Affluence allows all kinds of good effects. It means that there will be an excess of benefits for an alien civilization because of productivity increases, which is almost the definition of affluence. But this excess of benefits means, if there are alien individuals who are motivated to work, that there will be spare time so that more work can be done in the development of further technology. Thus, affluence implies at least an initial increase in the rate at which technology advances. This provides feedback to the effects of improving productivity, so productivity increases even more, meaning even more time can be devoted to technology advances, and so on. A venerable positive feedback loop.
As noted in a
previous post, affluence has malign influences which can outweigh the
benign ones, and cause the inverse of evolution, as measured by the
counts of the most successful genes in the alien gene pool, or rather
the genes which make alien individuals most successful in their
reproductive success. Here it is useful to recall the difference
between long-term goals and short-term goals, and how alien
civilizations evolve into their early industrial stages without much
consideration or awareness of long-term goals for their civilization.
Short-term goals propel them into various successful avenues.
Short-term goals for
an individual parent in some alien civilization relative to offspring
and successive generations might include both support, meaning
nutrition, protection, shelter, and other physical aspects of the
life of youngsters, and tutelage, meaning teaching by example or by
instruction. When the technology and affluence feedback loop gets
going in an alien civilization, the tutelage part runs into the
problem of the change in teaching needed for a generation where
technology is changing. Tutelage by parents becomes inadequate, and
needs to be done in another way, and is likely to be outsourced. But
tutelage has many components, and only certain components are
affected by the change in technology that occurs rapidly. However,
it might be that tutelage in general gets outsourced, without the
breakout of components. Thus, those components which relate to
motivation to work, being goal-oriented, character aspects such as
diligence, persistence, honesty, open-mindedness and educability,
skepticism, and much more, as well as interpersonal relationship
traits, all might be turned over to someone outside the parents or
grandparents or other close relations to others who might be
labor-specialized to tutelage. Here can be the fundamentals for a
catastrophe, if technology for training has not progressed far enough
to provide good, thorough procedures for training in the latter
traits. Thus the question arises, in an alien civilization, will the
material and industrial aspects of technology develop faster than the
training and education aspects? They will both eventually succumb to
the progress of technology, but there may be a gap between them, or
in more graphic terms, a chasm. Will alien civilizations tend to
fall into this chasm?
On the other hand,
the support side of parent-youngster relations becomes easier and
easier. Technology makes fulfilling the physical needs of youngsters
easier for parents, and so the two effects of this, first, more and
more products are provided with variety and quantity now expanding,
and second, less effort is required to do this support, implying to
the typical alien that those mental traits which formerly were so
needed for providing support to oneself and one’s offspring, were
not so much needed and could be diminished in attention. In other
words, youngsters were having the option of spending more time on
consumption-related interests, and parents were seeing less need for
production-related interests, both for themselves and for their
young. This would tend to add more impetus to the lack of need for
preserving the training components that were useful in earlier times,
especially times when evolution was striking down those without these
traits. This means, the chasm is wider and deeper than it would be
without the two-sided effects creating it.
The antidote to
having an alien civilization collapse into the affluence chasm is the
early realization of the need for long-term thinking, both in its
conception and development, but also in its use in guiding some of
the decisions of the civilization. Very specifically, long-term
thinking is needed for the civilization to recognize what the
consequences of affluence might be, and how it affects the alien
society. Instead of continuing the drive to develop technology to
provide more and more support goods, there would have to be a
parallel drive to develop technology in training, in more detail,
neurology, but also in sociology, meaning how society needs to
organize itself and what individuals would need to be trained in so
that they could act to preserve the civilization.
Long-term thinking
is needed to appreciate that the civilization has value, in and of
itself, and preserving it over the long term, meaning over multiple
generations, should take precedence over amassing more variety and
quality in the consumption goods that their initial short-term
thinking would lead them to support. This is not a simple
declaration, where the civilization suddenly says that it will
perform long-term goal setting and then do whatever is necessary to
achieve them, but instead it is a dedication to that parallel branch
of technology, so that it does not lag too far behind the material
branch that produces the affluence.
Developing this
parallel branch of technology will require a major commitment by the
civilization, meaning the governance and the population together, to forgo the maximum amount of material support in favor of having more
intangible support, which will help the society to navigate its way
around the chasm of affluence. It could very well be that the other
feedback effect that occurs in neurology, where the brain adapts to
its environment, will prevent this change. This feedback effect will
mean that as affluence turns producers into consumers, and young
members of the society into dedicated consumers, that there will be
more and more specialized thinking about consumption, and less and
less about long-term aspects of society and the potential troubles
that affluence can create. The competition between thinking about
consumption details, which can be manifold and complex, and thinking
about society in general, which is also complex and variegated, will
dictate if a particular alien civilization will make it to the final
stage of technology, asymptotic technology, where the potential for
collapse from its own decisions and choices will be almost
eliminated. Without the proper early realization of the nature and
details of this problem with affluence, the civilization will not be
at a high enough living standard for the long time needed to invent
and develop space travel.
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