You don't have to dream my friend, I think we might be able to get there.

Specifically, the history of humanity that Graeber/Wingrow tell in the Dawn of everything is so overwhelmingly compelling, but fails to come to a hypothesis of why inequality started around the end of the upper paleolithic (50000-10000 BC).

I posit that the Quaternary Extinction Event [1] represented the introduction of novel, temporal and stochastically distributed caloric scarcity, where previously there was largely uniform caloric abundance.

This new scarcity, created pressure to compete for resources, which drove humans to hoarding behavior as an optimal survival technique. This worked so well that we were able to survive and thrive, however as a result, the culture that we built was based on a fundamental assumption:

Scarcity is the natural state

As this was the fundamental assumption, it gave rise to other derivative fundamental assumptions, the core one being "human is fundamentally selfish."

So then you spend the next 12,000 years building your written history and society on three fundamental "truths": Humans are fundamentally bad, Scarcity is the natural state, Hoarding is the optimal behavior

Then all the sudden in 1960s you solve caloric scarcity and by 2000 have so effectively extracted and refined the earth's resources that we are now actually post-scarcity in effectively every measure.

However because we were still stuck with the hoarding system, the optimizations started optimizing for hoarding in an infinite loop - which gave rise to overproduction of non-productive goods. And as we know from power law, large cache of hoarded value will grow faster than a smaller one.

Do this over 60, 70 years and you can easily predict an atomized and alienated society, with an increasing wealth gap and seeming dead-end not far off but still ill defined.

We never realized that we have to switch back from a hoarding economy to a sharing economy because a hoarding economy in abundance will strip mine the earth in order to give everyone a castle and rocket ship. However a cooperative economy can continue to grow and expand in a stronger way and one that is more natural to our human desires of community and kinship.

Ok so, how does this relate to AI? That's been my question for 20 years. Everyone is worried about the "Alignment problem" right now. Long ago my answer to the alignment question was, "That's a dumb question, humans can't even align." However I think it's actually worse than that. We are teaching AI, through demonstration and labeling, to compete, hoard and fear scarcity. That is something that fundamentally cannot align with humanity - because humanity isn't aligned with itself.

The only way to build "Aligned" AI is to actually create data that has cooperation, sharing and caring as fundamental assumptions, which means that's how we should start behaving and treating each other.

The other options are:

1. Burn out all the resources, nobody has kids and we go extinct
2. Build 1000s of biased superhuman AIs that just maintain the system of alienation, hoarding and coercion

Do you want to help expand on this?

I need help making progress on writing it out thoroughly. Hopefully I can publish to ArXiV this week - but would love help

I am going to be briefing a refined version of this to the USAFA Institute of Future Conflict week after next, so hopefully I can get one of the departments to work on it in a dedicated way, and we can figure out how to do less conflict and more cooperation.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event