Whitehead: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

In motion - complex systems, computing and communication (amongst other things) | msweet.net

Thick vs thin rules. Thick: contextual, require interpretation. Thin: explicit, protocol-ish.

Separate agents in a society into organic (e.g. humans) and artificial (e.g. machines).

Whitehead-ian advances can be interpreted as a transition to thin rule governance. Difficulty is balancing which agents (organic, artificial, both) get governed by thin rules and to what extent.

Something that drives the evolution towards a particular quadrant? Valuation.

E.g. if something can be governed with a thin rule, then it becomes possible to approximate a cost for the application of said rule. This then functions as a de facto “value” for the agent being governed.

And if a thing can be costed, and therefore assigned a value, it becomes possible—incentivised?—for that cost-value to get driven to zero.

Can go in the opposite direction, however. An agent can be comprehended in a new way and force a switch to governance via thick rules instead.

Rise of recognition of animal sentience an example. Similarly, if LLMs advance and non-trivial portion of population perceive personhood within, thin rule governance gets icky.

A taxonomy of societies:

1) Organic and artificial agents governed with thin rules
2) Organic and artificial agents governed with thick rules
3) Organic agents governed with thick rules; artificial agents governed with thin rules
4) Organic agents governed with thin rules; artificial agents governed with thick rules