Let me share with you #mindtheposters one of those back of the envelope estimations that makes me (you?) reflect. A clue?¹

The maximum population supported (or supporting) a truly democratic, free and transparent society seems to be around 5 million people. That’s nearly an order of magnitude below the average population of a country (nation state) today (about 40M). (Population density does not seem relevant.)

Here are the numbers based on four well established indexes on democratic institutions and practices, freedom and corruption.

Assuming that democracy, freedom, and lack of corruption are desirable (I’m not so sure this is generally accepted today), and therefore a societal aspiration, or even more precisely, than those indexes capture the best we can do as a society, I have to conclude that our collective intelligence capability does not scale above 5M people.

I can only image how long it will take to reach the collective intelligence necessary to scale up to a galactic empire. Asimov Foundation’s dates (Galactic Era) seems very optimistic. (Not surprising that so many “enlightened people” believe in the path of artificial intelligence.)

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(1) This calculation has been made in the context of current Spanish separatist debate.

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