مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Aimpstrsystem could start to live “its own life”: it strives for its own survival, instead of that of the agent(s) who created it. Stirner (Stirner and Leopold, 1995) describes this process on several levels. In the individual mind, first you have the creative process where ideas get created. But then this transforms into a “fixed idea”, a dogma, where the person starts to live to serve the dogma, instead of the idea serving the person. The same mechanism happens on the societal level: first people start to cooperate because then they are all better off. A society is created. But then rigidity comes into play, this social mode (for example, a state) becomes a higher value, for which the people constituting it are subordinate. The goal of the system thus stops being aligned with that of the agent(s).

Heylighen (Heylighen, 2006) explains how this process works in several steps. First, a collective forms a medium, a support for carrying interactions. These interactions start to get coordinated, the medium becomes a mediator. Finally, this mediator evolves into a manager: instead of passively mediating actions of the agents, it starts to actively initiate and control such actions. This is when this system becomes to have its own goals, since it starts to have a control function. e the “imposing structure” I spoke about can come into play: But why would the goals of this system be in the best interest of the agents?

Heylighen (Heylighen, 2006) and Stewart (Stewart, 2014) explain this by the evolution from an extoculexploiter to a cultivator. An exploiter that is too successful will weaken and eventually kill the exploited, and thus endanger its own survival. That’s why exploiters tend to evolve into cultivators: they become more benign, thus being able to harvest an ongoing stream of benefits from those they control. However, there is still an asymmetrical relationship between the cultivator and the cultivated. While the cultivator will let the cultivated survive as long as that’s in its interest, it won’t enable them to grow and develop, to live. It is only interested in these aspects of the agents that give it benefits, and does n ot care about the rest.