UC Berkeley

I intend to examine the question of scalability of altruism and its long term sustainability. Altruism has posed multiple substantial conundrums in different fields, including challenges to its possibility, its efficiency, and its scalability. Multiple accounts of the evolution and dynamics involved in altruistic interaction among humans, institutions, animals and artificial intelligences rely on conflict between entities as the proximal cause of cooperation and altruism within entities. In this examination I go through our knowledge in anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and biology to examine in which ways specific properties of humans and human groups, as well as theorized properties of agents in general, can accommodate truly altruistic actions and behaviors. Further I examine the question of where the processes that lead us to the current levels and type of altruism are headed and whether there is a basin of attraction towards which it would be desirable to go from an altruistic perspective in longer timescales. I will examine the limitations and constraints posed by game theory, neuroscience, and the specifics of our evolutionary past, and in so doing I paint a picture of altruism as a valuable and feasible, as well as scalable, strategy, for the foreseeable future. I lastly propose some roads toward achieving these scalable possibilities through a combination of evolutionary and technological nudges according to the current literature.