If you’ve been to the Terafab.ai site lately, it has a simple breakdown of the Kardashev scale:
This is somewhat of a useless scale and it’s surprising that it’s become such a huge part of Elon’s beliefs that it’s actually on the front page of Terafab.
Does it really measure technological advancement though? Forget that we actually could never capture all the energy that the planet or sun generates and still have what we think of as a healthy environment to live in, it doesn’t represent advanced technology. Because it really only measures how great control a single government or corporation can exercise over a given workforce, whether that’s robotic or human. Have enough labor and you can scale modern technology, without advancing it much, to absorb all the energy on the planet by removing every nice place there is to live and inserting a power plant.
If we want to measure technological advancement we look instead at how common technologies are that use exotic fundamental phenomena. But what good does that do us if a huge portion of the people using the technology are fat slobs who understand none of it and only want a paycheck? That’s not technological advancement that’s technological oppression.
So instead of using a scale that measures how big your company is and lying and saying this is advancement of humanity, perhaps we can go further and quantify what actual advancement of humanity is. How do we do that? Here are a couple ideas, without creating a quantifiable scale…
Education and Fitness
What if we were to quantify the percentage of global population that is at a certain level of competence in education? If 90% of the planet could do calculus, we would be quite advanced, likewise if 90% of the population was at the level of a 1900’s olympian gymnast. There are many more appropriate thresholds, but this is our purpose. We raise children in schools so we can improve society and make the next generations improve upon that. It’s the pinnacle of advancement – not power generation. The idea is to measure greatness not in how much power we can get machines to extract from nature, but by how much and how greatly we can get humans to perform.
Mass Collaboration
Another method to measure civilizational greatness is how many people you can get to focus on one goal. Global meditation, writing, or volunteering. A big part of this is consolidating goals and enabling greater collaboration. For instance if it were possible to focus on ending violence enforced peace, we could measure how advanced we are by judging how many weapons are needed for local, state, and foreign defense. A scale which measures advancement by how close we are to world peace would mean much more than how many power plants we litter nature with.
In essence a good scale of advancement will take into consideration the number of weapons owned by people and their test scores. Which we’re definitely sliding back on that scale, at least in the USA.