We can afford some measure of chaos in our choices: we certainly do not need a global totalitarian dictatorship to set our priorities for life or death. But we can also afford some degree of guidance, especially if it is rational, sensible, and ultimately most humane.

It has been more than two decades that I have touted and developed the idea and theory of global meta-systems: in a nutshell, human systems of the anthropo-sphere must approach basic global design strategies for the sake of promoting sustainability, adaptability and long-term stability of human systems, and these design strategies come to rest upon five basic sets of problems the solution of all of which promotes such a long-term adaptive global meta-system.

Meta-system refers in this case primarily to a super-system composed of systems and their sub-systems, in which the higher meta-system or super-system level provides a common meta-systemic context within which its systems and sub-systems are logically comprehended and functionally integrated with their environments. Global meta-systems may or may not produce their own synergetic effects, depending upon how integrated they become at the super-system level, but many examples of meta-systems are primarily oriented to the providing of a meta-systemic context in which its systems and their subsystems may function in a stable and, in the case of the earth, an enduring and long-lasting manner.

The challenges of the global meta-system today is that it by and large lacks any deliberate effort at organization, beyond political-diplomatic and human development or aid organizations.

For any global meta-system on earth to become effective in realizing its promise, the following five sets of challenges must be met:

1. At the infrastructural level the development of a solar-hydrogen fuel based global infrastructure and economy becomes paramount to the consideration of the kind of long-term civilization we seek to build. This entails that the wealthy oil producing countries situated primarily in hot, arid desert zones, would do well to turn their sand into glass and produce solar energy that can be converted to other forms of energy and to the production of fresh water. Their glass can also go into production of industrial scale greenhouse operations.
2. At the structural level the development of areas and zones of protection and preservation of eco-bio diversity becomes important, that is free from human encroachment and habitat loss. Important as well would be the inter-connecting of these areas and zones by “human free” corridors that permit the migration of individuals of different species from one region or area to another. This entails that most human agriculture should go to large scale covered greenhouse production, semi-automated to replace large numbers of field workers, as well as the deliberate design and building of human habitation either skyward (upward or vertically,) or else, downward into the earth (or some interesting mix of both,) in order to reduce the overall infra-structural global footprint of human populations.
3. At the superstructural level, a global government is necessary to provide directional integration of the emerging anthropo-sphere, one that is democracy-based and primarily grass-roots (easily accomplished through the Internet,) and this includes human systems development focused upon education, recreation and knowledge systems-based structural and social development. This global government would seek to foster relative health and wealth of a growing human population as well as the provisioning of screens of opportunity for the majority of this growing global population to realize a better life for themselves and for their families.
4. Achievement of technological Artificial Intelligence singularity is critically necessary for human systems integration and entails that a lot of human labor displacing work can be accomplished more effective and more efficiently by machines than people, potentially free people up to pursue more intelligent objectives in their lives living hand-to-mouth especially with menial labor type jobs. The cybersphere that is a result of the increasing integration of computing systems into a collective synergetic system and meta-system, will increasingly interpenetrate and integrate with the human anthropo-sphere, and people will become critically dependent upon these artificial, increasingly autonomous systems.
5. Finally, the quest becomes necessary for travel, colonization, exploration and observation of outer space, deeper and deeper into the extant universe, becomes an important unifying and organizational priority. This pursuit must be made in many directions almost simultaneously or concurrently. It is important to pursue “biosphere” studies both on earth and in Outer space. It is important to develop both observational and communication/transportation hubs and grids in Outer space, presumably first targeting Earth-Lunar spaces and regions, and later branching into Earth-Martian and even Earth-Jovian regions of Space. It is also important to establish and develop semi-permanent human Space colonies as well also to promote the development of technological and production capabilities in Space not possible to develop on Earth due to its gravity, atmosphere, its geo physics, etc.

It is my main argument that these are the five main lines of effort necessary to be accomplished, if the social-environmental and primarily political-economic hurdles to achieving global developmental civilization are to be overcome. Without achieving any of these five problem-design sets, it is likely that human adaptation on earth will continue to fight an up-hill battle and risk global failure. Whatever our contemporary complex loyalties and identities, whatever the patterns of organization and stratification of current and near future human social systems, these considerations must find productive and human-based compromise with the global requirements and challenges that humankind now faces building its future in terms of global civilization.

The biggest risks humankind faces during the remainder of the 21st Century is its own antiquated ideas of political-economic stratification, self-serving ideologies and nativist chauvinisms. The greatest risk is that relatively minor sets of unpredictable events, regional or interregional environmental-social circumscription, triggered by large scale natural disasters or pandemic outbreaks of new strains of virus, cascading to the declaration of war between states and their people, and escalating to use of weapons of mass destruction in contexts no longer clearly governed by the dynamic balance of external powers or mutual detente. We run these risks as much in the next decade as we do in the next Century, because human development of civilization, becoming near completely horizontal away from its original vertical modality of transmission, no longer counts chronological, historical time as a critical constraint in the same manner that human systems did even half a Century ago, when information transmission still tended toward the diagonal.

Binary choices are not usually a good way of looking at the world, but general global trend-lines of climate change, urbanization and human population growth seem to be driving us to meeting the challenge of some tough either-or kinds of choices. In this case Buckminster Fuller summed it up succinctly: Utopia or Oblivion?

The challenge from a systems perspective is not only to understand what human systems are and how they work, but to understand workable design frameworks that would assure systems that are in essence “human-proofed” and reinforced by available back-up systems. A key trend, paradoxically, is the universal promotion of human development, and those primary lines of effort within human development that lead to greater realization of human health, happiness and realization of fundamental needs and requirements. But this key recipe of human development is not nor could it ever be unlimited development, and we are now within a couple of generations realizing the kinds of constraints to our own development put upon us by our requirements of long term adaptation to a global ecology.

Transitional energy forms, if done to economic scale and affordability, are a step in the right direction in moving humankind away from carbon compound producing fossil fuels. But this new grid of energy production must ultimately face to the requirements of hydrogen burning systems that have sufficient energy density to power large and heavy mechanical systems in an efficient manner: to operate heavy machinery, to fly supersonic aircraft, and to power large scale sea vessels, for instance. Hydrogen energy, cheaply produced, and with price falling with increasing production, reverses the trend the global economy has been facing towards the inflation of the petrol dollars and rising costs of fossil-fuel energies pumped from beneath the ground or mined from coal and shale extraction, that result not only in a carbon-compound based greenhouse effect leading to what is becoming drastic and rapid global climate change, but also which tends to drive the cost of manufacture, transportation, and maintenance that in turn drives ever-higher the average cost of living: of food, of water, and of the material goods and products that we have learned to depend upon in maintaining our everyday suburban “just in time delivery”-based lifestyle.

With a post peak oil global scenario, we cannot now think of any trend-line in human systems that would invert the formula of getting less by paying more into the reverse formula of paying less and getting more, except through the deliberate design development of sufficient alternative fuel infrastructure based ultimately upon hydrogen production and solar energy capture and conversion to ample and available storage facilities. In this regard, a purely electrical power-generating grid and infrastructure may work, but not if it primarily depends upon electrical energy production through fossil fuel stockpiling and burning.

Transformation of human systems begins from the bottom up—if you change the infrastructure then adaptive social structure must also change to follow suit. Political, military and religious forms are slowest and most resistant to such change, but the campaign to win hearts and minds always proceeds from the top-down though it must be driven from the ground up.

Human intelligence takes over where machine intelligence leaves off. Machine intelligence takes over where human intelligence leaves off. The two systems are at least in theory if not always in practice mutually complementary to one another, except when people begin mixing their metaphors of “Artificial” and “Intelligence,” which we have a strong tendency to do given the nature and structure of our linguistic intelligence. However powerful an A.I. algorithm or system might be, it is left to people to distinguish between real intuitive sentience and the simulation, however complex and sophisticated seeming, of such seemingly intuitive sentience.

I know my competition on this “Bloggishing” web-site. It is not the potential time of potentially interested readership who are too busy surfing and now “X-ing” the rest of web-world to bother with my Internet-conventional and mostly anachronistic “pages.” It is not even other Bloggers most of whom are both better writers and better published than myself. It is in fact not even the big Internet companies that are building these new “Chat” A.I. systems that purportedly can do miracles in simulating productive human consciousness. The competition is in fact these third and forth generation ELIZA like machine learning systems based upon advanced AI systems and technologies. My competition are machines, and most people today would prefer interacting with a seemingly alive and semi-intelligent machine than with a real other person, however dull or interesting the latter may really be.

My real competition for this aging doddering fool is a bloody sophisticated machine owned by a modern capitalist Ayn Randian “Howard Roark.” And it is really no competition at all because it is a game that someone like myself, of my age set, cannot even play well, much less expect to win. When and if I read someone else’s blog, I want to know and be sure that the blog was actually written by a real person on the other end of a two way computer terminal system, and not the plagiarized knock-off work of some Cyber “bot” or some criminal human cyber freak.

So perhaps we must again take heed Joseph Weizenbaum’s warning to the modern world made almost a half Century ago (“Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation,” Freeman & Company, 1976.) ELIZA was the epitome of simulated “true” artificial intelligence, functioning upon a seemingly intuitive and largely tacit level, but only projectively simulated in as much as it was received by and deceiving of sentient others who for a moment at least lapse in their own sentient judgment. The development of sophisticated and power modern AI will continue to leap light-years ahead, but it should not obscure as a developmental priority the fact or the facticity of human development.

What I have celebrated through my life’s work, however mediocre by modern standards, has been the basic honesty and value of human development and the development of truly human systems as a fundamental priority of our modern world, divested of any other “technological” considerations. In this regard, there is no other significant competition at all in my own little world at least, as this Blog will evidentially attest, except with my own self and my own limitations and weaknesses, of which there have been many.

The ultimate paradox perhaps is that I am all for Artificial Intelligence and advanced Robotics, as long as we do not over anthropomorphize it all. Advanced A.I. has its place, but that is not in substitution of or for human intelligence. A.I. as part of a larger human system, increasingly autonomous in function, has a critical role to play in the future development and facilitation of human systems, especially in terms of real working systems, except when it may potentially interfere with or promote technological development in lieu of the greater realization of human development.