The computational power of a human society: a new model of social evolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel computational framework modeling human societies and their environments as computers, offering new insights into social complexity and evolution through the lens of complex systems science.

Contribution

It proposes a new model where societies and environments are represented as computational machines, integrating thermodynamics and complexity theory into social evolution analysis.

Findings

New framework for modeling social and environmental co-evolution

Formalization of societal energetic costs and resource extraction

Potential to reinterpret archaeological and historical data

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.