Civilizational perspectives

The civilizational perspective.

We're biologicals hacked to do civilizationally productive tasks. As humans, we generate civilization, and are molded by civilization. A lone human is not very capable, but when you put of bunch of us together, we start generating civilization and the civilization starts driving our actions.

But in the end, you need to hack us to become civilizational agents. Education, jobs, creed, control, systems of reward and punishment around civilizational tasks. We're not purpose-built for civilization. We just happen to generate a bit of it and be pliable enough to benefit from it.

Our civilizations have other biologicals inside them. The biggest one are the crops. The greatest megastructure we have created, farmland covers 39% of the Earth's land area. 

Then we have other biologicals, used as food for the civilization-generators. And some other biologicals, used as weapons or companionship, or for hard labor. The hard labor type is interesting, as they got obsoleted by more purpose-built civilizational agents. No more need to hack large land mammals to provide high force output, speedy travel, or fast communications when you have internal combustion engines, electricity, cars and telecommunications. Sure, the purpose-built agents don't match the general capabilities of the biologicals in many ways (have you seen a car jump over a fence?), but the civilization can adapt the environment to make the best use of the new agents. So you get road networks for cars, even though they're not great for horses. Instead of traversing rough terrain, you make the terrain suitable for cars.

The end result: the more generic, high-maintenance biologicals that had to be hacked to work in a civilization became obsolete and almost completely vanished in a few short decades. Horses, elephants, carrier pigeons, work oxen, cats for pest control, hunting dogs, they're all mostly gone. Some of them could be adapted to work in the civilization. The rest? Cost of maintenance exceeded the value created.

Companies are not going away. Companies will evolve their work provider mix to move the generic agents out of places where specialists do better. Happened with computers (people who would sit at desks and do arithmetic), commercial illustrators, telephone switch operators, frontline customer service agents, designer prototype developers, report-collating middle managers, Instagram thotties, rendering artists, videographers, politicians and soldiers. We plug specialized agents into negotiation flows, into persuading people to do what the persuader wants, thinking outside the box, throwing out the 1000 concepts to surface the 1 good one. Civilizational work, civilizational tasks. Who does them is of no relevance to the company, the company that grows the fastest is the company that matters in the end.

Growth math.

If you grow every year 1% faster than your competitor over a 100 years, you'll be 3x bigger in the end. Repeat for another 100 years and you'll be 7x bigger. At which point you can either acquire your competitor outright, or they'll have changed to match what you're doing. Either way, they've become irrelevant.

If an organization grows faster the fewer humans it has in it, the organizations that end up taking over are non-human organizations and we'll have fewer humans because the cost of maintenance exceeds the value created. If an organization grows faster the more humans it has in it, we'll have more humans.

We've been at point where an increase in the number of humans has not brought economic benefits. This is what's behind the fall in population growth. If a higher population would make the civilization grow faster, our surviving civilization would be the one that maxed population growth rate. This was the case in the 1900s: very rapid population growth hand-in-hand with economic growth. In recent decades, economic growth has outstripped population growth, and even become negatively correlated with it. The faster your population falls, the faster your economy grows.

This trend of non-human civilization has been going on for the last hundred years and will keep going because of a couple of facts. The civilizational work that we humans can be cajoled into doing fall into a few categories: intake of information at a few words/s, taking actions according to the information, storage of information at a rate of a few words per day, processing information through fast heuristics and very slow structured thinking, exporting information at one word/s, picking up and manipulating small-to-medium-sized objects (2mm to 2m in size, 1g to 40kg in weight, at around 1mm precision), walking around at around 4km/h for a few hours a day.

A lot of the mental things that are very difficult for us to do have been replaced by purpose-built agents with great success. The device you're using to read this is doing more calculations per second just to display this text than the entire human population can do in a year. The millions of tiny lamps that comprise your screen are turning on and off so fast and with such great precision and synchrony that all of humanity could not match it.

At some point, growth math takes over. We feral humans will still generate civilization as we hang around each other, but the fastest-growing organizations are the ones with the biggest civilization and the fewest humans. The fastest-growing organizations may be the ones with no humans in them. How many cows or horses do you see in your office building? If they made the companies grow faster, you'd see them around. But... you don't.

Hacked biologicals have an upper limit of civilization work they can do. Is it worth it to sacrifice 39% of all land area just to keep the biologicals around? Is it worth it to constrain energy production to control surface temperatures just because the biologicals can't handle an extra ten degrees? Once a non-human civilization is 10x the size of a human civilization, they can just buy us out. Pay $10M per acre of farmland? Sure. $10M for a flat? Sounds like a fair price. $1000 for a take-out dinner? Yeah, good. First we'll be priced out, and then left to fend for ourselves in an increasingly constrained and human-hostile environment.

Yeah there'll be humans around. We're like seagulls circling behind the great ship of civilization, eating whatever emerges from the wake. The ship will be bigger, the wake will be bigger, there'll be great eatings.

 

How your body recharges

Your body's power system works a bit like a cellphone. You have an internal battery made of sugar, and a bunch of power banks made of oil. When you eat carbs and sugars, your blood sugar rises and acts like a wall-plug charger, charging your internal battery. Eating fats and oils adds power banks floating around in your blood.

You charge by eating. What you need to eat depends on your level of charge: if you're at 7% charge, you'll need more food to reach 100% than from 80% charge.

When you use the wall-plug charger, you switch to using wall-plug power for powering yourself. Any power banks floating around are stashed away for later use. Excess wall-plug power is used to charge up your internal battery.

Once you hit 100% charge, your internal battery can't charge any further. A cellphone would switch off the charging circuit. But your body can't really do that, the sugar is already in the blood. Leaving it floating about would cause issues, sort of like an overcharged battery catching on fire. To deal with the overcharge, you start to fill up power banks with the excess charge and stash them for later.

After the wall-plug charger is unplugged, you start using your internal battery for power. When your internal battery starts getting empty, you start fetching the power banks and plugging them in.

The power banks work a lot like the internal battery, except that they take some time to plug in and have a lower peak power output. Your body can't use power banks to charge your internal battery, so they're not directly interchangeable.

From the above we can come up with some ideas. If you want more power banks, plug in the charger for a long time and eat a lot of power banks to stash them. If you want to empty your power banks, unplug the charger and drain your internal battery with high power use, then switch to lower intensity activity so that the power banks can be used.

Or in other terms:

Eating carbs and sugars gets your blood sugar high. High blood sugar activates insulin release. Insulin switches your cells to energy storage mode. Eating fats while your insulin level is high makes your fat cells store the fat and your liver to convert any excess sugar to fat. Eating sugar followed by fat and going to sleep afterwards is going to maximize fat storage.

Going without carbs and sugars for a while (8-12 hours) brings your blood sugar low. Low blood sugar activates glucagon release. Glucagon switches your cells to energy release mode. At high glucagon levels, your liver starts releasing its glycogen sugar reserves and your fat cells start releasing fatty acids. Doing a workout when your glucagon is high consumes the glycogen sugar reserves in your muscles cells. The muscle glycogen is internal to the muscle cells, they can't release the sugar into the bloodstream. If you want to cycle the glycogen in your muscle cells, you need to make them work. Using up the glycogen shifts your cells towards using fatty acids for aerobic energy generation, so aerobic exercise (and even resting metabolism) at depleted glycogen levels burns fat. You'll also shift to breaking down your cellular machinery (proteins) for energy if this goes on for long, so keep it in moderation.

To summarize, get your blood sugar low and deplete your glycogen stores to get to the fat-burning state. Stay there for a few hours to burn the fat. This cycle takes around 16 hours, so it's easiest to do it overnight. Finish dinner at 8pm, do a bit of high intensity movement and take a walk to bring blood sugar down. Sleep. Skip breakfast. Do high intensity movement in the morning (you'll probably feel very exhausted after this) and some aerobic exercise to deplete your glycogen stores and switch to fat power. Eat again at lunch.

You can structure your meals to minimize fat storage and blood sugar spike. Start your meal by eating oily foods to stay at a low blood sugar (oil, nuts, vegs with oil, meat, no carbs), go for fiber-rich stuff next for slow-release carbs & fermentation products (green leaf vegs), maybe starch (potatoes) or fruit (apples) after a few minutes. Then take a 10 minute break, and eat your carbs with minimal fats.

This way you'll get your fats at the start of the meal when your blood sugar is low, so your cells will use the fats for energy and clear them out. The fiber and starch are slow-release carbs so you'll stay longer in the fat-using state. Once your blood sugar starts going up from the carbs, there shouldn't be much fat left in your blood, so you'll reduce the amount of fat stored.

Follow up on the carb sugar spike with anaerobic exercise and you'll use up sugar from your blood, which should reduce the amount of sugar converted to fat by your liver. In anaerobic exercise, a large amount of sugar gets converted to lactic acid, which is later converted back to sugar by your liver, further pushing back the sugar spike. And you'll lose around 15% of the energy available from sugar by using this pathway.

For the workout, activate a large amount of muscle mass (thighs, buttocks). And do it anaerobically to force the use of sugar reserves. A minute of airchair. I guess you could also use the immediate energy reserves (ATP & creatine) and get the reserve use from recharging them. Few seconds of intense exercise every 5 minutes. Three frog jumps.

Before & after a meal, do some airchair, repeat a few times after the meal (with 15 minute intervals). Before meal empties your batteries, so more of the meal is used to fill 'em up. After meal uses up the blood sugar, so less is used for charging the batteries. The goal is to not get the blood sugar level up very high, since that switches you to charging mode and leads to the creation of fat reserves.