Playing Infinite Games in Finite Time

Abstract

Robert Wright dashes through ancient history to demonstrate how a certain type of information already present in nature—a type of mutual altruism known in game theory as a " non-zero sum game " — first shaped human societies and gave rise to civilization. This century, the cycles of non-zero games are accelerating, leading our economy to new heights and our culture to new horizons. But one of the many consequences of progress, Wright argues, is that certain forms of culture become inevitable—for instance, mass democracy, or the emerging Internet. The question of whether any technology is inevitable is one of the great unanswered social issues of our time; Wright has the most articulated answer on the politically incorrect side of those who argue that technology determines our fate. —KK Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. • If you explore the murky recesses of just about any famously civilized people, you'll find this dark secret: they started out as barbarians. • Keep your eye on the memes. People and peoples come and go, live and die. But their memes, like their genes, persist. When all the trading and plundering and warring is done, bodies may be lying everywhere , and social structures may seem in disarray. Yet in the process, culture, the aggregate menu of memes on which society can draw, may well have evolved. • …Consider how hard people in nonliterate societies work to etch financial obligations in the public memory. The ostentatious Potlatch seems less absurd when viewed as a way to assemble a large audience to witness the incurring of a large debt. • For to deny any directionality in cultural evolution is to say that the aborigines, or the Shoshone, or the !Kung, left to their own devices, would show no natural tendency to propel their culture toward higher levels of technological sophistication and social complexity. • Today [a] vast interconnectedness, on a global scale, is obvious. But even in the Middle Ages, all of Eurasia and northern Africa had begun to constitute a single data-processing system. A slow system, yes, especially when trade would fall off after political dislocation—but a big system. The iron horseshoe and the windpipe friendly harness seem to have been invented in Asia …