Patterns and Edges: The Invisible Referee

On the perpetuation of harmful patterns — patterns are everywhere. We’re constantly being exposed to patterns, and the nature of pattern detection is changing. It has been for a long time, but for most of history, the way we detected patterns was by essentially dedicating human attention to it.

This will still remain the primary method for a long time, but now there are tools that produce facsimiles of thought. These tools can spot patterns that perhaps a human being wouldn’t have been able to see without hundreds or even thousands of hours of analysis or just good luck.

It’s exciting, but the nature of patterns is competitive, too. Seeing a pattern that no one else has yet discovered can represent more than an advantage — it can represent an edge. This edge can be leveraged for everything from accumulation of power to the means of defeating your enemy or becoming undefeatable by your enemy. If your enemy’s mission is to defeat you and you make yourself impossible to defeat, they will perceive that as though allowing you to make yourself undefeatable was their mistake in the first place.

This is crucial to understanding competition, because edges are dangerous. Even the potential for an adversary to acquire an edge can result in a preemptive response. That’s why we should always be careful when approaching edges or dealing with edges in general.

We need to analyze the trust environment. If the trust environment has the potential to improve, then it’s crucial to be wary of approaching an edge too briskly. One never knows what sort of preemptive response might feel necessary to an adversary if an edge becomes too cavalierly approached.

Part of my thinking with dinoflagellates was that not only is it possible for the calling down of a bigger predator to be a technological thing gone wrong, or even just a technological thing gone outside of the control boundary prescribed for it — even if it doesn’t have any deleterious effect at all, if it just exceeds the boundary that was prescribed for it, that is cause for concern.

I think the other possibility is that you can invoke an intervention from the “third referee.” Imagine two combatants: the first referee is the global community. The second referee comprises the powers providing weapons or means of continuing the struggle. They can potentially starve the combatants of what they need to continue fighting.

And then there’s the third referee. I’m not referring to aliens, but to anything else — the unknown, or as some might say, the “unknown unknown.” This third referee could potentially perceive anyone walking too briskly up to an edge and take preemptive action.

The pattern doesn’t need to exist or have a precedent. By definition, it’s not a pattern you can perceive externally. The pattern exists in nature and is just a potential — it’s present enough that it’s worth taking seriously.

For decision-makers and stakeholders, there’s constant pressure between the desire to seek a competitive edge (often for good faith reasons that have nothing to do with bringing harm to anyone) and caution. The nature of technology in this era progresses in complementary leaps, especially as the devices that help us think get better at producing facsimiles of thought themselves.

The potential to walk too briskly up to an edge is higher than ever because there’s motivation to do so — in the economy and in competitive dynamics everywhere: within countries, between countries, and between ideological groups. They don’t have to be monoliths, but there are significant groups of stakeholders willing to stand together and potentially walk right up to an edge, with the idea that they’ll be able to leverage this against whoever they’re imagining.

The dinoflagellate analogy suggests that increasing the total danger becomes a means of survival. Those are the patterns that keep me up at night. If we’re walking up to something we’ve never faced before, there will be nothing to announce it. It will need no introduction. None will be offered.

As a small note: curiosity, scientific curiosity is my first love. I’ve never put it so plainly before, but I hate to ever sound like I’m trying to discourage intellectual curiosity or human curiosity. The goal with this is to just share something that occurred to me. Perhaps it occurred to someone else as well.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​