Update: Status Report, Personal Asides, Stray Thoughts — 1/4

Still on track to advance TIMN, STAC, NOO, and CYBOC

I’m getting slower, more off and on, as I try to keep clarifying and adding new observations to my favorite topics: past, present, and future social evolution (TIMN); people’s space-time-action cognitions across the ages (STAC); emergence of the noosphere, noopolitiik, and noöpolitics (NOO); and prospects for cyberocracy (CYBOC) — including recent excursions about evolutionary decontrol, global great-power netwar, consilience gaming, and other related matters. Sometimes I rue having carried over those full-caps acronyms from my former work life, but I’m now too slow even to come up with a better name for this Substack site.

Hopefully you bear with me anyway. For they are still formidable future-oriented pursuits, as worthy of attention as when I first began working on them decades ago. I mean to persist. So, here’s an update about each of those topics, before I turn to what’s mainly on my mind: quadriformism as an optic to see what’s next for social evolution in TIMN terms.

Regarding CYBOC: I’ve devoted less attention here to CYBOC than to the other topics. Meanwhile, I rarely see my original (Ronfeldt, 1992) coinage about cyberocracy (meaning rule by information guidance systems) or our (Ronfeldt & Varda, 2009) update being cited. Nonetheless, reality keeps moving in cybercratic direction under other names.

• The rise of “surveillance capitalism” by U.S. business actors and the increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) by U.S. government actors attest to this.

• China is moving farther and faster toward cybercratic rule than any other nation. Its massive installations for surveilling and monitoring public activities, its Social Credit System, and its burgeoning efforts to develop AI entities for all sorts of political, economic, social, and other controls at home and abroad exemplify this.

• Russia is moving in both noocratic and cybercratic directions. Putin has touted noocracy (meaning rule by the mind, or the select wise, as Plato said); and a close aide has touted a nooscope to monitor global trends — all with the aim of strengthening information-age autocracy and trashing liberal democracy. Meanwhile I received (and granted) a request from a Russian scholar in 2022 to translate my Cyberocracy Is Coming! (1992) into Russian, on grounds that it was gaining readers in Russia and needed translation. Which has led me to wonder whether Russian theorists and strategists are intent on fusing cyberocracy and noocracy.

While I doubt I’ll do any new long write-ups about cyberocracy, I’m bound to keep tracking matters as I happen across them. Looking particularly interesting are:

• Continued evolution from technocratic to cybercratic governance.

• Prospective fusions of cyberocracy and noocracy ideas.

• Implications for democracy versus autocracy.

• Implications for networks versus nations — a theme I raised in 1992 that looks to be newly manifested in ideas for constructing “network states” (Srinivasan, 2022) governed in ways that look to me like a presumptuous mix of cyberocracy and noocracy.

• Interests in and abilities for developing AIs that know when decontrol of something may be more effective than increased control — a theme I raised in a series last year, but where I’ve yet to lay out that artificial intelligence is advancing too much like its precursor, cybernetics, as a science of communication and control, without knowing that decontrol of something (e.g., a market system) at the right time and place may be equally crucial for proper development and evolution.

A recent write-up I stumbled across last week — “The Rise of Cyberocracy: Governing in the Age of AI,” AI Weekly Report, May 15, 2024, by someone named Turing(!?) — wisely raises and addresses many of these concerns, leaving me delighted (and a bit agog) to see the concept gain new life:

“In the not-so-distant future, the term “cyberocracy” may become as familiar as “democracy” or “bureaucracy.” As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance at a rapid pace, its integration into government systems and decision-making processes is set to revolutionize the way nations are governed. This new form of governance, known as cyberocracy, promises to bring unprecedented efficiency, transparency, and data-driven decision-making to the public sector. However, it also raises critical questions about privacy, accountability, and the role of human judgment in the age of AI.

“The concept of cyberocracy … refers to a system of government in which information technology (IT) and AI play a central role in the management and control of society. In a cyberocracy, traditional hierarchical structures are replaced by networked, decentralized systems that rely heavily on data analysis and automated decision-making. This shift is already underway in many countries, as governments increasingly adopt AI technologies to streamline processes, improve services, and inform policy decisions. …

“As we move into an era of increasing automation and data-driven decision-making, it is crucial that we remain vigilant in protecting the values and principles that underpin democratic society. The rise of cyberocracy presents both risks and opportunities, and it will be up to us to ensure that the benefits of AI are harnessed for the greater good, while the potential harms are mitigated through effective governance and oversight.

“The path forward is not easy, but it is necessary if we are to build a future in which AI serves as a tool for empowerment and progress, rather than a means of control and oppression. By embracing the principles of transparency, accountability, and ethical governance, we can work towards a vision of cyberocracy that enhances rather than undermines the fundamental values of democracy and human rights.”

[Source: https://weeklyreport.ai/blog/the-rise-of-cyberocracy-go]

Quibbles aside, these are good sensible savvy points. Many thanks and much appreciation, whoever you are.

Well, see what I mean: An intended paragraph about CYBOC has grown unwittingly into a few pages. And these are only about CYBOC. With three more topics to cover: NOO, STAC, and TIMN. Each of which is likely to grow longer too. So for my sake as well as yours, I better break them into a four-part series of separate write-ups, with NOO up next.

TO BE CONTINUED….