The Truth About Expertise Or: Why Everyone Claiming to Know How to Run Civilization Is Full of Shit

A Meditation on Collective Ignorance, Emergent Complexity, and the Sound of Children Who Know They Don’t Know

Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And nobody—absolutely nobody—knows how to run human civilization.

This is not an anti-intellectual statement. It is perhaps the most intellectual statement possible: an admission that we are all passengers on a plane that no one actually knows how to fly, operated by people absolutely convinced they’ve figured out the controls while the machine does things none of them predicted or understand.

We are, all eight billion of us, experiencing contemporary technological civilization together. Some of us have greater perspective—historians who see patterns, technologists who grasp possibilities, philosophers who perceive structures. But claiming expertise in running civilization is like claiming expertise in conducting a symphony that’s composing itself while being played by musicians who are also the instruments.

The machine we’re in has never existed before. It changes faster than anyone can study it. It has emergent properties no one predicted. It’s made of conscious components that modify themselves while running. And we’re discovering its operating principles by crashing into them.