Complexity, Happiness, and Responsibility

Tying the insights discussed in "Communicating Complexity" back to the work I've done on understanding population and consumption, I found some tantalizing clues about how complexity relates to happiness and our ability to meet our personal and global responsibilities.

One clue involves how the complexity we each experience (complexity per person) tracks with happiness on a global scale. Since it is closely proportional to population size, it relates to happiness pretty much the same way. Until very recently, we could count on happiness increasing along with complexity, which is so intuitively obvious that many of us don't even think to question it: more people can provide more labor and creativity about how to both acquire new resources and use those resources to create environments suited to individual needs and wants.

As we were building environments, we were taking away or fouling the resources needed by other species to survive, including members of those species themselves, and since they were providing services and resources we depend on, it was inevitable that we would get to a point where there weren't enough of them left to replenish what we were using. We seem to have reached that point around 1970, and since then we have been struggling to provide enough environments for the people we've been adding to the world while using up more resources and killing more creatures. World happiness responded accordingly, reaching a peak level as Nature was unable to provide any more that we could dominate without increasingly severe consequences. We started focusing more on creatively using what we already had, which turned what might have been a smooth mountain-like peak into a very bumpy plateau, but we were still forced to deal with the need for some waste, especially of energy, the bulk of which we continued extracting from sources that could not be replaced in anything close to a human lifetime.

Another clue about complexity sheds some light on why we haven't done more to stop this suicidal behavior. One of the most obvious negative consequences of rising complexity is that people have less time to perform the same tasks, which risks (to put it lightly) sacrificing the quality of the results of those tasks. That decrease in time can be easily estimated for the world's population since the beginning of civilization based on population growth, and with reasonable assumptions about the time we are awake and the number of people and environments that would realistically be in our local communities which we could mostly interact with (interactions with the rest of the world's population would be negligible by comparison). One such estimate shows that 12,000 years ago people could have spent an average of about two weeks a year, at 16 hours a day, with each person in their community, along with their associated environments and worldviews, interacting to experience and shape their lives. Today, that time is down to two minutes. Put another way: we went from the time it would take to read a 7,300 page book to just a single page. Multiply these times by 24-millionths, and you'll get the time available for each person (and the rest) in the world.

Arguably, the sum of all of our interactions, directly and consciously with our local communities, and indirectly and unconsciously with the rest of the world, results in our net impact on human experience. Before civilization, when people lived in small groups that were effectively isolated from each other, each community was effectively a world. For the most part, personal responsibility, for oneself and family, was the same as global responsibility. But, on average, there were still impacts that could potentially or eventually affect others, mainly in the form of environmental change, but also in genetic changes that might be transmitted to other populations during chance encounters. Merging communities, as civilization did, enabled a critical divergence of these two kinds of responsibility, and complexity amplified it as people were torn between focusing on their immediate needs and those of people in a growing community. Competition for resources in the form of war simplified life for a while, by reducing population but leaving tools in place that helped the survivors support more offspring. On average, more people lived than died, with the tools, collective knowledge, and already-modified environments providing the means for further growth by dealing with more of the complexity with less direct human intervention. People were having more impact, but were feeling like they were still in small, manageable communities that happened to provide more of what they wanted and needed.

Now our numbers and our tools have created a global community where direct action is required to avoid catastrophic results of our collective impact that include increasing restriction of resources, both from overuse and fouling like that which has doomed too many other animals. Clearly, we don't have the time (and, for many, the inclination) to manage the complexity we already have, never mind adding some new variables to our internal constructs that will temporarily add to the complexity of our lives. Our tools may be able to pick up much of the slack; but by giving them more intelligence to do so, we risk them becoming our first serious competitors in millennia. This adds to the time-sensitivity of taking action, while avoiding the real temptation to accept the new capabilities as an excuse for increasing complexity further.

If we did take direct action, then, based upon my definition of complexity, we might try reducing the number of environments, roughly equivalent to creating less choice in products we can buy and sharing as much as possible. Unfortunately, even if we reduced that number to one for everybody, the complexity could only be cut by one-third, which wouldn't be enough (even if it didn't have the potential for much worse consequences) since we have nearly twice the complexity associated with safe consumption – and I'm not counting the possibly unstoppable and overwhelming effects of global warming.

In the past, we might have bought some time by reducing our population in a non-violent way: sending a large fraction to other, relatively isolated locations. Today our best option for doing so is a mass migration to other planets, beginning with Mars, but those worlds would need to be quickly made habitable, and the technology for transport would need to be created, tested, and put into mass production in even less time. The feasibility of doing so in the short time (less than a decade) we likely have before deadly competition becomes unavoidable is something I continue to reexamine and reject as too small to consider, but so are pretty much all of the other options, including the one I suggested at the end of "Communicating Complexity": cutting birth rates to zero and letting the population decline to a lower, sustainable level while regrowing ecosystems.

I remain committed to the belief that more understanding can lead to solutions that have a chance of working. While my recent research has added to that understanding (and hopefully the reader's), a viable path to solving this most critical of problems remains illusive. But it's good to remember that illusive does not necessarily mean nonexistent, and I plan to keep using some of my precious time to keep looking.

The Martian Scenario

A few years ago, I explored the idea that people's behavior could be described in terms of personality traits interacting with associated environmental variables, directed by knowledge and enabled by power, with the goal of finding the best match that would manifest as maximum attainable happiness. Because, in aggregate, a population's happiness increases logarithmically with ecological footprint, the price of continually growing happiness is faster depletion of ecological "resources" – including other species that provide basic services that keep the planet habitable. Population size multiplies this effect, and exponentially increasing population accelerates our approach to a critical point where habitability can no longer be maintained.

My projections have shown that this point will likely be reached by 2030. As it approaches, the world will get harder to live in as resources become degraded and harder to find and use. But we will keep trying, because more happiness and life expectancy are what drives us. After that point, deaths will exceed births, and our population will drop to zero by 2075, which I now understand will likely be due to our ecological impact having grown due to self-sustained global warming. According to my calculations, the difference in global average temperature from pre-industrial times will climb past 3.3°C, and the world will be uninhabitable.

Using the Big Five personality traits (OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), we can guess how groups of people will both perceive and want to act as this nightmare scenario unfolds. Power and knowledge can be expressed as efficiency in achieving total happiness, where efficiency is a fraction of the happiness someone doesn't have, which can be achieved in the amount of time it would ideally take to get from 0% to 100% happiness. Using efficiency, we can estimate change in happiness over time. Using the relationship between happiness and ecological footprint, we can tell how people's ecological impact will change over time. Assuming a statistical distribution of personalities among people, we can also estimate how many people will act in a given way.

I expect that the openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion traits correspond to variability in the environment. The more variable it is, the more a person with high openness prefers it. Because a rapidly changing environment can't be easily planned for, people with low conscientiousness will prefer it. Extraverts will like the excitement of rapid change, and be more inclined to be active parts of communities that must react to the change and share resources. I estimate that maybe 1% of the population would (initially) benefit from large variability.

The cooperation/competition dynamic inherent in the agreeableness trait would correspond to the distribution of resources among people, as well as the amount of social order and violence that accompanies its breakdown. People with high agreeableness (around 17%) would prefer to share resources and avoid conflict, while those with low agreeableness would do the opposite.

A high amount of neuroticism would translate into increased stress as deviation from preferred conditions for the other traits increases uncontrollably and inescapably. Stress leads to more disease and death, and ultimately may kill off the most people, even those with low neuroticism (17% of the population), before environmental conditions do.

Climate change due to global warming is perhaps the best example of how humanity's influence on the world's physical systems is changing the range of environmental conditions. In the case of temperature, the range has shifted significantly from what we depend on, and will continue to do so (such as in Australia this past summer). As some conditions become less likely, those people who are best adapted to them (and are happiest when experiencing them) will find it harder, and eventually next to impossible, to meet their desires and then their needs, mirroring what is already happening to other species whose ecological niches are disappearing. If the shift happened slow enough, our population (and those of other species) might be able to change its preferences through evolution so that more members would be adapted to the new conditions, or new species would do so in our place, but climate change in particular is happening far too fast.

Technology and social behavior have enabled people to adapt to different conditions, and can be expected to do so in the future – up to a point. My calculations indicate that they enabled our efficiency at achieving happiness to increase by several orders of magnitude until the 1950s, when it spiked due to immense technological progress. Efficiency achieved a minor peak in the late 1980s and has been declining since then. Notably, that last peak occurred less than a decade after the world's annual ecological impact exceeded what ecosystems could offset in production and processing our waste.

Using our highly complex civilization as a base, we can now support keeping small numbers of people reasonably comfortable in space for limited periods of time. With a moderate amount of additional development, artificial habitats might be able to support a dozen or more people over a lifetime on a planet like Mars. By my crude estimates based on personality, around 220,000 people would find our rapidly deteriorating world acceptable, and only 300 of them could have enough power to prepare for its physical consequences. It is conceivable that such a minority (curiously close to the actual number of extremely rich people) would attempt to outlast the rest of us just as Mars settlers would eventually be forced to do.

Tests of Survival

One of the common retorts to warnings of resource exhaustion and environmental catastrophe is that humanity has overcome similar problems in the past, and will continue to do so, primarily through innovating and exploring that is driven by the promise of great rewards for those doing both. This ignores the historical record of collapsing civilizations, the huge advantages accompanying our access to cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, and the growing signs that we have merely postponed the worst consequences of our excesses, not eliminated them.

The bottom line is that every civilization – and every species – has lived or died based on its ability to solve two basic problems: matching resources with demand, and safely disposing of waste. It is far from a sure thing that our global civilization will solve these problems, though plenty of potential solutions are known. Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the future may, at some level, depend on your confidence that solutions will be implemented before resources run out and we are overwhelmed by our waste.

Given the stakes – entire species at risk – it is tempting to think that motivation won't be an issue. Those who acknowledge the stakes and are advocates of capitalism, even the distorted form currently dominating the world, expect that the price associated with demand exceeding supply will be enough of an incentive to spur discovery of new resources and innovative new ways of using the ones we have. This is certainly happening in the “green” industries, which are also taking on the waste issue by creating connections between waste and production, and increasingly altering the nature of ownership so that they can control everything but the use of the products, which is leased to their customers. To anyone who knows – or is – a true innovator, the majority of incentive to create comes from the innovation process itself; but true innovation is all-too-often a very minor part of industrial systems, where it is far cheaper to exploit workers and customers' ignorance than to provide quality, long-lasting products.

That so many people remain in ignorance or denial of the critical condition we're in by definition suppresses innovation. Not surprisingly, the people most responsible for disinformation are those whose personal power derives from the status quo, which in addition to causing the looming shortages and excess waste that is sabotaging Earth's life support systems, has no constructive alternatives to provide. Instead, all they can do is reap the profits of diminishing supply, and promising what they can't deliver (and convincing people that no one else can) while appearing to try by further exploiting the resources in decline.

Really sustainable solutions, because of the universal availability of resources and durability of products, will not ultimately lend themselves to profit-taking and power concentration. This is understandably unacceptable to those who have learned to value the maximizing of personal power. One tried-and-true alternative, which provided legitimately high rewards in the past, is to locate other sources of nonrenewable resources that can be controlled. Since such resources are limited or too dangerous to exploit here on Earth (whether people accept that fact or not), it is natural to try to find them on other worlds.

Various nations have space exploration programs, well-funded private groups not far behind. As noble as the search for scientific knowledge is, there is a strong component of the space community that has argued strongly and explicitly for the exploitation of other worlds. Now that NASA is terminating its Space Shuttle program and looking for a grander mission than remote observation and measurement, the space exploitation advocates (one of whom I used to be) see an opportunity to gain traction in the exploration and eventual settlement of Mars. I now find myself in the strange position of offering lackluster, if any, support for the idea, mainly because I fear that humanity hasn't learned the lesson of respect for other life that would keep us from spreading death and destruction as far as our technology can take us.

Not that long ago, I found people with attitudes like mine to be dangerously naive, idealistic, and maybe a bit crazy, mainly because I figured that our unique opportunity to transport life outside the death zone of our expanding Sun was worth the risk, and not likely to be available for much longer. Besides, I reasoned, we might still learn the life-respect lesson along the way. Now I figure that if we're bound to kill everything in our path anyway, it's probably good for the Universe if we stay right here and limit the damage. Of course, I hope that I'm proven wrong, but we should take the time to find out. A sustainable civilization is likely a good civilization, at least to those who value life and quality of life beyond our own experience.