How empowering is civilization?

Are individual humans currently disempowered by human civilization in some important, CEV-load-bearing way? This question seems inherently important (we might want to steer society in some new direction if there were a problem) and also seems to be one of the best leads there is for how we can get a utopia that isn't pet-shaped while still cramming intelligence into every crevice of our environment. More on the course between Scylla and Charybdis here:

Not pets or ghosts but something else29 Oct 2026Read →

“Civilization” can be considered a superintelligence capable of conjuring the macbook I'm typing this on, along with all kinds of crazy shit I can’t wrap my head around, yet it's also not a godlike singleton. For example, civilization can't complete an IQ test or have a coherent real-time conversation with me, because it's a hella jagged intelligence; that is, not a Pareto improvement over human intelligence. It's also composed of individuals who are roughly as intelligent as me, with low communication bandwidth + high transaction costs, which you would not see in a similarly sized AI swarm.

Individuals also have more variance compared to AIs, which mostly work with exact copies of themselves. Even among different models from different labs, LLMs are so similar that:

Tom Reed @mentalgeorge

Incredibly fitting that Grok, despite being pretty mediocre at forecasting overall, is the single most useful addition to an ensemble of frontier models forecasting real world events. Overwhelming empirical evidence in favour of keeping your toxic friend in the group chat

Twitter · 10 Apr 2026 ↗

“Civilization” isn't a legible overlord to me. I don't wake up and think of “civilization” as a thing I'm a pet to, the way I would with some depictions of artificial superintelligence—it isn't human-shaped enough to register as something I might be jealous of, wary of handing over control to, or imagine myself in a power struggle with.

Importantly, I'm a component of this emergent intelligence, rather than merely a subject to it. My everyday decisions concerning how much I'm willing to spend on something, what I publish on the internet, and who I talk to and in what way, directly influence the egregore. It's true that parts of this experience are unpleasant, because being one of billions of support pillars requires bearing some weight (if I stop doing work the market will pay me for, my quality of life degrades significantly)—but overall it seems important that if “I” stop, the superintelligence grinds to a halt, too.

Macbooks aren’t occult magic I can’t hope to understand: I could join Apple and help design them. I could, in principle, join any node in the supply chain. In practice many jobs are gated by skill, intelligence, or design, but the ability to choose your field, switch jobs, and pull off 180s in life seems fairly common in rich western countries, and you’d expect GDP growth to keep increasing that freedom.

I'm not sure I buy that people grappling with quantum computer design or neuroscience understand what they're doing at a deep level. The number of scientists per science is increasing, implying scientists understand a smaller slice of their field. Abstractions, computations, complex 3D models and narrow machine learning are crutches that allow people at the frontier to fathom things they couldn't possibly rawdog. At that point the difference between a 100IQ researcher and a 140IQ researcher may not be the ceiling (since both need to rely on crutches) but the fact that everyone is exposed to intense market pressure and “the Sort”, which enforces triage, but says nothing of latent capabilities; “Is Anything Inherently Difficult?”; can anyone latently replace anyone else at any job?

How many of these attributes of civilization are necessary for some rough measure of human “empowerment” / “dignity” / “sense of meaning”? How many might we lose if we continue on our plotted course? Is civilization even a good model of human empowerment? There's got to be a flip side to this. Perhaps a… “how disempowering is civilization?”