The Future of Israel

What is strategy in the eyes of the philosophy of the future? An analysis of a system's learning capabilities, compared to its rivals. In other words, it's not about future content (a problematic concept) but about future form - strategy doesn't examine specific goals, but methodology. Thus, the examination doesn't revolve around data, or even trends and directions, but around learning algorithms operating within the system. A demonstration of algorithmic thinking about Israel

An algorithmic analysis from Israel's perspective (Source)

The demographic problem isn't a real issue in the conflict; this is outdated thinking, because if you (as a state or society) have a technological advantage, it overcomes much larger masses of people, and therefore time is working in our favor. The main problem that causes the gaps to be smaller between the inventors (the creatives, in the sense of producers) and the non-creative part is selling technology for money, which allows you to sell a substantial advantage for something much less valuable, because you don't understand the long-term gap between the value of your technology and the value of money. Selling for money is transferring value from the future to the present. And vice versa - in investing money. Money has no meaning without the future - and it's a time machine of value. Therefore, it has crucial importance regarding technology - which is an advantage towards the future.

Money reduces gaps and builds bridges between the past and the future, and without it, there would be many more technological gaps and disconnects and real, crushing advantages. Technologies always trickle down due to decreasing costs, despite increasing value, meaning the price reflects a perspective that can change. Therefore, one must consider the chance of disruptive technology that the other side will possess and we'll be the first to use against them, because due to the combination of antisemitism and active conflict we're the most hated in the world, so we won't be able to adapt and will pay a heavy price - against the chance that over time the gap between us and them will only grow, until they're no longer relevant. In other words, the right-wing loves technological risk and the left-wing hates technological risk. Currently, there's a growing gap between your ability to be a technology user and your ability to be a platform, and therefore in this situation, the gap will continue to grow even if they have access as users, because large systems require much more technological knowledge and are much stronger.

Israeli children are the least educated people in the world, there's no such disrespect for adults in any other country or society, and therefore what will determine is the ability to create an elite with exceptionally high capabilities from among the children each generation. And all this will be true only as long as technology becomes more and more startup-based and built on breakthroughs, and not one that requires massive organizational and engineering capabilities (quantum computing?). In the U.S., for example, there are masses of idiots but a higher elite than other countries, as opposed to places more balanced in the distribution of abilities, precisely because of American inequality. What determines a society's (or empire's) ability is the quality of its elite, and therefore that's where it's most important to invest, not in the average, but in the gifted, who are the creators of technology - and the rest are the user class. In a future-oriented world, the creative are the productive class and the non-creative are the non-productive class. The gap between them is intellectual and sometimes even programmed, and lacks mobility, like the gap between Facebook and its users. Therefore, an empire can be the programmers of a much larger population, living within platforms they have no control over, just as the empire's peoples lived under Roman law and its works.

The masses won't even be able to control technology through the economy. For example, even if in the economy people always vote for those who give economically incorrect solutions, and similarly in policy, then although the medium term will always be poorly managed, the long-term technological term will not be managed by the state and therefore will work well. If people voted in elections for what to give money to in academia, then technology and science would progress much less quickly, and everything would go to engineering and short-term goals like cancer drug research, not basic research, despite that being where most breakthroughs happen. The reason for the advancement of science and technology is that there's no public and democratic management there.

Where is democracy important? Precisely where it's completely absent and there's no balance and external feedback. Art is managed by experts and therefore everything is corrupt, because everything is not for the benefit of the audience but the artistic establishment. In art, there are no measurable goals and therefore there should have been more democracy there - voting with one's feet. But what really needed to be understood is that only the future is the judge there. Until modernity, you had to be successful in the eyes of your contemporaries or you disappeared, but today it's no longer like that, because physical preservation is costless. In short, ultimately the question is what a good learning mechanism looks like, and since there's no good learning mechanism with a reasonable hierarchy in the present, then the layers of the future in this network are necessary for it to work well, and the hierarchy will be the next generations.

The important question is whether there can be a good real-time learning mechanism. The answer is that there's no democracy in the brain, and it often makes mistakes, as does evolution, and that there's no ideal learning mechanism - but there are better ones than others. What's needed is for each layer (of neurons or agents in the system) to examine and select the one below it, but the top layer to be examined and selected by external criteria. Like in an ecological system. Evolution doesn't believe this can happen in real time and the layers are generations. In each generation, what evaluates the layer below are women, who choose from among them, and what pleases the layer above them are men (their sons), and their daughters are another layer above, and so on. Evolution is a deep learning algorithm in the conjugal sense (of mate selection). In a unified theory of learning, these connections between different learning algorithms will be emphasized - and there will be a mapping of the possibilities of learning algorithms. Such a theory is of paramount social importance, and all the data and comparisons to other learning systems point to the need to add stratification to democracy. One or two layers of representatives is not enough.

But in the end, perhaps no technological consideration or new social structure will help. It's a question of spiritual content versus social form, and only an ethos influenced by these considerations (the ethos of the gifted, the startup ethos, the technology ethos, the creativity ethos) will be able to allow long-term prosperity for the Israeli kingdom. And here art is of enormous importance. The literature of the Bible created an ethos that actually caused destruction, because it created a sense of uniqueness and chosenness that overcame any later internal critical voice in it. The prophets failed to overcome the Torah. Were democracy in the polis or the maritime trade network and ideological connections the factors in Greek flourishing, or did they come only afterwards? Perhaps it was precisely the ethos of Athena as the goddess of wisdom that is responsible for the rise of wisdom - and philosophy. Just as Artemis the goddess of hunting turned Sparta into Sparta. There's a need for a revision of modern structural explanations for the rise of Greece to a Greek explanation, which the Greeks themselves believed in - their ethos and aesthetics. And here the Israeli situation is much worse, in light of the weakening of Jewish intellectualism.