Will the United States meet the same fate as the British Roman Persian and Greek Empires?
We are all told the line that all Empires fall. And so will America one day were told. Its inevitable.
Well, this time it’s different. And that’s the problem for most people. We are all lazy. We want answers about history and society to be convenient enough to make nice categories and draw similarities. “Ahh, see! There’s the pattern. All empires behave the same and fall the same.” Maybe in the past, history rhymed from one hegemony to the next.
People love lazy truisms, and that’s why we hear them so much. “There are no atheists in fox holes.” “History always repeats itself.” “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And on and on. We just want it easy. History is incredibly nuanced and each event in history had the tiniest, sui generis factors that made it happen; which factors have never occurred before in all of history. That takes a supreme level of dedication to research and learn. But that’s too hard. It’s easier to say, “Ahhh! History repeats itself!” And then casually look for whatever factors confirm one’s biases in that silly belief.
But it’s not that easy. This time it’s different. History has never experienced anything like what we’re doing now. An average person from the year 500 and a person from the year 1000 could each be placed in the year 1500 with minimal challenge to their mental states. They’d see so many similar things. They’d certainly see many different things, but the vast majority of it just stayed the same or within similar-enough changes that the leaps the time-travelers from 500 and 1000 would not be that challenging.
But, take a person from the year 1500 (or even 1800) and take them to the year 2000 and the shift would be so great, so terrific as to completely bewilder the traveler. There is nothing in history like today. History in the past changed slowly. But the Industrial Revolution changed all of that. Before, only a few select minds worked on problems. After the IR, millions of minds were freed to be educated and then work (like a larger computer) to advance science and industry. It began to change quite rapidly after that.
We remade civilization. We remade the planet surface. We remade ethics. We remade war. We remade culture. We remade education. We remade (indeed, invented) science.
Paraphrasing Harari in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, The Nobel Peace Prize should be given to Oppenheimer. The Atomic Bomb changed everything and bought us more peace — but at the horrific threat of extermination — than any period in human history. The deaths from wars have decreased greatly. There has not been a war between any industrialized nation since WWII.
It’s different today because of technology. We are creating technology that changes not just history, but changes ours very bodies and minds. We’re decoding the very fabric that makes us human and by the time the American Hegemony ends (sometime this century), hegemonies and republics and empires and kingdoms and tyrannies may be a silly anachronism to those beings that look back a thousand years from now. So totally different in form and intelligence that anything we try to predict about them and how they write history will be foolish at best.
Once we create machines that can do everything humans do, including making and designing new machines, we enter an economy that really doesn’t make any sense. “If you don’t have to pay any people, their insurance, their retirement, the staffs to cater to the staffs. . . what role do humans have in this supply chain? If we only exist to purchase products that are now essentially free, what does the eocnomy look like.” We are suddenly irrelevant in a world of machines that make more machines. To remain relevant, I suspect we’ll tinker with our genome and re-engineer our bodies to keep up.
What will be included in that “book” (ebook?) is that the American Hegemony — despite its enormous flaws, political corruption and hubris — has been an umbrella over the greatest expansion in wealth and industrialization. The people who operate in the Hegemony are the wealthiest people on the planet and those who fall in line with the American doctrine of “free trade” (see: Latin America) experience the greatest expansion in wealth and political stability seen anywhere on the planet.
The US will be at the cutting edge of those “things” that bring humanity to the point where it’s able to look back at the old nation states that existed on this planet and identify all our flaws. They will see the mistakes. They will see all of the terrible things the US has done. But they will also see that the US was a critical player in the creation of the technology that made their existence possible.
When that happens, the American Hegemony or the American Republic won’t fall. It will fade away with all the nations on the planet because nations become obsolete. Humans tinker with their very biology and develop technology so ground-shifting that beyond that point nations no longer have any use to those beings.
My own personal hypothesis is that the shift in how we make politics will be so drastic about 2050 that after that point in time, nation-states will be an anachronism in terms of “superpower”. I get all jibbery when I talk about this and (belaboring the point, this is just my own personal opinion), the nature of technology, in particular how totally interconnected the world will be, how our own technological creations will so totally automate everything, that humanity is in for a titanic shift in what “power” means.
National power has always been about three things: land-resources, technology and human capital. Nations with lots of people (China, Russia/USSR, the US, the British Empire) have leveraged a combination of these factors to defeat enemies for centuries. But there’s a point where, if you remove humans from production of everything — from mining, to shipping, to refining, to manufacturing, to shipping again, to retail — that “population” doesn’t really mean anything any longer. What you’re left with is a giant question, “What does the economy look like?”
I’d like to believe that we’ll move humans back to their passions and have a global economy of humans doing what they want in their own free time. But even that is so speculative as to be useless. But, one thing that I feel reasonably sure of is that the way we make politics is in for a paradigm shift. We haven’t even speculated what nanotechnology, AI and genetic engineering mean if/when they come about. The term “technology singularity” gets tossed about casually, but not without good reason.
If you have the ability to know that we’re going to be exponentially more interconnected by 2050, that we will continue to automate the economy, that our robotics and computer processing powers will also be exponentially more powerful by 2050, then it seems pretty reasonable that there’s a point where everything changes and nobody quite knows or is even prepared for what happens after that.
This century changes everything. Nothing will be the same. Maybe we won’t have a fully self-sustaining fully-automated economy by 2030 but we will by 2100. Maybe we won’t have AI by 2040 but we will by 2100. Maybe we won’t have reverse engineered our brain and genome by 2050 but we will by 2100. Maybe we won’t have nano technology by 2060 but we will by 2100.
By 2100 we will have life by design. We will be engineering ourselves from the genome up. We will have fully automated industrial production at every level of the supply chain from mining to refining to shipping to assembly to finished product. Nothing we do today has any paradigm to what it will be like then. We can’t even imagine a post scarcity economy where life made by design, where we can build things from the molecules up and where we make machines orders of magnitude more intelligent than ourselves.
What’s the limit on building things today? It’s mostly the engineering designs (limited by our knowledge) and manpower. The salaries of all the layers of supply account for almost all of the costs of everything down to the penny. Remove humans from every level of the industry.
If you have computers who design the robots that build the robots who build the things we consume and computers trillions of times more powerful than we have today (that can create a design internally, test it for all possible events then churn out the design for use) then cost ceases being a relevant factor. Price and enhancing is meaningless. Robots and computers don’t get paid; they don’t need HR or retirement or insurance. Capitalism ends. You can literally grow at an exponential rate. Your only engineering limit is the limits of the materials your using.
It’s freaky. By 2100 nothing will be the same. I highly doubt we’ll make politics anything like we do today. Why have politicians when you are all linked to a system that instantly knows the wishes of all people? It can assess the digital psychological copies of all personalitis of all humans, simulate a quadrillion outcomes of those actions, weigh all consequences of the general desires of the public then issue guidance based on those actions. Then the real public can assess that recommendation and make a decision. In nanoseconds.
And that’s just one random guess. But I highly doubt we will have nation states. If we do, then no matter what, the way they behave will be totally different. What we think today will be an anachronism. Even everything I just wrote won’t be close.
Back to the topic at hand.But the Sun that has shined on the American hegemony is beginning to set. If its the middle of July (northern hemisphere) then we’re likely somewhere around 3:15pm. It’s still pretty bright out. Nice and toasty. Plenty of light for lots of things, but it won’t be noon again like it was before (I’d say 1992–2000).
The USA will not collapse. The American people aren’t going to suddenly disappear. Look at even the most conservative of estimates about our economy. By 2050 the American population will FINALLY plateau (at 400 million), a full 50 years later than Europe, Russia and Japan. 20 years after China, Brazil and Korea. The USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal and natural gas. The US has the world’s largest breadbasket. Those things buy a lot of wealth even in bad times.
So what will become of the USA? Simple: the nature of international politics and technological inter-connectivity will begin to slowly render the nation state as a bit of an anachronism. We are less than 10 years away from telephones that can instantly translate conversations with near perfection. People will be traveling much easier. We’ll have commercial space flight and likely the robotic mining of the Moon beginning to take place around that time. Global efforts will be needed for things like building space tori, managing climate change (that will be really taking effect) and controlling powerful tools that will proliferate power that used to reside with the leaders of major powers (chemical and bio weapons will be able to be made in small labs, rather than in gigantic military bases).
The nature of commerce and the flow of human beings isn’t slowing. The inter-connectedness of the world isn’t lessening, it’s increasing. As that reaches a certain point, people will begin to see the individual governments as somewhat old fashioned and begin to look to whatever international organizations for managing issues that no one nation can handle alone. This will apply very much to the USA, but it will also to Russia, the EU, China, India, Japan, Brazil, Mexico and pretty much all of the planet. We have big hills to climb and all are too steep for any one or two nations.
