Competition and collaboration: Finding the light of civilization in the dark forest

Editor's note: The concept of the "Dark Forest" in the science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem" has become very popular in China in recent years. In this article, the author Li Zhiyong analyzes the operating logic of the open source software community and gives his own views on the "Dark Forest" in response to the problem of collaborative cooperation in the business community.

He believes that the "dark forest" is not in line with the development direction of modern business civilization, because in the "dark forest" state, suspicion and distrust will multiply, and all competition will become a life-and-death competition, which will lead to the disappearance of cooperation space, causing the overall system to rapidly increase entropy, and ultimately have no power to resist external pressure. "The warlord melee in the last century was this kind of competition, but it did not lead to national prosperity and people's strength. The battle-hardened national army was still no match for the Japanese army. The price war of color TVs did not make that company an international giant."

In the author's opinion, the dark forest state will destroy potential opportunities for collaboration, accelerate the alienation of workers, and make the evolution of civilization increasingly inefficient and dangerous. Although the author failed to provide an effective way to alleviate the "dark forest" throughout the article, he always insisted that "competing people and organizations should tend to understand and communicate, rather than completely confront each other, so as to truly improve the overall environment, and improving the environment is to help yourself."

Dark Forest VS Light of Civilization

The Dark Forest Law in "The Three-Body Problem" describes a very simple logical chain. When two civilizations cannot understand each other and compete for survival resources, they will only look for every opportunity to destroy each other, regardless of good or evil, just for survival. The Light of Civilization shows several sections of human beings stumbling out of the jungle. Even the most pessimistic nihilists will surely admit that from Egyptian civilization to today, the light of civilization is burning more and more, not the other way around. This is against the Dark Forest Law. The fundamental reason is that there is not only confrontation and conflict between civilizations, but also understanding, trust and cooperation. With the development of science and technology, under the pure Dark Forest Law, the final result can only be the extinguishing of all civilizations, at least with the earth as the boundary, there is no other possibility.

Because of the opening of Pandora's box of nuclear energy, the world is at a critical crossroads.

Turning left means that humanity is not enough to control technology, suspicion and distrust continue to deepen, low-probability events finally happen on a long time scale, and the light of civilization tends to dim. Perhaps because such stories are more exciting, Hollywood movies always use this as an assumption, intentionally or unintentionally, such as "The Matrix", "Cloud Atlas", "Planet of the Apes", etc.

Turning right means that humanity can control technology, people finally learn to trust and cooperate, and establish effective consultation mechanisms and order. After nuclear fusion leads to the large-scale use of clean energy, mankind can better solve the problems of poverty and disease, and ultimately make the light of civilization usher in a more glorious page after industrial civilization.

This is almost an ultimate thought, the process can be extremely complex, but the result is extremely simple, either harmony and prosperity, or gloom and destruction. It is too wishful to believe that civilization will inevitably evolve. At least in Chinese history, the transition from Song Dynasty to Qing Dynasty cannot be considered an evolution of civilization. It is even more naive to believe that the law of the dark forest will lead to win-win results. What awaits disorderly competition is more likely to be ruins and destruction. This ultimate thought may have countless perspectives, but the problem that cannot be avoided is the way people organize production and the way they distribute. Judging from the current situation, the development of science and technology is inevitable and does not need to be paid too much attention.

Searching under the light of civilization

If the light of civilization is to continue, it will eventually have to find a state in which people, technology, organizations, and organizations tend toward harmony rather than outright confrontation. Otherwise, the more technology develops, the more dangerous civilization will be.

This is an extremely large topic, far beyond the scope of one article or one post. This article will mainly focus on two small points to explore the problems we will face in the future and possible solutions: one is the reconstruction of the relationship between people and organizations; the other is why the dark forest state between organizations will only lead to destruction.

In comparison, the problem of profit distribution is indeed more difficult to solve, but this has been discussed in a previous article: "Giving software companies a little more "soul" in their management" , so I will not expand on this here.

The reconstructed relationship between people and organizations from the perspective of the open source community

Marx once proposed a very sharp concept, which he called alienation. The image of alienation is the still of Chaplin hanging on the gear in "Modern Times". In the alienated state, people do not belong to themselves, but to external production relations. Alienation reflects the opposition between people and organizations and technology.

So when can alienation be completely ended? The answer is when alienation itself becomes a key obstacle to improving efficiency.

When intelligence becomes more important than capital and other means of production, alienation must be ended, otherwise it is equivalent to only letting people's bodies work instead of their brains, which will become an obstacle to improving productivity.

Alibaba's listing has attracted countless people's attention, but few people interpret it from the perspective that the weight of intelligence exceeds the weight of capital, but this may be more meaningful. Alibaba's partnership system is essentially equivalent to reducing the voice of capital and respecting intelligence more. In fact, angel investment and other systems can also be seen as concessions made by capital to intelligence. Because from the traditional perspective, this thing is a bit difficult to understand: I pay money, why should I give up so many rights?

The new organizational forms and the power that can be unleashed after the end of alienation can be more closely referenced in the software open source community.

The basic production mode of the software open source community has the following characteristics:

1) People choose to join designated software projects according to their interests and wishes.

2) Anyone can obtain the source code and corresponding programming tools of an open source project free of charge, and contribute their own code to the open source project.

3) Anyone can use the software of open source projects free of charge.

4) The main body of software development and release is not a company, but some foundation organizations or individuals, and their purpose is not to make a profit.

5) Participants may be located across the globe and collaborate with each other via the Internet.

6) Large open source software relies on donations and other means to maintain basic operating expenses.

7) Use various licenses to clarify the rules for using open source software and protect one’s own rights and interests.

In summary, this is a group of volunteers working for the community basically for free, although the work itself may have various purposes, such as improving skills faster, pursuing freedom, etc. But these do not affect the establishment of the above facts. The most interesting fact is that open source has defeated the products developed by large companies (mainly Microsoft in the past) in many fields, such as: server operating systems, web servers, programming languages, development tools, etc.

There is nothing special about the open source production method and personnel organization method. Simply put, the management of source code and personnel communication are all based on the Internet. The permissions of participants are determined based on their contributions (for example, whether they can directly change the official version of the code). Other engineering practices such as test-driven and code review are also widely adopted by most companies.

However, this loose and unremarkable way of working has produced amazing productivity. How amazing is this productivity? To put it in a figurative way, the operating system that we have not been able to develop despite the efforts of the whole country has been developed by these volunteers for many years, and more than 90% of supercomputers and at least 30% of servers are using this operating system .

This is worth pondering. The root cause of this productivity explosion may be:

1. The first key is the end of alienation. When a person does what he pursues, he can often devote himself to work. This makes people more enthusiastic about work than being driven by external forces such as company rules and bonus incentives, and having to do work that is not in line with their subjective wishes. In the traditional way, the driving force for organizing different people together is often the company's pursuit of profit, and the developer's wishes are not the first consideration. In this case, people are equivalent to being forced to invest their lives in things that go against their subjective wishes, which will lead to a decrease in job satisfaction. As a result, compared with work willingness, an open source approach has an overwhelming advantage.

2. Secondly, everyone has similar interests in the final software product. In the open source approach, the key driving force that brings developers together is to make better products. Although there are differences in ideas among open source participants, there are not too many conflicts of interest. In this way, various judgments can be made in a very rational way. The basis of their judgment is often whether it is beneficial to the product, and there is no need to consider factors such as the market and the construction period. At the same time, in the open source organizational model, rights come from specific contributions, which makes it possible to effectively control negative factors such as corporate politics. The final result is that the open source approach has obvious advantages in internal friction.

3. Again, in the development of open source software, anyone can access the Internet at any time and any place to obtain open source code and documents and make contributions to them. In other words, the power of the whole society can contribute to the same code base and document system. This, combined with the corresponding engineering practices, means that as long as the organization is appropriate, the organizational power of the open source project can only become stronger and stronger. In companies, due to security management, not only between different companies, but even within a company, the code of a product is often divided into several pieces, accessed and maintained by different groups of people. At the same time, because the code involves commercial interests, even if errors are found, developers may not have the power to make corresponding modifications, which makes it easy for the quality of the code to continue to decline. In addition to code quality, with the help of the Internet, open source software can easily form its own clear directory throughout the society. Anyone can easily retrieve this public information, which makes reuse very easy. Here, disclosure itself is a kind of planning, which leads to the phenomenon of no repeated wheel manufacturing throughout the society, and the use of resources can be accumulated over a large time scale. This gives the open source method an advantage in organizational power.

The above analysis may not be entirely correct, but there is no doubt that this is a way of organizing production that is very different from production organized by company. There is no doubt that this loose organization that is not driven by profit has achieved great results. There is no doubt that this form of organization has exploded with amazing productivity because of the end of alienation.

This is obviously a more ideal way to organize production, where people, things, and organizations (not to say there are no quarrels) are more harmonious, and people can think more about self-realization rather than anything else.

In contrast, Mr. Yu Qiuyu once wrote a very sharp passage, saying: Our history is too long, the schemes are too deep, the military tactics are too many, the black boxes are too big, the inside stories are too thick, the gossips are too greedy, the vision is too complicated, and the predictions are too dangerous, so everything is over-conceived. In comparison, the relationship between people is more desirable, and it must be very clear.

If the above analysis is correct, then things become very simple. When materials in the real world become cheaper and the weight of intelligence becomes higher, the atomic-based real world is more likely to be suitable for open source-like production methods (especially allowing work to overlap with personal wishes a little). Otherwise, it will not be enough to stimulate people's vitality and unleash higher productivity.

When the nuclear fusion energy device mentioned in "The Light of Civilization" can really provide humans with a steady supply of energy, we may usher in an affluent society. In an affluent society, labor costs will increase further, while other costs (including raw materials, energy, etc.) will decrease further. In that era, open source production may be extended to the real world based on atoms. Since electronic products are becoming cheaper very quickly due to Moore's Law, there is already a concept of open source hardware in reality.

Of course, in order to expand the open source model to the real world based on atoms, the distribution problem must always be solved. The success of open source obviously depends on a key feature of software products: software is a digital product based on bits. If one person takes it away, it does not affect the interests of another person. It is truly distributed on demand.

Why is it said that the dark forest state between organizations is a prelude to death?

It is said that Internet tycoons really like The Three-Body Problem and the Dark Forest Principle. Judging from the chaos of fans on mobile phones, this rumor should be true. But this is not right, because among countless options, the Dark Forest State is the worst state. Putting aside the science fiction issue of interacting with aliens, if we regard humans as a system, then believing in the Dark Forest State will destroy humans; if we regard the country as a system, then believing in the Dark Forest State will destroy the country.

Why is it that the dark forest state always leads to the destruction of a system? Shouldn't competition bring vitality?

There are many kinds of competition, some are orderly and some are disorderly, and not every kind of competition leads to good results. The dark forest state means that all competition is a life-and-death competition, which will lead to no room for cooperation. This idea will lead to a rapid increase in entropy in a system, and finally it will not be able to resist external pressure and eventually die together. The warlord melee in the last century was this kind of competition, but it obviously did not lead to a rich country and a strong people. The battle-hardened national army was still no match for the Japanese army. The price war of color TVs did not make that company an international giant. Specifically, after the current form of competition between Xiaomi and Meizu, is there still a possibility of cooperation? If there is no possibility of cooperation, can all the basic problems and ecological and environmental problems be solved by one manufacturer?

In fact, the bigger the company, the more responsibility it should fulfill for the ecological environment. This is not only for others but also for itself. Fulfilling responsibilities to the ecology and the environment requires more cooperation.

Take Alibaba for example. Alibaba's listing has attracted the attention of countless people, but in fact Alibaba is also approaching its own turning point, and the next step of Alibaba's development will definitely be related to the overall environment, because it is too big. During Alibaba's rapid development period, the interests of Alibaba and small merchants were converging. Once the pace of development stagnates, the size of the cake is fixed, and the question is how to divide the money. At that time, Alibaba's more means that the merchants will take less. In order to avoid this embarrassing situation, Alibaba must continue to develop, and once the domestic rapid development period has passed, in order to continue to develop, it must go international, which requires the improvement of the overall environment, and promoting the improvement of the overall environment actually requires the collaboration of many e-commerce companies. Otherwise, once the growth stagnates, conflicts may break out and intensify between it and various merchants. From this perspective, collaborating with others to improve the environment is to help yourself.

The dark forest state will naturally lead to suspicion and distrust, which will destroy the above-mentioned collaboration and cause the entire system to collapse. This is also true at the national level. The bad thing is that we seem to be able to only point out what is bad, but not precisely what is good, such as how to build trust and collaborate more.

Conclusion

To a certain extent, this article is a review of The Light of Civilization. The book talks a lot about science and technology, but in fact the power of science and technology is attributeless. It will simultaneously amplify human disasters and happiness. Whether we can control it depends more on the development of social sciences and our own values. A social scientist once said: God seems to have left all the easy problems to physicists. The implication is that social sciences are too difficult.

From this perspective, the Internet is a technology that can help civilization continue. It can subvert the way we work and allow us to focus more on how to realize ourselves. It can also allow everyone to express themselves and let people understand each other better. But it can't solve the problem of what we think is more valuable. For example, the way we look at the dark forest state is actually a value concept.

It now seems that when the accelerated development of science and technology becomes inevitable, the shape of civilization, the future world, and society will indeed depend more and more on this kind of values.

Our own choices determine our future.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.