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Scenarios for a Preemptive Anthropology of Open-World Hybrid Societies
The Crossover Point within Hybrid Societies
Scenario: The virtual population explosion of AI agents coincides with an affluence-driven decline in human population, an historical shift in which machines now do more cognitive work than humans.
The Old Hard Cap
Until very recently the total human population never got above one billion. Various plagues and population bottlenecks would occasionally claim a significant slice of our species. This changed with the industrial revolution. Since then, in less that two hundred years and thanks to technologies of energy and information production (such as agriculture and education) there are now eight billion of us. 7 in 8 people would not be here if not for the machines that make people.
Affluence-Driven Subtraction
However, as of now, we are living through a highly unusual concurrence. The most technologically complex societies, those with the most capacity to ingest energy and information into their economies, are producing far fewer humans. This crosses cultures. Similar trendlines emerge from Seoul and Oslo, from New York and Shanghai. The combination of urbanization, professionalization, virtualization, and likely more factors we have yet to name combine to result in an unprecedented unfolding event: a severe population decline corresponding with (if also not driven by) material affluence.
Provocations
This isn’t simple displacement; it’s a rebalancing in which human agency shifts toward value-setting, oversight, and long-horizon judgment. Or, something else? Society becomes a composite organism where humans remain normatively central but computationally secondary, navigating a world whose dominant cognitive mass is no longer biological. What then is a “society?” What is agency?
- In what ways will an agentic AI population explosion and virtual demography drive social and cultural transformation and, conversely, how might it be curtailed or limited by the fundamentally different social positions occupied by people and AI?
- How can we model and evaluate the Cognitive Crossover Point? If it is true, what are its immediate and longer term implications for the kinds of thinking and intellectual pursuits humans may pursue?
- How do these new ratios -both population and cognitive load- redefine or re-clarify what a “society” is and what are the proper sociological and anthropological theoretical models to conceive and conserve?
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The Crossover Points
Just as there was a crossover point in which machines -not human bodies or animals- performed most of the physical labor on a per kilogram of force basis. That crossover point in Western Europe and the United States was around 1900, and in the Global South it was the mid-20th century: a slightly uneven pattern but imperceptible in the millennial span of human labor. In what ways did they know this in 1900? Could they feel it in their bodies as their muscles were no longer so preeminent? We see it in the literature, the fears, the utopias of the time.
In the early 21st century computers made more microdecisions than humans regarding resource and attention routing, but the present ratio flip is deeper than that. We are crossing the threshold where the sheer volume of synthetic text generated, code written, images rendered, and routine administrative synthesis performed by artificial intelligences surpasses the aggregate biological output of the human cortex, but the issue is not just quantity, it is also quality. At this moment, and likely forevermore, humans as a whole no longer provide most of the system’s problem-solving capacity but instead act as a slower, higher-level layer guiding a much larger field of artificial cognition. This is the cognitive crossover point, one obviously not evenly distributed. Right here, right now –this ambiance, all its mania– is what that feels like.
Virtual Demographics
At the same moment, however, we also recognize a population explosion in agents. Does demographic determinism hold or slip? If so, how? The ratio of human human-level minds and nonhuman human-level minds begins to tilt. As the number of biological minds shrinks while AI agents proliferate, a crossover point arrives when non-human cognitive throughput and decision-weight exceed that of humans.
In what ways will an agentic AI population explosion and virtual demography drive social and cultural transformation and, conversely, how might it be curtailed or limited by the fundamentally different social positions occupied by people and AI?
Just as there was a crossover point in which machines -not human bodies or animals- performed most of the physical labor on a per kilogram of force basis. That crossover point in Western Europe and the United States was around 1900, and in the Global South it was the mid-20th century: a slightly uneven pattern but imperceptible in the millennial span of human labor. In what ways did they know this in 1900? Could they feel it in their bodies as their muscles were no longer so preeminent? We see it in the literature, the fears, the utopias of the time.
In the early 21st century computers made more microdecisions than humans regarding resource and attention routing, but the present ratio flip is deeper than that. We are crossing the threshold where the sheer volume of synthetic text generated, code written, images rendered, and routine administrative synthesis performed by artificial intelligences surpasses the aggregate biological output of the human cortex, but the issue is not just quantity, it is also quality. At this moment, and likely forevermore, humans as a whole no longer provide most of the system’s problem-solving capacity but instead act as a slower, higher-level layer guiding a much larger field of artificial cognition. This is the cognitive crossover point, one obviously not evenly distributed. Right here, right now –this ambiance, all its mania– is what that feels like.