User:CognitiveMMA/sandbox/GCI4WebSci2022/technologygravitywell

The Technology Gravity Well Technology creates competitive advantage, which enables the purchase of more technology, which enables more competitive advantage, in a cycle that potentially lacks natural limits. Due to the alignment of decisions with the interests of technology owners, this implies an increasingly centralized accumulation of resources that is expected to lead to a steady centralization of technology in key areas of control. Because while median inequality might decrease, it is the inequality at the margins which is predicted to drive decision-making related to technology. Similarly, while the use of decentralized technologies might increase, it is the centralization in key areas that is predicted to drive the direction of systems. This irresistible free fall towards centralization in key areas of society due to the inevitable advance of technology has been called “the technology gravity well”. This theory predicts that even movements such as blockchain or web 3.0 that sell decentralization as their main value proposition, will be centralized in hidden ways that tie technology to a single vendor, and that this centralization will be introduced at an increasing rate and level of complexity that can’t easily be detected much less addressed by any regulations or policies. A General Collective Intelligence however is predicted to enable true decentralized technology at any pace of development by defining decentralization as an objective pattern of stability in a "fitness space", where this pattern can be maintained at any speed and scale of activity.

General Collective Intelligence is a form of biomimicry. Every organism is a collection of cells. Any collection of cells must have a system for collective optimization in order to coherently achieve any collective outcome in any domain, whether homeostasis, or reproduction, evolution, motion, thought, or consciousness. Human-Centric Functional Modeling represents the behavior of every organism in each of these domains in terms of functional state spaces, and defines collective optimization in terms of the ability of the group of cells in an organism, or the ability of a group of individual humans organized by a GCI, to navigate the entire collective functional state space in order to achieve optimal collective fitness.

As conceptualized in the diagram, all current web3 technologies not based on GCI sit in a centralized technology gravity well that leads towards pervasive centralization too strong to escape. The only way out of the technology gravity well is to implement sufficient General Collective Infrastructure that it creates its own decentralized technology gravity well, so that by decomposing themselves into a library of functional components that a truly decentralized solution might choose to use, it becomes possible for existing web3 technologies to tunnel through the walls of their current technology gravity well.

Assuming that Artificial General Intelligence is a system of individual optimization, and assuming that General Collective Intelligence is a system of collective optimization, then applying Artificial General Intelligence or General Collective Intelligence to the basket of technological and other global goods and services relevant to the citizen of the future societies leads to the results in table 1.

Table 1: Differing effects on elements involved in implementing products or services.

GCI is important because without GCI it is predicted that wicked problems like poverty and climate change are currently not reliably solvable due to factors in group organization that prevent the exploration of potentially optimal solutions. The time window to implement GCI is potentially limited because of this “technology gravity well” which is predicted to act to increase the centralization of technology more and more, until deployment of a decentralized system of decision-making like GCI is no longer reliably possible, at which point problems requiring decentralized collective optimization in order to maximize outcomes for groups that include entire civilizations, may no longer be reliably achievable. Instead, after having fallen into the technology gravity well it is predicted that societies will be constrained to follow goals aligned with the interests of powerful centralized entities (likely corporations and/or governments) in ways that might openly conflict with the public good, where those entities evolve technology too quickly for any significant number of the public to understand, or for any government regulations or corporate policies to be effective in changing even if they did.