Section 2
russ wilcox
Surplus Without Streets Everyone calls AI the new industrial revolution. The real parallel is far older and far more dangerous.
RUSS WILCOX AI Policy Leader | Advisor to U.S. Senate & Federal Agencies Chair, Policy Committee, American Society for AI | AI Governance Advisor Expert on U.S.–China AI Competition | Policy Advisor
resembling a town. What they did not have were the institutions to manage what that surplus created. No council to adjudicate disputes. No codified law. No designated public space where strangers could negotiate proximity without climbing through each other’s homes. For roughly a thousand years, they lived like that. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that more than a quarter of examined skulls showed healed fractures from blows, and that the majority of victims were women struck from behind. I think about Çatalhöyük when I read about artificial intelligence. The dominant metaphor for AI, from Davos stages to Congressional hearings, is the Industrial Revolution. AI is the new steam engine, the new electricity. The comparison carries a reassuring implication: what comes next will look roughly like what came last time. Disruption, followed by adaptation. The existing institutional order will survive by evolving, because it survived steam and it survived semiconductors, and it will survive this. The Industrial Revolution changed how humans work. It moved labor from fields to factories, from muscle to machines. The suffering it caused before institutions caught up is well documented. But the organizational infrastructure of civilization survived it. Courts, legislatures, banks, universities, churches. These institutions bent. They adapted. They existed before industrialization, and they persisted through it. The Agricultural Revolution did something entirely different. It created the conditions that made organizational structures neces- sary for the first time. Before agriculture, humans organized in bands of roughly one hundred and fifty,
what cognitive scientists call Dunbar’s limit. Trust was personal. You knew who was reliable because you knew them, had hunted with them, had shared food with them. Institutions, impersonal systems that coordinate behavior among strangers, were unnecessary. The group was small enough that everyone could see everyone else. Agriculture shattered that. Surplus required storage, storage required protection, protection required someone to decide who stood guard and who slept. Hierarchy required legitimacy, some principle beyond personal acquaintance that could persuade people to accept decisions from individuals they had never met. That legitimacy required institutions: religion to sanctify authority, law to codify rules, bureaucracy to administer distribution, and eventually writing to record agreements so that the dead could bind the living. Every institution that human beings have ever built exists because agriculture created conditions requiring coordination beyond the hundred-and-fifty-person band. Institutions are the technology humans invented to scale trust past the limits of personal relationship. They are what made it possible for millions of strangers to live together without climbing through each other’s homes. They are the streets. The Industrial Revolution changed how we work. The Agricultural Revolution changed how we organize. AI is doing the second thing, and we keep talking about it like it’s the first. Institutions depended on three conditions, and all three are collapsing at once. The first was information asymmetry. Courts knew the law better than citizens, doctors knew medicine better than patients, journalists knew events before readers did. You deferred to the institution because it knew things you could not
LinkedIn.com/in/russwilcoxboston @russwilcox2013
In southeastern Turkey, beneath a mound of earth that farmers had plowed over for centuries without suspecting what lay underneath, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a settlement more than nine thousand years old. Çatalhöyük had granaries packed with surplus grain. It had shrines decorated with the plastered skulls of aurochs. It had paintings pressed into wet plaster by human hands, the marks still visible after nine millennia. It had death, too, the intimate kind: skeletons tucked beneath the platforms where families slept, so that the living rested each night on top of their dead. What Çatalhöyük did not have were streets. No alleys. No plazas. No agreed-upon paths between one dwelling and another. The buildings were packed wall to wall, like cells in a honeycomb, and residents entered through holes in their own roofs, climbing down ladders into rooms that opened only upward, toward the sky. To visit a neighbor, you crossed the rooftops and descended through someone else’s ceiling. Several hundred people lived closer to each other than most modern apartments allow. None of them had agreed on how to move among each other. Agriculture had given them surplus. Enough grain to store across seasons, enough calories to sustain permanent settlement, enough people to constitute something
28
DAVOS CLUB
Powered by FlippingBook