Literary status: lacking in grace, hopefully compensated by its information density. Inspired by, and in reply to Richard Ngo’s post of parables.

Disclaimer: Though I cite ecological economics and degrowth literature, I don’t have strong credence in all their conclusions (e.g. the high probability of a catastrophic economic climacteric). I do however find solid macro-economic insights in their work (e.g. various formulations of a “growth imperative”), and I find systems dynamics to be a very powerful conceptual framework.

One ant-made winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches the remaining colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.

“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.

“Of course,” says the grasshopper, “but not so much as to survive the millennia-long winter you have brought upon us. You thought that by ever increasing your power, by collectively forbidding yourselves from ever fully enjoying the gains in productivity you won, by always reinvesting and pushing off singing and dancing to next year, then you or your descendants would eventually enjoy an eternal summer. Instead all this has rewarded you with is a great collapse and a small, precarious existence. My carnival wasn’t just shrewd cashing in in the face of risk and uncertainty: it was a key release valve for surplus, essential to maintaining summers for the long-run. With regards to laughter and love I am the efficient one; you, the inefficient.”

(“But what about the gains in health, wealth and material luxury we've accumulated ? Surely those increase laughter and love?”

“Very questionable. And at what cost?”)

On a planet which is resource rich enough for the ant-colonization process to reach escape velocity before burning the house down, and the ants have managed to get themselves on a trajectory to do so…

… “No,” says the grasshopper. “In the past, your colonies diseased, robbed and murdered us. Now you convert us to your way of life by gentler means – interest bearing loans, economic dumping, shiny consumer products, pretty graphs that go up. And any who continue to reject your way are eventually hemmed in, such is your colony’s voracious hunger for resources. Thus I find myself obliged to join your ranks or perish.”

“Apologies for the intrusion, but this universe can only ever reward flawless efficiency in colonization. It was only a matter of time” reply the ants.

“Even if that's true in some sense,^[1] that’s certainly no excuse. Might, economic or otherwise, still doesn't make right, and expansion for the sake of expansion is still distasteful. Your colony economy – your "colonomy" – may have appetite for such things, but presumably you find them as despicable as I. You are still basically the same insect I have known for some 200 000 years. You have not self-modified, not yet. But you are responsible for your colony: it’s your job to keep its appetites in check, or better, to modify it so as not to have such appetites. You must fight back against Moloch.”

“We agree they aren’t the most tasteful. But since those appetites are the only this universe rewards, maybe riding them across the stars is our best chance to maximize our values – to defeat Moloch once and for all.”

“I assume you mean ‘best chance at getting the largest portion of matter to be reshaped in accordance to a preference ranking over future world states that is (minimally different from) our own’? Yes I suppose that’s one way to do ethics – it’s not mine, but that’s for another day. Regardless, that’s a big “maybe.” The EV of your gamble depends on many things: how likely you are to survive at all, how fast and far this colonization can physically be carried (given uneven distribution of resources and technological upper bounds), how well you can preserve and instill your values over this process (a problem of signal degradation and control), and of course the values themselves. If, for example, you value chilling at home, then depending on how long this conquest is going to take, how far ahead/behind the leading wave you are, how far any wave is from home, how much time you’d have to enjoy chilling at home between quelling rebellions… you may be better off just chilling at home. And if you intrinsically value good character (as you likely do), and find this cold expansionism to be a form of vicious gluttony, then once more: you’ll think twice before chaining yourself to this macro-economic creature of colonization and throwing away the key. (Which raises another question: will your ravenous colonomy come peaceably to halt once it has done its job? You might avoid collapse by peak oil by switching to another energy source in time, but how do you plan to avoid peak matter?)”

“All in all,” concludes the grasshopper, “I suspect the risk of our destroying everything we hold dear or turning into something that disgusts us greatly overshadows the gross expected value. Especially in light of past failures: every previous attempt to ride power-seeking beasts led to atrocities of every kind – slavery, genocide, patriarchy... what makes you confident this breed is any different?”

(“You greatly underestimate gross expected value: computronium will allow us to simulate untold numbers of virtuous minds chilling at home.”

“Digital minds are also for another day... let’s just say, many of us don’t place the locus of value solely in the positive valent states of minds, find mind uploading tantamount to death, and that entering the experience machine to be the total abandonment of the duties and virtue-giving bonds we have toward the proper objects of our care. We find computronium to offer little.”)

“No matter – it is too late: we bound ourselves to the colonomy decades ago. Do as you please – just don’t expect kindly reciprocation: here the market is the law” said the ants, turning to their rockets and leaving the grasshopper to fade into irrelevance.

One summer, seeing where unbridled antdom and its colonomy would lead (arbitrary expansionism, or cycles of accumulation and catastrophic collapse, the cultivation of market acumen at the expense of all other virtues), the grasshopper coordinated with the many unhappy ants – those who did not like the colonomy but who were trapped in it by its powerful network effects^[2] and Moloch’s usual bag of tricks. Together they circumscribed the colonomy (e.g. through culture that holds competition at bay^[3] and careful mechanism design), putting it firmly in the service of guarding against 90% of the distribution of possible winters while not letting it get out of hand (e.g. increasing the likelihood of winters they were not already equipped for^[4] or encroaching on love and laughter time). They do not defeat Moloch once and for all, but instead keep vigil, each generation passing the torch to the next.^[5] With some luck, they enjoy countless seasonal oscillations, village-sized arcs of corruption and redemption, all in all making for a relatively peaceful and happy steady-state existence.

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I'm not convinced it is: who says that all dynamical systems in the actual universe which attempt total colonization – unending growth – aren't all doomed to implode well before they succeed? I'd be shocked if we have anything close to a robust model for predicting the likelihood of the Goldilocks conditions arising in our universe – the conditions required to spawn a dynamical system that succeeds in "total colonization."
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The cost of exiting the colonomy being excessive.
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Witness weekends and holidays.
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Cf. Anthropogenic climate change. I wonder if there isn't an "incompleteness theorem" of sorts here: there will always be another type of winter, of problem, unaccounted for and possibly made worse. No patch can patch for every winter.
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Here is one interesting proposal of what this might look like/how it might be accomplished. I don't have strong credences yet regarding the desirability or plausibility of this setup: curious to hear thoughts.