Are we witnessing the Beginning of the “End of History” or its End? — Part 2

And could a mathematical model predict this evolution?

Introductory Notes

This is Part 2 of this essay. As you can see, in Part 1 I have summarized the views I advocate in a series of 7 topics. But now I have added the following:

• Nonconformist personalities — the freaks — are fundamental to cultural and social evolution, just as genetic mutations are fundamental to biological evolution.

2. EXPLANATORY and PREDICTIVE MODELS of HISTORY

Despite all the controversies and the greater or lesser discredit of the theories proposed in the previous two centuries by philosophers, political theorists and sociologists, the temptation to model social evolution remains and has inspired fiction writers, fuelling academic discussions and research projects. But whereas before it was essentially restricted to the domains of “professional thinkers” (using Hanna Arendt’s expression), in the last decades its implementation has begun to explore quantitative methods and data analysis based on mathematical-statistical models and relying on the exploitation of huge volumes of data (big data) that the new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have made accessible. This is one of the main topics of my notes, which I will try to illustrate with examples taken from the literature and from my recent personal experience.

Determinism and Statistical Laws of Mass Action

Basic concepts:

(only for readers less familiar with Chaos theory and Stochastic Processes)

Chaotic and random phenomena are different things. A deterministic system (not involving random variables) can be chaotic; Henri Poincaré, when studying the famous three-body problem, in the 19th century, was the first to formalize this type of systems. Edward Lorenz is recognized as the physicist (climatologist) who established the study of Chaos as a new scientific discipline.

What characterises a chaotic system is its high instability: the underlying physical laws may be well known and mathematically modelled but the system is intrinsically so sensitive to small variations of the initial conditions, to small perturbations and combinations of the forces at play, that its behaviour becomes unpredictable for practical purposes from a given moment on. Climatic phenomena are a good example of this. Human history can also be subject, by hypothesis, to long-term determinism and still be chaotic.

Chaos: “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”.

- Edward Lorenz

We say (in very informal terms) that we are dealing with a stochastic process when the result of an experiment involving random variables is also a function of time.

Does it make sense to try to predict history based on mathematical models?

I am strongly sceptical about the possibility of predicting the evolution of history on the basis of deterministic or stochastic models. As I have already mentioned in Part 1, Marxism introduced a kind of (long-term) historical determinism, while other theorists chose the apparently more rigorous approach of creating statistical-temporal (stochastic) models of the behaviour of large masses, trying to explore and extend the application of principles of the theory of mass action in terms of time and population size.

Despite my reservations, I find in some serious studies statements that point in the direction of the inevitability of historical events. See, for example, how Ian Morris, in his best-selling Why the West Rules — for Now : The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future classifies the two schools of thought that claim to explain the dominance of the West over the last few centuries: the theory of “long-term determinism” and that of “short-term accidentalism”. Arming himself with an arsenal of tools and data for analysing the evolution of societies since the most remote past, Morris argues that biology and sociology explain global similarities, while geography explains regional differences. He considers that it was not any single factor such as geography, climate, biology, sociology, economics, etc., but the combination of all of them (in which some contributed to changing the weight of influence of the others in a way that changed over time) that determined historical evolution and concludes that its unfolding could hardly have been very different from the one we know. In terms of Chaos theory this is reminiscent of a chaotic system with a phase space conditioned from the initial instant.

Ian Morris also believes that people in large groups (social groups) are very similar and when faced with identical circumstances tend to react in a similar way, regardless of the geographical region or ethnic group to which they belong. The author also underestimates the role of the great figures in history; he believes that if they were not the ones to lead certain trends or take decisive initiatives in history, others would take their place, since the important thing would be the context existing in each era. However, he considers that after 1945 (with the appearance of nuclear weapons) for the first time in history leaders have the ability to change history. It can thus be concluded that (at least in relation to the past) Morris is a determinist, but given the combinatorial complexity of the variables at play it does not seem credible that his analysis would allow the formulation of a model for predicting history by someone who at a given moment could not model and predict the evolution of all these variables, which would be unrealistic.

Determinism also underlies the thesis of the predominant role of geography in international politics, which I will not comment on here but which is convincingly set out by Tim Marshall in his book The Power of Geography : Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World (2021). This geographical determinism is also evident in Jared Diamond’s classic Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society (1997), although in his later book Collapse (2005) the author attributes fundamental relevance to the decisions of rulers and the attitudes of peoples.

The role of outliers: freaks who changed the course of history

Despite all the convincing arguments that point to the determinism of the historical process, history provides us with very interesting examples of the disruptive role of unusual personalities whose ideas seem to have influenced or even radically changed the course of social evolution for thousands of years. I am referring to those characters who gave rise to the epoch that Karl Jaspers called the axial age , referring to the role of Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist and Jain ideas that according to him defined a time (centred around 500 BC) around which history changed its course. Indeed, to accept this concept we should include the later influences of Jesus and Muhammad whose impact on history has been remarkable from the time of their appearance to the present day. Regardless of the more or less nebulous location in time and the historical reality of their existence, it seems unquestionable to me the historical role of the currents of thought attributed to these personalities, whom we might consider extravagant or freaks in the context of their time.

Determinism of geophysical and astronomical phenomena

Regardless of the above considerations, at this crucial moment in human history, there seem to be other strong reasons to believe in the determinism of a social collapse on a planetary scale, even if we cannot accurately model all the forces at play: the consequences of human activity on climate change and its inevitable feedback on human history. Indeed, climate is a chaotic phenomenon — and it was a climatologist who gave rise to the establishment of Chaos as a new branch of science, despite the precursor studies fundamental to its development — but it is nonetheless essentially deterministic.

Another possible, perfectly deterministic cause of a global collapse, which can be calculated with great accuracy (at least once the necessary data is collected) and so far beyond our control, would be the collision or the very close passage of a celestial body large enough to drastically alter Earth’s current geo-dynamic and environmental conditions and destroy most terrestrial life and human culture. Despite reasonable “scares” and “end of the world” threats associated with the near Earth passage of meteorites with high destructive potential in the recent past, it is only now that there has been a more serious effort and some more substantial investment in technology to try and mitigate this risk. Although the odds are on our side we remain exposed and totally vulnerable…

Possible Closed Endings

I envision other possible Ends of History, which seem to me less probable, but which would be fatal or from which we would not be able to recover to a stage of civilisation close to the present one:

• A global climate change capable of turning the Earth into a global desert, uninhabitable for humans, in a similar way to what seems to have happened on Mars;
• A reduction in biodiversity so drastic as to destabilise the planet’s ecological balance, making us vulnerable to increasingly frequent and ultimately lethal pandemics on a global scale;
• Catastrophic astronomical events like the one that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth tens of millions of years ago or something even more devastating as it seems to have taken place five hundred million years before;
• Total self-destruction with nuclear weapons.

But, in my opinion, the most probable of all (strictly speaking, a probability conditioned to the non-occurrence of one of the previous ones) will be that of the technological Singularity (which I will discuss below) because it is the one towards which we are irremediably inclined. If it is achievable, we will certainly do so precisely because of the thymic nature of the human being that promotes the ambition of some and the greed of others, combined with an insurmountable tendency to react only when it is already too late.

Some of today’s brightest and most creative minds are enthusiastically committed to AGI’s development and seem unwilling to listen to cautionary tales. In fact, even before we have reached this point, according to the latest studies, a good proportion of humans are already beginning to be expendable with automation to the point where they are losing wealth rather than increasing their standard of living; it can be expected that the pool of those affected will increase greatly as the application of AI becomes more widespread.

The current end of history thesis is a naive and short-sighted idea

I think that the thesis of the end of history is a naive idea if it is seen as something definitive. At most, what philosophers call the end of history (which some say was already reached with the French Revolution in the 18th century) could correspond to a transitory stage of humanity. As happened under some empires in the past, which corresponded to periods of relative political stability, security from external threats, progress and social welfare, it is possible (or even very probable) that humanity will move towards a state of relative stability in terms of political regimes, financial systems and social peace.

It could evolve, for example, into a true League of Nations, with a world government and parliament able to intervene to prevent wars between nations; could eventually create a system of International Law regulating aspects such as education, health and social security, finance and the separation of powers in member states (the current European Union system seems to be a good indicator of the potential success of such a system as recognised by Francis Fukuyma). However, it cannot be expected, nor can anyone guarantee, that long-term stability has been achieved.

During the period of greatest stability of the Roman Empire (a period of a few centuries of a domain that in total lasted a millennium and a half if we include the Byzantine empire), the social development index (according to the metric introduced by Ian Morris, opus cit.) reached one of the highest levels in history, surpassed only in the West more than fifteen hundred years later with the industrial revolution.

In my opinion, it is only understandable that end-of-history theses arose at the time they were created, when humanity still knew very little about the physical characteristics of outer space and the possibility that one day human beings would leave the cradle planet to go and explore, possibly colonise, and exploit the resources of other planets.

Despite the intellectual audacity of a thinker like Giordano Bruno, who 3 centuries before had already defended the existence of other possibly inhabited “worlds” (and having been burned at the stake of the Inquisition for his audacity), and Jules Verne having fictionalized space travel in the XIX century, at that time humanity seemed destined to live the rest of its history in this limited system, the Earth, whose geography at the time was already practically known in its entirety.

But by the middle of the 20th century, everything had changed radically: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity; Edwin Hubble’s extra-galactic astronomical observations and their impact on cosmology; the beginning of space exploration with the pioneering efforts of the Soviets and Americans; in other words, the horizon of humanity had been expanded far beyond terrestrial space, with all the philosophical implications of this new cosmovision.

This broadening of humanity’s horizons seen in the last century seems to me to be comparable to the Age of Discovery initiated in Europe by the Portuguese and Spanish in the 15th century, which had an enormous impact on all areas of human life, material and intellectual, and which led to the creation of a new worldview. In the 15th century, Prince Henry the Navigator realised, after having sent the first Portuguese navigators to explore the west African coast, that the future lay in long distance oceanic navigation and direct contact with other peoples, and he drew up a plan to carry out this epic… and since then the world has never been the same.

Similarly, by now many of us are already aware that it will be a matter of time before we start sending the first human explorers to other planets in the solar system (where our unmanned robotic probes have already arrived).

Just as the navigators of the past were surprised, both frightened and amazed, by the strangeness of the things they saw on other continents (despite not having left their planet), we cannot imagine what the explorers of the future might find in the immense diversity of the cosmos and how it will change the way we live and think. But it will certainly be very impactful: we may find natural resources not yet exploited on Earth; we may find life on other planets; perhaps other planetary civilisations with social organisations that are unthinkable for us at the moment.

Contrary to what most people may expect, the limits will not only be extended to the scale of the infinitely large but also to the infinitely small; in fact, the (much less publicized) idea of nanotechnology began in the middle of the 20th century, having been idealized by the brilliant Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965). In fact, more than the direction of the infinitely large or the infinitely small, we should prepare ourselves mentally for what Freeman Dyson, supported by his gigantic scientific baggage and his irrepressible imagination, has been describing in a variety of texts and which he summarised in his book Infinite in All Directions.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

- William Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5

The expansion of horizons to new dimensions inevitably leads to profound paradigm shifts in the most diverse aspects of human existence. From then on it makes no sense to try to apply previous paradigms to the prediction of history.

Possible Open Endings

We don’t need to be very creative to imagine that humanity will try other forms of social organisation and political regimes beyond the “End of History” discussed above, without any of them having to be the definitive one. In other words, we would be facing an Open Ending, according to the classification I propose. I put forward some clues of possible open endings in human history, from among those that I consider most probable (note that none of them excludes the other; they may be combined with each other):

• The fusion of biology and technology, i.e. the human body augmented by cyber-physical devices (something that is already beginning to be implemented in practice); it will allow the supremacy of humans to continue, rather than allow the dominance of “artificial systems”; however, the danger of the appropriation of these solutions by a minority may lead to the establishment of totalitarian regimes of a kind never before seen in history.
• We could be moving towards a Technocracy dominated by an elite of mathematicians and artificial intelligence gurus, similar to the Foundation fictionalized by Isaac Asimov (Case Study 1, presented below).
• The decrease in the planet’s population (following the current trend in the richest societies) combined with a very high extension of the average human life expectancy could result in the planet being ruled by a conservative and complacent gerontocracy, leading to long-term stagnation.
• A deep erosion of the heavily regulated and bureaucratised governing systems in which we live has led a growing number of people (mostly young people) to test alternative social models in small, informally self-regulated groups. This phenomenon, in a post-global environmental catastrophe scenario, could result in history restarting as an evolved anarchic system similar to that of the planet Anarres (or something more effective than that) described by Ursula Le Guin in her book The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.

The role of Artificial Generic Intelligence (AGI)

One might be tempted to think that AGI combined with disciplines such as massive data exploration and analysis, with its aptitude for discovering patterns underlying social and geophysical data, etc. , will allow in the more or less distant future to model and predict the whole reality in which we are inserted (the physical evolution of the planet, of human society) and beyond. It would be the equivalent of a mind with superpowers, a super-intelligence, the cybernetic God. There is a short story by Isaac Asimov, entitled The Last Question, which explores this topic in a brilliant and surprising way. This hypothesis which I don’t think is entirely unfounded raises the question I haven’t raised so far:

• Won’t the Singularity (the moment when the IAG surpasses human intelligence, making us obsolete) be the beginning of the End of History? I am referring to human history as defined above (and which is the subject of this text) and not to history as a succession of events taking place on this planet.

In my view, while much good fiction can be written about this, and despite optimistic predictions (from the point of view of some) that we will be close to witnessing this event, we will still be a long way from getting there if, as Gary Marcus argues, AI research stubbornly follows its current course. AI has demonstrated amazing capabilities to recognise patterns and solve problems in closed systems (such as Chess or Go, where the rules of the game are fixed and the environment is perfectly bounded) and where it has been trained countless times using huge volumes of data and computational power. However, it fails resoundingly in questions of the purest common sense that is necessary to answer questions about topics it’s unfamiliar with but which any human child can answer.

AI does not reveal the slightest ability to reflect on what it is doing and is incapable of understanding a metaphor in common language (in mathematical terms, it cannot identify an isomorphism). That is, however creative it may seem (and many of its gurus try to show that it is) it is actually incapable of “getting out of the box”; it works in the mechanical mode of reasoning, which Douglas Hofstadter calls M-mode and not in the (truly) intelligent mode or I-mode which constitutes a fundamental requirement for capturing the meaning of a poem, a piece of music or of another work of art (including Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid).

This kind of limitations is easily detectable even in the most advanced AI systems in natural language processing and which are trained with computational resources so expensive that they require the energy equivalent to the annual consumption of some countries.

Given the insistence of most AI experts (fortunately not all) in continuing to bet mainly on the current Deep Learning-based machine learning paradigm, and given the lack of motivation that most of them reveal to interact with experts from areas like Neuroscience or Cognitive Psychology I think that AGI will take a long time to be something truly credible. In any case, it seems to me that it would be naive to try to make any kind of realistic prediction of what a society would be like in a future dominated by this type of technology.

CASE STUDY 1: Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory

A fictionalised proposal for the mathematical modelling of the historical process

In the 1940s, the brilliant and prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began publishing a series of short stories entitled Foundation that would later give rise to the trilogy Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation (later expanded with two prequels and two sequels). The plot of the series begins with the story of a mathematician (Hari Seldon) who develops the theory of psychohistory, a new and effective branch of the mathematics of sociology based on the statistical laws of mass action and in my opinion with a contribution, although not explicit, from the theory of stochastic processes that Asimov certainly mastered. Applying that theory, Seldon manages to predict the future of large populations (of an entire planet and even the galactic Empire itself).

The story of the series is too long and complex to summarise here, but one of the topics that I find most interesting and revealing of Asimov’s creativity (combined with his great scientific background) is the following: at a crucial point in the plot, the entire scientific basis of the story (Seldon’s mathematical model) begins to collapse due to the appearance of an unpredictable character — in more formal terms highly unlikely according to the model (what in statistics we would call an outlier) — a freak with unusual psychic powers that nothing and no one can control.

As any statistical scholar knows, although the location (spatial or temporal) of outlier-type events cannot be estimated by a stochastic model, in general their probability of occurrence is not null and can be modelled. Furthermore, the so-called robust statistical models are developed to deal with this type of events in such a way that their occurrence does not jeopardise the full effectiveness of a statistical model. Although this theory is not addressed in the Foundation story, in practice this is what ends up happening: Seldon’s model is robust, allowing his theory to remain applicable and history to be somehow predicted and controlled by the experts of the Foundation (or one of its factions). Actually, I think that was only possible because in the whole story only one freak appeared. I wonder what it would be like if there were many…

But, what I find most interesting is the following fact: although the strange character had ended up being dominated, the Foundation’s control over the empire had been deeply shaken, making room for the emergence of new protagonists in history who began to look for the true Foundation, the one that truly represented the values that Seldon had wanted to preserve. For those familiar with the history of the Roman Empire and how it was shaken by the emergence of Christianity, this may seem somewhat familiar…

In my opinion, the psychohistory fictionalized by Isaac Asimov is the first proposal of a (non-formalized) mathematical theory of sociology and may even have inspired some recent attempts to implement it, taking advantage of the enormous computational power and gigantic volumes of data that are currently in the possession of several more technologically advanced nations and some well-known multinational companies.

After a more attentive reading of the story of Foundation, I believe that the events described there reveal something that does not seem to have been intentional in the fiction created by Asimov. The plot, in fact is so intricate and fascinating that one can easily get caught up in its details and miss a higher view of the story. Looking now at the events from a more distanced point of view (after some time on reading it) I have come to the following conclusion: the psychohistory that, after some initial acceptance problems, becomes a very successful theory, turns into something much more powerful than that, it ends up becoming the very driver of the galaxy’s history, conducted in a clever but ruthless way by the elite that constitutes the Foundation (or the Foundations) in order to ensure that the predictions of the theory are fulfilled, to safeguard the Empire.

CASE STUDY 2: A real and recent project of mathematical modelling of social phenomena on a global scale

I end this essay with an account of my personal contact with a group of researchers and international scientific teams of the highest level who created a European research project with the suggestive name of FuturICT, having as general objectives the following:

• modelling global social phenomena based on big data, mathematical models and super-computing;
• proposing a new economy and new financial models;
• supporting policy-makers, traders and citizens’ groups in their decision-making.

In 2012, as chairman of a scientific conference integrated in the international event Mathematics of Planet Earth (launched in 2013), I made contact with one of the leaders of FuturICT, who offered to present a paper entitled “Earth as a Complex System”. The communication consisted of a description of the project whose announced goal seemed ambitious but not yet very clear. However, already at that time, the project’s website presented a bolder vision.

FuturICT’s presentation during the conference triggered strong criticism from other participants at the event; critics were concerned about the lack of scrutiny over the methods of acquisition and appropriation of data and the type of use that could be made of it; on the project page (the initial link is no longer available on the web but can be found at the Wayback Machine, here) it read:

The ultimate goal of the FuturICT project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience.

FuturICT will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society.

The project will do so by developing new scientific approaches and combining these with the best established methods in areas like multi-scale computer modelling, social supercomputing, large-scale data mining and participatory platforms.

Later, a new project webpage went on to present more ambitious proposals, including topics such as:

Science

The ultimate goal of the FuturICT project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience.

Policy

FuturICT will build a Living Earth Platform, a simulation, visualization and participation platform to support decision-making of policy-makers, business people and citizens.

Technology

FuturICT — Integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society.

The documentation that can be found on the project’s version 2.0 website is more cautious and seems to clarify some methods and objectives.

FuturICT is not interested in tracking individual behaviour or gathering data on individual actions. Its aim is to understand the macroscopic and statistical interdependencies within the highly complex systems on which we all depend.

These notes clarifying the objectives may have been motivated by criticism of the project and accusations that it would be creating a modern Big Brother system — moreover, with public funds. But it is more plausible that they were necessary due to the recent European legislation on data protection (with regulations applicable from 2018), which may even have seriously limited the implementation of the project.

Among the challenges of FutureICT 2.0 are:

Simulations & Experiments [whose] ultimate goal is to identify new technologies and provide the basis for large-scale simulations in different domains of the social sciences, aimed at advancing the current understanding of the behavior of large communities of people, especially of groups of people having different cultures, values, norms coming in contact with each other.

Finance 4.0. [a model of] a circular and sharing economy that would allow a high quality of life for more people with less resources [and a Pilot Demonstrator that] will explore the potentialities of this innovative economic model, from pricing and trading to multi-currencies, from taxation options to new opportunities for central banks’ financial system.

In fact, after having finished its implementation period (the most recent contents of the website seem to be from 2019), the results presented on the project page are very poor in terms of the number of publications and scientific conclusions. It remains to be seen whether this corresponds to the actual results or whether there are other undisclosed ones, but for now the initial enthusiasm for this type of initiative seems to have waned or to have been held back by the very reality that the models are not capable of simulating…

Final Reflections by Way of Conclusion

I. If the Singularity is technically feasible, it will happen

Something that seems to me to stand out from the previous notes is the following: we do not know whether the current much-publicised promises about the future of the AGI will ever be fulfilled. But I believe that if this is technically feasible, humanity will do it no matter how many warnings are given. It is part of our nature (our thymic component) to push our limits, to always go beyond, regardless of the risks. To quote Douglas Hofstadter (with only a short modified expression) with my personal advantage of having practised these and other even more radical activities,

This suspicion of [AI] just runs in our human grain, it would seem. However, as with many daring activities such as hang-gliding or parachute jumping, some of us are powerfully drawn to it, while others are frightened to death by the mere thought of it.

- Douglas R. Hofstadter. I Am a Strange Loop, 2007

We know that all past civilisations have done it and we also know how they ended up…

Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we use it.

- Stephen Hawking

II. If history is deterministic, it will eventually be modeled

If social phenomena are governed according to a deterministic cause-effect chain or modelable as a complex network of stochastic processes or, more specifically, as Markov chains albeit with hidden variables, as observed in a wide range of micro- and macro-scale physical phenomena, then their laws will eventually be found by resorting to mathematics and artificial intelligence.

Whatever can be determined on the basis of pattern recognition or statistical inference will eventually be revealed … however large the temporal or spatial scales involved and however hidden these relationships may seem to us at the moment. I believe, however, that history will be neither modelable nor predictable, by any method within our reach, if we stop acting solely on the basis of the old patterns of personal, social and international behaviour, inherited from our ancestors; if the main factor in the development of history becomes based on human creativity, as unpredictable (or “delirious”) as that which the arts, philosophical thought, exploratory science, religions and even conspiracy theories have revealed. Or what some have called divine madness.

In conclusion

I had thought to summarise these ideas as follows:

Freaks from all over the world, unite.

Then human history will be so innovative that it will be impossible to model, predict, and control.

- Corto Jedi, 2022

Unfortunately, it seems that someone has got ahead of me :)

The freaks already have inherited the earth, my friend. Weirdos and misfits are now the world dominators.

- Chris Borgan. The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth, 2014