Exhaustive Futurism

An outline-form set of notes (October 2018) toward organizing futurist research, presented almost entirely as nested bullet lists rather than prose. It opens with a question about what to call entities in a “table” and proposes dimensions for analyzing agents and historical/futuristic change: types of elements, knowledge, relationships, and impacts. The bulk of the document is a long taxonomy of actors (state and non-state), groupings by wealth, gender, age, religion, and interests, alongside lists of “ways of gaining power,” related research, and existing frames such as “AI and National Security.” It also links to several external resources on AI and national security and to Wikipedia categories. The piece is a sketch: it states a goal of mapping the full space of relevant actors and forces but does not develop arguments, and it ends on scattered open questions about Open Philanthropy and influencing academia. Appended at the bottom is a shorter, closely related sketch, “Dimensions of Historic & Futuristic Analysis” (November 2018), which lists candidate axes — time, causes of change (“changers”), recipients of change (“changees”), researcher knowledge, and elements — and trails off into a list of synonym pairs. Both are first-draft sketches rather than developed frameworks.

Question: What should things in this table be called?

Agents
Entities

Common Dimensions of Historic & Futuristic Analysis

Elements

Things that will change. Partition?
Types
- Organizations
- Demographics
- Physical things
- Ideas
- Innovations
- Events
Element-specific Subdimensions Time

Relationships/Impacts between elements

Knowledge

Total amount
EV of existing / new knowledge
- Subdimensions for specifics of research effort.

Intro Resources:

Similar to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fields_of_history

Field Names:

Technology-driven power differentials
Technology-enabled power grabs

Previous technologies and technology differentials have allowed specific groups to gain power.

Military technologies / techniques helped the Romans, Mongols, etc. grow substantially.
The industrial age led to European countries overthrowing and colonizing much of the rest of the world. (guns & steel)
Nuclear weapons helped the US win WW2 and led to the main power struggles of the cold war.
The use of Tanks very much changed war from the early WW1 days.
The use of cannons and similar removed the utility of castles.

Technological Determinism

Exhaustive Futurism

Entities: Actors / Collectives / Ideas / Technologies

For each, estimate

How much improvement is correlated with EA values

Recommended Frames / Dimensions

Comparative Differences of Agents (Power)
- Existing State Actors
  - US
  - China
  - Russia
  - Saudi Arabia
  - Iran
  - North Korea
- Specific inter-state actors
  - USA
    - Parties
      - Republicans
      - Democrats
      - Libertarians
    - Government Departments
      - Executive
      - Legislative
      - Judicial
    - Surrounding
      - Lobbyists
      - External influence
      - Media’s influence
    - Issues
      - Polarization
      - Climate Change
      - Authoritarianism
      - General government effectiveness / efficiency
- State Actors by Government
  - Democratic Governments
  - Dictatorial Governments
- Government Agendas
  - Economic
    - Left
    - Center
    - Right
  - Social
    - Left
    - Center
    - Right
- Nonstate actors
  - Global alliances
  - Powerful individuals
  - Coorporations
    - Startups
    - Large coorporations
    - Large coorporations with AI emphases
  - Terrorist groups
  - Media Agencies
  - NGOs
    - Open Phil / Good Ventures
  - Effective Altruists
  - DAOs
  - Uncontrolled AIs
- Industries
  - Academia
  - Law
  - Health
  - Trade
- Groups by Wealth
  - Poor
  - Middle Class
  - Rich
  - Ultra-Rich
- Groups by ownership
  - Citizens
  - Governments
- Generic Lens:
  - All tools & strategies for power
- Gender
  - Men
  - Women
  - Transgender
- Age
  - Young vs. Middle Age vs. Old
- Religion
  - Catholicism
  - Protestant Churches
  - Islam
  - Judaism
  - Athiests
  - Cults
- Interests
  - Risks
    - Climate Change
    - Nuclear Proliferation
    - Biorisks
    - Animal Cruelty
    - Cause Prioritization
    - Blockchain Governance
  - General
    - Polarization
    - Truth & Reporting
      - High-integrity media
      - Low-integrity media
      - Rationality
Absolute Differences
- Coordination abilities
  - General expected stability levels
Decisive Strategic Advantage Ways of gaining power
Technology development
- AI
- Weapons
Financial
- Stock market
- Coorporations
- Theivery
  - Thought crime
  - Blackmail
  - Hacking
Social influence
- Political influence

Related research

There’s lots and lots of military futurism / sci-fi.
- This could meant that work in the area seems unscientific.
Known organizations?
- US Military Intelligence
- British Intelligence

Existing Frames

AI and National Security
- Naively wouldn’t focus on power grabs from other groups, which would eventually be an issue of National Security.
- Too much focus on military national attacks.We need to catch groups before they have too much power.

Sources of benefit:

Identify the main trends to notice for generic decision making
- Many ideas you may not have thought to consider.
Find what areas may be the most modifiable, change those areas

There’s a conflict between specificity vs. generality

Question: How effective is Open Phil? What areas are they leaving out?

Question: How effective is it to change academic opinion?

What are the ways of changing academic focus / emphasis? / research

https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-influence-campaign-1499785286

Think Tanks
- Convince funding
- Convince owners
- Convince researchers
Academia
Convince Academics
Change funding
Change university emphasis

Dimensions of Historic & Futuristic Analysis

Futurism as a field generally attempts to understand the future, but the future is highly multidimensional. One may ask how futurist research can most effectively cover all potential territory and ensure that there aren’t any large areas underexplored. I think one way to begin is with a good ontology.

Ontologies can be used to help map out the space of existing and possible futurist research. On a high level, I think it’s useful to begin the ontology by identifying a few distinct axis or dimensions.

Below is one first draft at a dimension outline. I hope it could eventually be improved, but find it useful for now. I wouldn’t be too surprised if other organizations have made similar attempts that I don’t know about. One thing I noticed when doing this is that creating an ontology for the future is probably very similar to creating one for the past (somewhat obviously in retrospect), though I imagine in practice they may be used differently.

The outline is below. I’ll explain the main parts underneath it.

Time
Causes of change (Changers) (Elements)
Recipients of change (Changees) (Elements)
Change type
- Subdimensions for specifics of elements
Researcher Knowledge
- Types
  - Total amount
  - Expected Value
    - Existing or expected knowledge
    - Subdimensions for specifics of research efforts
Elements (As changers or changees)
Types
- Organizations
- Demographics
- Physical things
- Ideas
- Innovations
- Events
- Relationships between Elements
Element-specific subdimensions

Elements

Elements are things that may either cause effects of be impacted. Basically, anything that could be a noun could be an element. Some specific examples could include:

China
Chinese business interests
The impact of Chinese business interests on stability in Ghana
Self driving vehicles
Democracy
Norwegian woman who enjoy opera Because there are so many different types of elements, many subdimensions would only apply to a specific selection.

This is probably the simplest dimension. Time is very one-dimensional and easy to understand in the context of history and the future. For example, one could analyze “modern aggriculture per decade from 1800 to 2000.”

inputs / outputs.

influencers/ influencees

changers / changees

impactor/ impactee