The Economics of the Bootstrap

We have an immense amount of information of how economics work in the areas of financial markets. I'm going to do my best to map these back to more basic bootstraps and show that the dynamics are similar and ultimately the effects of these economies manifest themselves in similar ways.

The foundations of most economic theories are built on the ideas of 'labor specialization' and 'supply and demand.'

We see these same patterns at work in at the inorganic level when we look at the supply and demand of forces. These forces supply and demand these forces in consistent ways. These consistencies lead to patterned forces and ultimately carbon emerges as a molecule that can form highly specialized patterns that can be reliably reproduced. At this level we see the economics of supply and demand and the benefit of specialized 'labor'.

As we move to biology, we see an economy emerge that deals in reproduction. Biology began to leverage the inorganic to form reliable environments and these environments each encouraged a different form of survival and reproduction. The massive proliferation of environments and discovered advantageous adaptations has lead to significant biodiversity. Through sheer brute force biology bootstrapped society and intelligence. Again we see the supply of and demand of reproducibility offered by DNA leading to the version of specialized 'labor' called biodiversity.

At the level of society it is resources that are supplied and demanded. Different sets of supplied resources lead to very different societies. So what should we be looking for if society is going to bootstrap to a supersociety? It certainly isn't a mono-culture. We need as many diverse societies as we can muster until we find the type of society that bootstraps. If this pattern follows the previous bootstraps we will have a large diversity of cultures all containing and preserving robust sub-groups with vibrant arts. These societies will be moving away from each other(as in out from earth and out into the galaxy.) When we do find the bootstrap, we need to be careful because it will likely be so dominant that the results of that culture will look at other cultures the same way we look at the societies that form among the lesser species of nature.

On the intelligence level we are dealing in the supply and demand of time. Intelligence operates on understanding the supply of time and demanding more of it. This ultimately culminates in science delivering massive improvements in time availability and the promise of more time leads to more science. The superintelligence bootstrap likely emerges from the diversification and amassing of reliable time observations and the ability to act on 'many many many' of them at one time. System 1 of our brains is pretty bad at operating on more than a couple observations at a time and System 2 ups that by letting us add in some processes that can build some complex systems, but it is likely that the superintelligence is going to be operating on thousands and thousands of simultaneous observations.

It is tempting to dismiss the possibilities of a Biology II or System III bootstrap but recent advances in nano-tech and genetic engineering put this back in play. For Biology II we should look to processes that generate reliable and consistent systems that are not carbon based. This could lead to very different patterns than what carbon provides. For System III we can look toward the future possibility of engineering new variants of species on a drastically reduced timescale. If we are able to do these while also avoiding a grey goo scenario or a bio-accident of global proportions we might see another kind of bootstrap, but I expect these would look very alien to us.