Great Power, Great Responsibility

"It's to do with intelligence," I replied. "Remember that Spiderman quote I mentioned earlier? 'With great power, comes great responsibility.' Well, humans have incredible power because our intelligence allows us to hold significant prediction errors. A human can imagine something far removed from her physical reality. If she holds steady to that vision, she is generating a lot of surprise. This surprise throws the system out of homeostasis, forcing it to rearrange. The more surprise in the system, the faster and more drastically it will rearrange. That is why humans can create new things at such a rapid pace."

"Contrast this to an organism, like a moth, in an ecosystem. The moth can't hold large prediction errors. It believes itself to be a moth, and can't do much to become anything other than a moth. This means a moth can only create tiny amounts of surprise in the system. Tiny amounts of surprise create gradual, incremental evolutionary changes — not sudden, drastic ones."

"That's why humans have a huge responsibility to look after our natural ecosystems. We're powerful creators, but that also means we can change physical reality incredibly quickly compared to the rest of nature. Because nature can only hold small prediction errors, it will struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing ecosystem.

Imagine what it would be like to have super-intelligent aliens running around Earth, constantly rearranging everything. Our intelligence to them would be like a moth's intelligence to us. The aliens can hold massive prediction errors that regularly throw the system out of homeostasis. Human society would form an accurate mathematical model of reality, only to have that reality change the next second. It would result in utter chaos and destruction because humans wouldn't be able to adapt to their environment. Humans would entropy and die, and the aliens wouldn't give a shit because they believe their intelligence makes them superior to us.

Well, we're the aliens in this scenario. If we go about our creative process with no regard for less intelligent life, then we're going to change their environment faster than they can adapt to it. That's not a very kind or compassionate thing to do. I'd appreciate it if the super-intelligent aliens treated humans with kindness and compassion while engaging in their creative process. That's why our great creative power comes with great responsibility.

And I'm not saying we all need to become hippies living on self-sustainable farms, or anything. We just need to take some personal responsibility for the impact of our own choices on those less powerful than ourselves. New, innovative solutions should allow us to have our fun in a responsible way.

When I ran 99dresses, we rehomed thousands and thousands of clothing items that would otherwise have been thrown in the trash. I loved having fun with fashion in a sustainable, affordable way by trading clothes with other women. After four years of slogging it out on that business, we had so much trouble crossing the chasm from early adopters to a more mainstream market. Our biggest competition was women going down to H&M, buying a brand new top for ten dollars, wearing it once, then throwing it away. We were competing against the convenience of not giving a shit, so the business eventually drifted towards a high-entropy state and died. And I'm not saying our failure was the market's fault — it was my fault for not modeling the market accurately. I was also very young with under-developed skills.

That's why personal responsibility and personal choice is so important. The collective consciousness of our society — the value system we act out — creates the 'shape' of the market. If people begin to value sustainability, the market will shift, creating surprise in the system. Then businesses will rearrange to minimize that surprise, or new startups will enter the market to fill it. Innovative solutions will be planted in the minds of entrepreneurs so that our society can have a physical experience of being sustainable. Whether its evolution or economics, the same surprise-minimizing mechanism is organizing it all."

"Is the market a blueprint, then?" Zac asked. "Like, the collective thoughts of cats create the 'shape' of the Cat blueprint, so do the collective thoughts of society create the 'shape' of the Market blueprint?"