OR Overworked Sun-Gods in a Time of Poor Management Optimization
Whoa! What’s this crap about!?
I’d like to talk about the Bronze Age, but more precisely, the possible reasons that many of the bronze age cities collapsed. Then I’d like to connect this to a particularly gloomy scenario about how deploying AI to help manage modern cities may get pretty much everyone into an end of the world sh*t-storm if something goes wrong.
In the process, I’ll talk about how the bronze age led to the early Christian aversion to Sun God worship and why, Moon symbolism in both Christian Orthodoxy and Islam (Awkward!), World War 2, and how I myself use AI to help manage my home.
Let’s begin…
Cities in the ancient past had an upper-limit to how large and complicated they could be, and this was entirely because of the limited amount of food that could be grown. This was because before the ratio of copper and arsenic was found to create bronze, human shaped metals were too soft to be used to plow a field with. More precisely, using a domesticated beast of burden for farm work was impossible, because a copper ard (like a plow) couldn’t be dragged through a field without quickly deforming and becoming useless. This made it necessary that ALL field preparation be done entirely with human physical labor, and physical labor is hard, and so the size of fields of growing crops was limited. You can see how this easily led to an upper-limit to the size of a pre-bronze age urban area.
But, once bronze was created, they could make ards which could be dragged through a field by an animal, and guiding an animal to make long furrows for planting is much easier than doing it all yourself, and the size of farmland increased drastically. There was now more food, and so the population increased, which means more buildings needed to be built.
Now, with the increase of food and the increase of all the ancillary tasks that workers in all their various functions support a growing city and its needs, this means an increase in paperwork. But, not trying to be funny: They didn’t use paper. They used clay tablets, and these cities had various writing systems for marking these tablets while the clay was soft and then letting them harden in the sun for preservation by another class of society dedicated to records and documentation.
Generally, this was SLOW. Some things were interestingly sped up, such as their method of using rollers with unique designs on them for rapid signatures on clay, but that was an exception to the rule that their writing system was very laggy.
Touching upon another related aspect of this are the decision-makers that are using these records to decide how to best manage the city. Remember that before bronze was created, there had never been fields of crops or cities as large as they were now attempting. It was completely new territory, and to them, they were in a utopian situation of finally having achieved more food, security, wealth, and power than they had ever had before.
They were set on continuing to increase the size of their cities, though this was probably more because they couldn’t actually control the population growth. Nevertheless, they weren’t apprehensive to the idea that the cities might become too large for them to actually manage, basically because that had never happened before.
These people in leadership positions were also solving problems on a continual basis about all aspects of their growing cities, and the inner-symbolism of the intellect became associated with the sun. It was the intellect which solved the limited food problem with the creation of bronze, and the sun was necessary for growing the crops. The intellect also continued to make one decision after the other in the resolution of all the problems arising from their growing cities. As far as they were concerned, it was the Intellect, aka the Sun God, which was going to allow their power to grow indefinitely.
This was true for a time, but then the various bronze age cities crossed some murky and difficult to perceive threshold in size and complexity. This threshold was influenced by their primitive writing and record keeping systems, as well as the cognitive limitations of decision makers to take in and understand enough information to make sound decisions, and once this threshold was crossed, the cities began to become unmanageable by their leadership classes.
To put it another way, records were being made and transported too slowly, and at the SAME time there were too many records being created to possibly be understood well by all their decision makers. Thus, the decisions that were being made by all leaders increasingly became poor decisions. Despite this, these cities continued to grow unabated, and eventually this led to societal instability and their full collapse.
These collapses were astonishing to the ancient world, and the people who lived afterwards sought a different god than the one that had failed the once great cities. But, this idea of gods is different than how they are naively defined today. The ancient world was only giving different names to the various inner psychological forces within the human mind which can be identified as unique from the others by their different traits and reliability.
To put another way, they were out in the ancient world hustling to meet all their needs, and trying to figure out which way was the best way to think, defined by how successful they were in all their various human goals. The old sun god (intellect) apparently had issues, so they looked elsewhere.
2,000 years later, the Roman Empire was in control of the territory where Christianity emerged. The Roman writing and record keeping systems were much more efficient, and they solved the information and organizational problems that had limited the size of the earlier bronze age cities. They also achieved multi-city supply logistics, graduating up from being simply powerful city-states to being a full fledged empire.
There were certainly tensions between early Christians and the Roman government regarding compulsory worship of state-deities, including a Roman sun god, which was associated within the empire with the unquestionable authority of the Caesar. Christians basically wanted to be allowed to openly obey the silent tug of their inner-conscience over the will of an external human authority figure. Bad juju in Rome.
The spiritual ideas of early Christianity was naturally skeptical of the intellect which had brought utter ruin to the old cities, and among the trait of intelligence that this ‘sun god’ apparently possessed, they also associated it with cruelty. This is because the two traits tend to coincide most of the time, and when we are our brightest, we also tend to be more vicious and the least empathetic.
What they were perceiving, according to this early mental model, were two general natures of ALL human beings, which was cruel intelligence, and kind benevolence, and early Christianity turned away from the sun to gaze instead at the moon; ie They put their faith in the other side of humanity which was nurturing and understanding without flashiness or clever thoughts and words.
This sun and moon symbolism representing the two general natures of human beings continued to be used and understood for centuries after Christianity’s founding, all the way up to the founding of Islam in modern day Saudi Arabia 500 years later. The idea that the true god (ie more reliable god) was the moon god rather than the sun god was borrowed from Orthodox Christian ideas which were floating around in Arabia at the time, among many other ideas. The fit neatly within Arabian inner-symbolism because the site of the Kabbah in the city of Mecca had once been used to worship Hubal, a moon god four-centuries before, and the name of the old pagan Arabian supreme god Al-ilah, shortened to Allah, was selected to refer to the inner ‘god’ which was NOT the intellect.
Now lets skip ahead to World War 2.
The British Empire had an astonishing capability to push paperwork and management to the bleeding edge. Roughly another 2,000 years after the Roman Empire, the creation and transportation of records and information was vastly more efficient and coordinated, and various technologies had been created over the past several centuries that literally provided this pre-computer empire to quickly relay information to where it was needed. These technologies included better paper, better writing utensils, typewriters, telegraphs, telephones, and radios. What the British empire had done is make up for the limitations of human workers with these information technologies, and superbly organize these workers into a form which could manage their entire colonial empire.
The idea I’m trying to convey is that there is only so much you can do to make a living human being more efficient in the creation and dissemination of information. We are slow. We write slowly, we speak slowly (and vaguely), we type slowly, we walk and run slowly, and it even takes us time to read or hear something and understand it clearly. But, information technologies have a huge impact on making up for the inefficiencies of human workers, because they speed up the creation of information being prepared for another location, and can get it there often instantaneous. Thus, the better you can handle information, the larger and more complex your society’s governing apparatus can be.
While there is still little you can do to improve the performance of a human worker, the British empire did anyway, and in World War 2 had superbly trained and educated classes of society managing their empire and their role in the war.
But one of the effects of the German raids was that it disrupted the education of children in the war, much like how COVID caused American children to miss too much school and are now a year or more behind for their age. After World War 2 was over, the children that experienced the war grew older missing large swaths of the education they would have received had it not been for the war, and it had the effect decades later of undermining what had been a supremely well-oiled machine of management and empire. This means that the quality of human workers to get information to where it was needed was much diminished, and the power of the British suffered as a result.
What saved things for the British was the dawning of the computer age, and this was because of the development of early computers during World War 2 to enable the allies to decrypt Nazi encryption. Computers in the proceeding decades became smaller and more affordable, and by the 1970’s were available to the public. This meant that the British could overcome the effects of education disruption on children growing up around the time of World War 2 with more efficient ways to create, store, and transmit records. In other words, the quality of human workers could be even less now, and they could still manage large and complex endeavors. Yey for computers! Lucky save!
Now what is the dire threat? We are well along in the computer age now. In fact, the size and complexity of many of the wealthiest countries is probably at their maximum plateau possible when managed by human workers utilizing computers.
But Artificial Intelligence in the near future will certainly be utilized to assist in managing not only cities, but all the linkages between them across not only an entire country, but across alliances. This will have the effect of making the size of everything that will be built in the future far larger and complex than what is possible with only human thought and labor alone.
But what happens if we build something which can ONLY be managed by AI, and then something happens to the AI itself? Human beings won’t be able to serve as backups to a vast, world spanning system which was only possible through artificial intelligence. In a way similar, but not the same to the collapse of the bronze age cities, if something happens to the managing and governing AI that kept a vast infrastructure like that humming, the entire thing in the space of a millisecond becomes unmanageable to the ENTIRE human leadership.
It would be like a tree growing near a far away star that obtained immense size, but then the star grew faint and the soil lost its richness, and where the great tree once thrived, it is now too large and bloated to absorb enough energy from the ground and its sun.
Lastly, a miniature version of this dilemma is just how damn useful ChatGPT is. It is now my preferred method of learning something on the internet. This is because the process of attempting to find the answer to a question on the internet, has been for decades, to type in a search query, scroll and semi-randomly select from search results after scanning the little information you see in your results feed for indications your answer may be at a particular link (this rarely works), reading one article and then another without finding your answer quickly because the authors will only put what you’re looking for at the bottom and hidden amongst a load of stuff more designed to inflate the article to a larger-than-necessary size, likely failing, and then navigating over to forums and reading one uninformative comment after the other HOPING one commenter just happens to blurt out what you were looking for. With ChatGPT, if you ask it one perfect question, the majority of the time it will respond with one perfect answer.
I’m currently in the process of repairing my home, and ChatGPT has been enormously useful at just finding the answer to things related to fixing my place up. “What is that putty called that you put in the holes in walls and then scrape flat and let dry?” – “What you are referring to is called Spackle.” Next stop Amazon dot com.
Now what would happen if I incorporated ChatGPT into the full management of my home and property, and I got things really clicking along very efficiently, but then, out of nowhere, OpenAI got the spooks, and pulled ChatGPT from being available to the public?
My *ss would be back to getting OCD while exhaustively trying to find the answer to a peculiar question by experimenting with differently worded and designed search queries.
Regarding the potential threat society is under by allowing AI to manage it, perhaps we should deliberately keep the size and complexity of what we maintain and build in the future at pre-AI levels. We need to make sure that office staff with computers can run the damn thing themselves if something goes wrong with any AI they choose to incorporate. Bumping up societal complexity too much by letting an AI run things makes the AI itself an Achilles heel to that society, because there will be nothing that exists that can perform as well as the AI if something drastic happens to it.
A single city can be thought of as a self-regulating thing as long as it doesn’t perish. Urban decay is one of the symptoms of a city that didn’t die outright, but parts of it withered away while other parts continued to receive sustenance. If a city grows only a little too large that it exceeds invisible and elusive upper bounds, then various city projects will fail to continue to be funded, and people will work elsewhere.
But this is only a single city under austerity measures and perhaps on life support. If it exceeds the bounds TOO far, it collapses outright.
Unsupported Speculation 
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