A planetary AI copilot network to overcome the Metacrisis
The Metacrisis is upon us. Humanity is recognizing the total risk we face as a species and planet, created by self-increasing technological capabilities, the “Molochian” self-reinforcing economic drive for short-term growth and financialization at the expense of sustainability, safety and equity, and the feedback loops between these factors. As argued by Daniel Schmachtenberger, popularizer of the term “Metacrisis”, the most likely outcomes are either some form of chaotic breakdown, or the development of powerful control systems in response, leading to oppressive authoritarian control. It is useful to think of these outcomes as “attractors”, or centers of gravity for our world’s path through history.
Schmachtenberger and others seek a “third attractor”: a globally beneficial outcome with enough gravity to could change our path — with the help of intentional planning, coordination, and effort. The “old order” of 20th-century capitalism, with all its failures and discontents, is no longer a feasible center of gravity. And although many attempts are being made to achieve global good — perhaps most notably the Sustainable Development Goals — there is a widespread lack of clarity about the character of the attractor they are aiming towards. This leads to insufficient coordination, factionalism, mutual accusations of wishful thinking, ambition gaps, and a general sense of Sisyphean effort and hopelessness.
We argue that there is indeed a third, win-win attractor, which we call Gaia, and it is within reach from where we are. It represents a truly different paradigm than the “old order”, yet reconciles seemingly opposite movements, such as degrowth and eco-modernism, or regeneration and YIMBYism. And the same energy boost from exponential technologies and capital, if well harnessed, can drive fast movement towards the Gaia attractor, leading to substantial positive-sum gains within a horizon of years, not decades.
Indeed, there is a concrete initiative, feasible with today’s technology and knowledge and already in progress, that will drastically accelerate and focus this trajectory shift. It involves creating a decentralized network of AI assistants to augment human collectives, based on principles of complex adaptive systems, open science, and collective intelligence. This AI-human supermind — the Gaia network — will empower humanity to coordinate at planetary scale, lock in win-win outcomes, and safeguard against Molochian dynamics. It is our best hope to overcome the Metacrisis.
Robert Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny argues that all evolution, whether biological or cultural, tends to produce non-zero-sum games of increasing intricacy and scale: relationships that reward cooperation and integration. In order to reap the benefits, players — whatever kind of entity they may be — evolve information processing and physical structures, “technologies” that form foundations for the next layer of non-zero-sumness. As Wright puts it: “Whether you are a bunch of genes or a bunch of memes, if you’re all in the same boat you’ll tend to perish unless you are conducive to productive coordination.”
This process of compounding, hierarchical non-zero-sumness continues up to the planetary scale and provides the “microeconomic foundations” to the “macroeconomics” of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia theory. “The entire 3-billion-year evolution of plants and animals is a process of epigenesis, the unfolding of a single organism. And that single organism isn’t really the human species, but rather the whole biosphere, encompassing all species.” **Wright goes even further and argues that “the human species—not to belittle the job—is just the biosphere’s maturing brain.” According to this view, we are not only children of Gaia, but also its stewards.
We then give the name Gaia to this attractor, the tendency for life on Earth, including humans, to evolve towards a single pattern of increasing richness, structure, interdependency and prosociality. But however strong this general tendency may be, it is just that: a tendency. It does not provide a guarantee of positive-sum outcomes in any specific trajectory. Players may well choose to defect, and game theory shows that it’s often rational to do so, given the context. Humans’ strategic rationality renders them prey to Moloch, the god of coordination failures and multipolar traps. If Gaia is the invisible hand that systematically creates win-win opportunities, Moloch is the invisible hand that makes humans systematically forsake those opportunities for lose-lose outcomes.
We can picture Moloch as a parasite that coevolved with Gaia and feeds on its bounty — a natural force that has “existed” since life on Earth began, will be around forever as well. But just like parasites of the biological kind, Moloch doesn’t usually endanger the entire system: regulatory feedback loops keep it in check. Indeed, as most economists rightly point out, Molochian dynamics of competition and self-interest do often create positive, perhaps unintended consequences: the development of technologies and political economic institutions that have enabled significant positive-sum outcomes like longer lifespans, increased calorie availability, and renewable energy sources. And in the long term, as humans learn to exploit coordination games, they generate evolutionary pressure to develop more resilient (antifragile) games. (If Moloch is the god of coordination failures, Gaia is also the goddess of learning from failure.)
What’s different about the Metacrisis, according to Schmachtenberger, is that Moloch is supercharged by exponential technology: not only are humans able to play out Molochian strategies of extraction, commons overgrazing and externalizing costs and risks faster than ever, but the logic of compounded returns at the heart of financial capital requires them to continuously accelerate the scale and speed of these dynamics, driving the development of increasingly sophisticated software and socioeconomic technologies to enable that. From that perspective, even current AI systems are Molochian in origin, having been developed by wealthy tech corporations to deepen their competitive “moats” and currently being deployed at an accelerated speed in extractive areas such as ads.
This network of reinforcing feedback loops presents a dire picture of our future global path, but the good news is that nothing about that path is unstoppable or irreversible. As mentioned above, Gaia is very good at inventing regulating mechanisms that keep exponential dynamics in check. Most relevantly for the case at hand, as mentioned above, we have a wealth of experience as a species in creating positive-sum dynamics out of negative-sum ones: notably, information technologies and socioeconomic structures that augment our intelligence, helping us disseminate knowledge, build trust, and safeguard our behavior and decisions, and allowing us to minimize Moloch’s destructive influence.
Ever wonder why you’re so often unimpressed by humans and yet so blown away by the accomplishments of humanity? It’s because humans are still, deep down, those people on Planet 2. Plop a baby human into a group of chimps and ask them to raise him, Tarzan style, and the human as an adult will know how to run around the forest, climb trees, find food, and masturbate. That’s who each of us actually is. Humanity, on the other hand, is a superintelligent, tremendously-knowledgeable, millennia-old Colossus, with 7.5 billion neurons. And that’s who built Planet 3. — Tim Urban
Our ability to navigate between Moloch and Gaia is fundamentally tied to our intelligence, both as individuals and as a collective. Intelligence allows us to envision novel strategies, ponder the consequences of decisions, and create new tools that further augment our intelligence. However, individual intelligence has limits, and coordinating collective efforts is often hindered by conflicting interests, information asymmetry, and bounded rationality. To successfully navigate between Moloch and Gaia, we need to overcome these challenges and enhance our collective decision-making capabilities. The first category of enhancement is “wetware-based”: Collective intelligence structures such as networks, hierarchies, and markets help facilitate collaboration and coordination. By understanding and correctly leveraging these structures, we can create more effective systems for collective problem-solving and decision-making. Collective intelligence is further radically augmented by software-based structures — symbolic systems from writing all the way to the Internet, which have created exponentially more powerful "superminds." By integrating advanced information technologies like AI and decentralized systems into our collective intelligence structures, we can radically enhance our ability to process, analyze, and act on information more effectively, as shown in Thomas Malone's book "Superminds".
By embracing and developing this ultimate exponential technology (the “Human-Computer Colossus”, to borrow Tim Urban’s terminology) we can create superminds capable of navigating the complex landscape between Moloch and Gaia: our only path out of the Metacrisis.
In a nutshell, the only way to reverse the escalation of compounding risk is bottom-up: by creating and deploying intelligent systems that help people, communities and organizations at every single decision frontline mitigate risk and create shared value, while coordinating and learning from each other to internalize externalities and improve themselves exponentially faster. The logical conclusion of this principle is the Gaia Network, a decentralized AI supermind backed by the sum of the world’s knowledge and data.
This is a radically different vision of the future, so it is useful to make it more concrete by having examples in mind. Rather than give you hypothetical examples, we will focus on an example drawn from our work at Digital Gaia. Since 2022, we have been designing a framework and operating infrastructure for decision-making copilots in the domains of agriculture and land-based natural solutions. What follows is a concrete scenario that will be feasible in the mid-2020s, inspired by a true story.
Fatima is the leader of a community farm in Mexico, and has been worried that fertilizer supply has been hard to secure, while prices for her main crops like maize have been too volatile to ensure an income for the farm. Both her suppliers and the traders who buy the produce blame it on the Metacrisis… She asks Alice, her town’s local agronomist, to develop a plan for improving the farm’s profitability and reducing the dependency on fertilizer supply.
Fatima grants Alice full permissions to her farm’s node on the Gaia network, one of 600 million nodes just on the agriculture subnet — each “responsible” for copiloting a specific farm. These lightweight nodes run securely on the farmers’ mobile devices, acquiring external resources and data when necessary. They contain public satellite imagery, weather, and other open data, as well as private data like photos, bookkeeping notes, and the records of the community chat group. They are also full generative models or “digital twins” of the farms, based on state-of-the-art science and local knowledge that’s been aggregated and distributed over years.
Using Gaia’s analysis engine, Alice quickly spots an interesting phenomenon: some of Fatima’s heirloom maize fields are extremely productive, even in a nitrogen-poor soil and using very little fertilizer! Maybe that maize field has something special? Alice decides to investigate. By comparing the data to predictions from the full range of plant and soil science models ever published, Gaia quickly hypothesizes that this maize has a rare trait only previously observed in one other variety: it has aerial roots covered in a strange type of mucus, containing bacteria that pull nitrogen directly from the air. It’s a holy grail, a self-fertilizing cereal. Gaia guides Alice to collect more data: she samples the farm’s soil, runs a genomic analysis of the maize and the mucus, and adds all the data to the farm’s node. This confirms the hypothesis.
Gaia guides Alice to quickly find the patches where soil conditions are best suited for the heritage maize. With other constraints in mind, she and Fatima quickly come up with a plan to expand that crop to several other patches, replacing seeds and crops that require more fertilizer or are less profitable. As the next season progresses, they will be able to track whether their experiment works in real time, just by following Gaia’s updated inferences.
Fatima’s node automatically shares all these updated parameters with other nodes in the network. The detailed data like the maize genomics are configured to be private, but Fatima opts to make the provenance public. In a few weeks, other farmers reach out: Gaia has alerted them that there is a new maize variety that is perfect for their low-nitrogen soils, and they want to buy seeds from Fatima. Now the community has an additional income stream from selling heirloom seeds.
Meanwhile, Paula, a plant scientist, has been keeping close watch on the network's automated diagnostics and seeing confidence in this technique increase. She believes she has a technique for transplanting the bacteria-carrying mucus to other cereal varieties. She uses Gaia to reach out to Fatima’s community and negotiates permission to test her technique in the farm, giving them co-ownership in the rights to any benefits generated, generating even more income for the community. Meanwhile, Gaia’s built-in traceability mechanisms help ensure that all of this is done transparently and with the right risk mitigation safeguards, without slowing down the work. As a result, Paula is able to develop her new mucus transplant solution to commercial scale and eventually able to deploy it on a significant proportion of the world’s maize fields, yielding a 50% reduction in global fertilizer use from maize.