Foundation Ethics

My belief is that bar a handful of people who can gently nudge it, most of our future is predetermined. Populations are large and statistically unfungible. Similar thoughts to the Foundation books which this is named after.

As much as we like to think our fate is in our hands, as the last two sections show, our physiology determines our behaviour much more than we think - And we don't have much control over that.

I think the art is not predicting what things will happen, but when and trying to influence that.

Thought experiment: Trump isn't an outlier, but the symptom of a statistical event. If it wasn't him it would be someone else. An embodyment of the ethical priorities of that moment that globalisation, covid, rates have created. It's not a coincidence similar parties are appearing in the west.

Thought experiment: You've been buying the same cereal for 10 years, it'll take a really large shift in something to move you away from that cereal. But the reason you move away I belive is physiological. You biases, emotions, hormones outbalance eachother to a point where you decide to swap. If the cereal price increases, there will be a point that the "pain" of that price doesn't outweight the convenience.

Now think of this on a global lens. Not with cereal but interest rates, policies, culture. There will be a psychological trigger that changes your behaviour, how you vote, what you think is right and wrong. Your behaviour can be an outlier but for the masses it is predermined by our physiology.

Thought experiment: Even with companies, was Facebook that unique? Or simply the market climate was ready for a social network, and Facebook was the first to have enough PMF to reach market saturation and defensibility.

If the hypothesis is right - This means (especially in a democracy), we have little control over our fate. Our government has little control over their fate. it is predetermined and although we should display virtue, we can also sit back and watch as there's not much we can do about it.

Ethics, which feels a very man made topic. Is actually a worded representation of our biology and statistics.

In a world moving toward automation and AI, the ethics problem does need to be resolved. If we can’t clearly articulate what we value, how can we trust ourselves to automate those values?

It will resolve itself eventually, but maybe we can gently nudge it happen faster and avoid mistakes which slow our progress. Not change the fact it happens, but when.