Light and Darkness, Abundance vs Scarcity

The Great Filter

The Fermi Paradox is basically why we can see no effort of extraterrestrial species if any are more advanced than us and presumably with have left signs that we would notice, even in our relatively early technological progress. I have a theory.

For every evolved technological species there comes a moment in its species history when its technological progress begins to build upon itself faster and faster. It accelerates exponentially. Eventually it speeds up and complexifies their world beyond the species intelligence and cooperation capacity. This is the crisis point. The species evolved psychology also limits and colors how it sees everything and all its institutions. This limits its wisdom and is a stumbling block. The tech become advanced enough that it leads to radical possibilities in intelligence, both as AI and as augmentation of species individual and collective intelligence. It leads to the possibility of radical going beyond evolved limits and evolved psychology. But few are the species that transcend their limitations fast enough and successfully embrace the species positive Singularity that is fast approaching. Most fail in various ways. Some destroy themselves using the very technology that could have liberated them. Others out of fear and scarcity thinking use the tech to lockdown into a statis everyone and everything including the radical innovation and insights that could lead them to transcendence. They fail to grasp the Radical Abundance.

In both cases the species does not produce noticeable artifacts visibile to other species.

It is all too rare for a species to make it to and through a positive Singularity.

The Light — Radical Abundance

The technological marvels unfolding take us to a world or can that is almost beyond the fondest dreams of humanity

• Curing all diseases
  - Unending healthy lifespans — Eternal Youth
  - Limitless intelligence
  - Radical Abundance of all good and needed and much to be desired things
  - Effectively unlimited resources
  - Ability to transcend beyond our limits
• everyone can be as intelligent as they wish
• everyone can be as beautiful or whatever they wish in appearance
• everyone has room to dream their best dreams and bring them into reality
• Expansion into Space
• Society such that it is our joy and purpose to actualize the highest potential of ourselves, of each and every one of us. It is our joy nad the very source of limitless Abundance and Peace.

Technology and Knowledge to make it so are here already or soon to come. We have a lot of growing to do to claim even what we already have at hand in it full Abundant potential.

The Dark, Resistance, Ignorance, Fear, Limitation, Stasis

Perhaps it is normal for a species under the stress of so much change so fast to tend to darker notions of how it is to turn out or is likely to turn out.

Perhaps there are other reasons.

The power elites fear loss

Since Singularity by its positive nature distributes near unlimited possibilities to everyone that wants them any elite position based on vast differences in resources or ability or limited access will indeed be threatened.

Many elites and others that support their poistion may even thing this is the way that it has to be for the good of all. Under the spell of Scarcity it seems there is not enough and the few, hopefully relatively wise need to more or less run things.

In Scarcity thinking any problem real or imagined seems to require great sacrifice and control by the few in order to have any hope of addressing it. Particularly if enough are persuaded that the problem is very urgent and that without extreme measures the problem[s] will doom the entire species.

But from a more Abundant perspective there are likely solutions that do not require great sacrifice or top down control. But these Abundance solutions cannot be arrived at under so much fear and top down control shutting down much of the innovative creative problem solving ability of the species.

From so long in Scarcity Thinking it is hard to think of reaching for anything but the old ways to address anything that assume lack of Abundance from the very beginning and ensure lack of Abundance by starving its foundation in freedom and highly positive starting point.

It is hard to learn this. It sounds like just Positive Thinking. But it is much more than that. It is a radical shift of perspective. Admittedly it is not so easy to do.

Fear of not being needed and having no place

If the world is automated and many relatively low training jobs or even more training required jobs are done with ease by AI and automation many fear they will have no place and no value in the system and will be discarded.

But this is also an assumption from Scarcity. In Abundance meeting the needs and many of the desires of everyone is trivial without going into any sort of massive debt, which would imply lack of Abundance. In Abundance a very trivial fraction of productive capacity and resources are sufficient to meet all of these needs and desires and much more.

So the fear comes from thinking of something radically different in one realm while denying that difference in all others. It takes practice to think that differently.

Fear that the elite will use the Abundance enabling tech to award only themselves and enslave or even get rid of everyone else.

It is certainly true that the technologies heading toward Singularity like all technology can be used for quite dark and evil purposes. It is true that many of them used wrong and from a Scarcity mindset. There is legitimate reason for worry at the nexus leading into Singularity. The way to address the worry is to have enough people understand and embrace radical Abundance and the full potential before us. You can’t embrace that and believe you have some current deferentially special position to preserve or that there is not enough to go around. To embrace Radical Abundance is to see it is impossible to have more, especially deferentially to others, than Radical Abundance affords.

The victimized view of this is that the elites are blind or somehow irredeemably evil and will always use the Singularity tech run up to enslave and oppress them. But will they really once they see that Radical Abundance blames them and everyone more than they ever dreamed of? Of course it may take a lot to demonstrate this to them or to reach them or any of us so caught in Scarcity.

Wealth and opportunity huge inequality

Many of the clutching to past understandings that are done today at all levels of society including government have exacerbate the divide between relative haves and have-nots. If the relative have-nots cannot see a path forward to having more of what they lack today then it is a very explosive situation. Especially if accelerating tech makes both the discontent capable of more destruction and the relative haves capable of more far reaching oppression. Both perspectives could be helped considerably by understanding of Radical Abundance and that it is the great hope beyond these endless Scarcity borne bitterness.

But Radical Abundance must be made manifest. First in believable ways forward including necessary research goals achieved and in the actual fruits available to all.