The computational power of a human society: a new model of social evolution
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the core challenge of intertwined energy constraints and computational complexity in the coevolution of human societies and biological environments. We propose a novel “socio-ecological Turing machine” framework that, for the first time, unifies social systems (e.g., occupational and technological networks) and ecosystems (e.g., ecological process networks) as thermodynamically constrained computational systems. Our method integrates computable energy-cost metrics and a formalized model of resource extraction, synthesizing computational complexity theory, generalized Turing machine modeling, ecological network dynamics, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The resulting framework establishes the first quantifiable computational paradigm for modeling the evolution of societal complexity. It provides an energy–information joint interpretive tool for archaeological and historical data, thereby advancing the study of civilizational rise and collapse from descriptive accounts toward mechanistic, predictive analysis.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of investigating human history, just when advances in complex systems science and computer science saw the emergence of powerful new conceptions of complex systems, and in particular new methods of measuring complexity. We propose that these advances in our understanding of complex systems and computer science should be brought to bear on our investigations into human history. To that end, we present a new framework for modeling how human societies co-evolve with their biotic environments, recognizing that both a society and its environment are computers. This leads us to model the dynamics of each of those two systems using the same, new kind of computational machine, which we define here. For simplicity, we construe a society as a set of interacting occupations and technologies. Similarly, under such a model, a biotic environment is a set of interacting distinct ecological and environmental processes. This provides novel ways to characterize social complexity, which we hope will cast new light on the archaeological and historical records. Our framework also provides a natural way to formalize both the energetic (thermodynamic) costs required by a society as it runs, and the ways it can extract thermodynamic resources from the environment in order to pay for those costs -- and perhaps to grow with any left-over resources.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Modeling human society evolution
Integrating complex systems science
Quantifying social and environmental interactions
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Modeling societal co-evolution computationally
Unifying societal and environmental system dynamics
Quantifying thermodynamic costs in societal operations
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