that would control all affairs.
Other forms of a singleton may exist, and, ultimately, Bostrom believes one of them will come into existence. The philosopher argues that historically there's been a trend for our societies to converge in "higher levels of social organization". We went from bands of hunter gatherers to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states and now multi-national corporations, the United Nations and so forth, all the way to globalization – one of President Donald Trump's favorite targets for attack. One view of that trend sees increased power going to multi-national businesses and world government bodies, making globalization somewhat of a punching bag concept, often seen not as a needed re-organization of societies around the world, leading to increased cooperation and a peaceful international order, but rather for its potential to bring about the loss of jobs and undermine the sovereignties of individual countries, making citizens beholden to faceless totalitarian bureaucrats from foreign lands.
But a singleton doesn't have to result in a bad outcome, argues Bostrom. In fact, he thinks it could also be a good thing or at least something that's neither obviously positive or negative – just neutral. One way to get to a singleton, according to the philosopher, is through technology. Improved surveillance and communication, mind-control tech, molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence could all bring about a singleton.
While some aspects of such technologies could certainly be unwanted and infringe upon individual freedoms, Bostrom thinks that there are situations in which there could be broad support for either a technological solution or a single government agency to take control of the society. As the world grows more complex, it's harder to achieve efficient coordination between countries and individuals within them. Tech solutions in conjunction with converging moral values and a democratic worldwide government could facilitate that.
Other scenarios, like catastrophic events, could also hasten the creation of singletons. The League of Nations, for example, came out of World War I, while the creation of the United Nations was a byproduct of World War 2.
Some may view the current political trends of rising nationalism, tariff wars and anti-immigration platforms to mean that globalization and an overall unification of people the world over is not coming any time soon. In fact, it feels like we are going backwards on such a path.
In an email exchange with Big Think, Bostrom cautioned us to not only look at what is happening over the course of a decade or maybe even a few decades. There are much larger, historic trends at work, which may see the current times as a blip rather than a change in the overall direction.
"I don't think there's much evidence in the year-to-year (or even decade-to-decade) political jitters for the question of the long-term fate of Earth-originating civilization," writes Bostrom, while adding "Still, it seems a bit sad whenever the world is moving in the direction of fragmentation and unilateralism."
He would rather see relationships between nations like the United States and China to be cordial rather than the "tussles and tensions" that we get now, with the added risk of a further breakdown in communication leading to even worse outcomes.
"I fear that people have forgotten how bad the Cold War was or have learned the wrong lesson - "well we survived it so it wasn't so bad," warns the philosopher. "But I think it's more like somebody played a round of Russian Roulette and survived and then they say "hey that wasn't so bad, let's play another round!" With the opening of the nuclear archives, we can see how close the world came to the brink on several different occasions. Allowing ourselves to slide into another situation even remotely like that of the Cold War would be a huge mistake."
Political tides certainly can come and go. It might be long until we can definitively tell which era we are living in now. Either advanced technology and a spreading democratic order will create a global techno-utopia of the future or we will be enslaved by corporate hegemony and international oligarchs. There are also options in between. It's important to remember that once created, a singleton could become the way of life for the foreseeable future as it will take measures to stay in existence and to keep away threats.
"Earth-originating intelligent life will (eventually) form a singleton," writes Bostrom.
Before you get set for your life to be dominated by a single agency, Bostrom's classic paper on the subject lays out some specific pros and cons of a singleton.
Four Advantages:
- avoiding dangerous arms races – these are costly and potentially disastrous. Without many competing world powers, arms races would be unnecessary.
- avoiding a space colonization race, again leading to potential war and extreme expenses.
- avoiding inequality - a singleton could distribute wealth.
- avoiding evolutionary outcomes we don't want - a singleton (especially an AI) could better keep track of dystopian scenarios, like epidemics, and work towards the survival of the population as a whole.
Want to Retain American Jobs? Stop Blaming Globalization
Four Disadvantages:
- having one entity control everything could lead to less control over decision-making and things could go bad for us humans. "All the eggs are in one basket" under this scenario, points out Bostrom.
- world without competition between states could be more vulnerable to systemic breakdowns than a world that is less arranged, in which "there are some processes that limit the destructiveness of certain kinds of failures," writes the philosopher.
- some singletons could lead to terrible bureaucracy and inefficiency – it's not certain whether that would outweigh the gains from such a coordinated society. That would depend on the "severity" of the problems.
- some singletons could be created by force - think Ghenghis Khan, Napoleon, Nazis and whatever new dictator is waiting in the wings.
Check out Nick Bostrom's paper "What is a Singleton?" here.
As statisticians who study demography, we expect that record will be broken by 2100.
We study the maximum human life span using a data-driven approach. Our peer-reviewed study, published in June 2021, models and combines two key components: how the risk of dying flattens after age 110, and growth in the number of people to reach age 110 this century.
Our analysis of these two factors, which we did before the COVID-19 pandemic, suggests it's nearly inevitable that someone will break Calment's record during the 21st century, with an 89% chance that someone will live to at least 126, but only a 3% chance that someone will reach age 132.
Debate around maximum human life span
Scientists are actively debating whether there is a fixed limit to the human life span.
Some biologists think the data shows that aging is not a disease that can be treated, but instead an inevitable process that cannot be fully stopped, whether through medical breakthroughs or other means. Some demographers have argued that there is a natural limit to life expectancy, implying that maximum ages will level off as well.
But others think there's good evidence that life spans will continue to lengthen - at least for a lucky few. Several prominent biologists and medical experts have recently published findings suggesting there is some hope for extending life spans dramatically via medical interventions. Ultrawealthy tech titans like Tesla's Elon Musk and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are investing heavily in such research.
In 2002, two demographers named Jim Oeppen and James Vaupel observed that between 1928 and 1990, limits to life expectancy proposed by leading demographers were broken just five years after the prediction on average. They also noted that flattening gains to life expectancy should not determine our view of maximum life span, as they are quite different things – the maximum is not the average!
Even a pair of prominent demographers who come down on the side of a fixed limit to human life, S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes, acknowledged that there is no age at which death is absolutely certain, leaving open the possibility of continually broken life span records.
Challenges studying supercentenarians
Data on "supercentenarians," or those who reach age 110, are limited and often of poor quality. There is the problem of "age-attainment bias", or the tendency of very old individuals to misstate or exaggerate their age. For this reason, we've used only data from the International Database on Longevity, a collection of rigorously verified death records for supercentenarians.
Since these individuals died before 2020, they were all born no later than 1910. Because of record-keeping limitations throughout the world at that time, only records from 13 countries could be included in the database. For that reason, our study is limited to individuals from those 13 countries.
Basic demography of super-agers
Yearly mortality rates generally increase as people age. For example, individuals are more likely to die at age 80 than age 20.
But this changes for those who make it to 110 years old. The best available data suggests that mortality rates for these "supercentenarians," while high, do not increase as they continue to age. In a sense, this means that supercentenarians stop aging.
Instead, supercentenarians as a group have a steady but very high mortality rate of about 50% per year. This means that for every 1,000 individuals who have reached age 110, we expect approximately 500 of them will have died before their 111th birthday, and 250 more by age 112. Taken to its logical end point, this pattern suggests only 1 of the 1,000 would reach age 120, and only 1 in a million supercentenarians would reach age 130.
Even more, such traditional demographic factors as sex and nationality that affect mortality rates also appear to not affect supercentenarians. But scientists have yet to figure out what factors lead supercentenarians to live as long as they do. Do they benefit from excellent genetics? Or healthy environments? Or some other factor as yet unidentified? They appear to be extraordinary individuals, but the exact reason is unclear.
That pattern led us to the second component of our study: projecting how many people will reach age 110 during the 21st century, which ends in the year 2100. Using population forecasting methods developed by our research group that are used by the United Nations, we found that large mid-20th-century population growth will likely lead to an orders-of-magnitude increase in the supercentenarian population by 2100. Our estimates suggest that about 300,000 people will reach age 110 by 2080, give or take about 100,000. Although this range is well below a million, it makes the one-in-a-million chance that at least one of them will reach age 130 a real possibility.
Practical limit to human life span this century
Predicting the extremes of humanity is a challenging task filled with unknowns. Just as it's conceivable that a medical breakthrough could let humans live indefinitely, every individual to reach age 123 could simply die the next day. Instead, our study has taken a statistical, data-driven approach focused on what will be observed this century rather than on untestable hypotheses about absolute limits to life span. Our results indicate there's only a 13% chance any individual will reach age 130, and a very tiny chance anyone lives to age 135 this century.
In other words, the data suggests that life span may not have a hard limit, but a practical one. Humans will almost certainly break Calment's record of 122 this century, but probably not by more than a decade.
While we carried out our analysis using data collected before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on life expectancy, we believe our overall findings remain accurate. The pandemic may lead to a somewhat smaller total number of 21st-century supercentenarians. But that reduction is unlikely to be very large, and any big effect on their mortality past 110 is unlikely to last many years into the future.
Michael Pearce, PhD Candidate in Statistics, University of Washington and Adrian Raftery, Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology, University of Washington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
