The initial New Earth thought experiment presents a blank slate on which to design an optimal society for human well-being, with no other considerations, in order to demonstrate the intuitive preferability of small and sustainable over competitive and expansionary. Nevertheless, our modern civilization’s relentless growth is often presented as a grand shared project of self-improvement driving toward our destiny or telos, perhaps to expand to other planets and beyond. We speak of “progress” as if it were a irrefutable moral imperative that no rational, technologically developed people would ever willingly jeopardize. Even the assumption of existential risks, such as the pursuit of AI, are sometimes justified as a bold gamble necessary to fulfill our destiny.
But a teleological framing distorts our understanding of human history and constrains our ability to imagine alternatives. Humans never made a collective choice to transition from hunting and gathering to building a mass civilization as a way of improving ourselves. Mass civilization beat non-agrarian ways of life through force of numbers, not an aggregate individual preference for one over the other. Whatever the other advantages of civilization may be, they are only by-products of this dynamic. So if other options become, for the first time since the Neolithic Revolution, actually a matter of choice, even holding all else equal (which, as we will see later, we can_not_ do), allegiances to mass civilization would be sorely tested.
Even if we in insist on treating progress is our destiny, we should not assume that its benefits would be shared. Instead, we should consider mass civilization itself to be a kind of technology that is subject to “creative destruction.” Past disruptions have served mostly as “job killers,” not “human killers,” but only because they did not succeed in moving beyond the need for large populations. What happens when this last constraint is eliminated?