The agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions have been great for humanity, ... so far. These technological revolutions have fuelled big improvements in the standards of living, efficient use of natural resources, and exponential growth of the population. Ultimately, the improvements and growth are fuelled by the consumption of natural resources: all those people have to eat (better food), wear (better) clothes, live in (better) houses, transport things (faster and more efficiently), etc. Higher population provides more labour for extraction and processing of natural resources, which fuels further population growth and further development of technology. More technology provides tools for further development of technology down the line. It is a positive feedback loop.
The amount of natural resources used per person has decreased over time due to the efficiency gained from the use of technology. However, as the population increases, the total amount of resources required for the entire population has been and is still increasing. According to Global Footprint Network, the ecological footprint has exceeded the planet's biocapacity for over 50 years.1 The growth could eventually run out of fuel. There's already a sign of population growth slowing down: many countries have fertility rates below replacement levels. The increasing ecological deficit will eventually affect the population in way that then affects the ecological deficit, completing a feedback cycle. It could cause the population growth to slow down enough for the biocapacity growth to catch up. Or, it could cause the population and living standards to decline until the population growth matches the biocapacity growth. Or, it could cause the population to decline until there's an ecological surplus which fuels another period of growth, eventually creating a periodic cycle of growth and decline. All in all, if we zoom out, there's also a negative feedback loop, with a longer cycle than the technology-fuelled positive feedback loops. It is the outer loop within which technological revolutions are shorter inner loops.
In cybernetics, positive feedback tends to be destabilizing while negative feedback tends to be stabilizing.2 An example of a positive feedback loop is a microphone whose input is played out of a loudspeaker while the loudspeaker's output is picked up by the same microphone: the sound coming out of the loudspeaker gets annoying quickly. An example of a negative feedback loop is a thermostat that cools the room when it gets too hot and heats up the room when it gets too cold: the temperature in the room is stabilized at some equilibrium.
The world seems to be already experiencing the destabilizing effects of the ongoing positive feedback loops (like climate change, and disinformation). The outer loop has not completed a full cycle yet, otherwise, the population and living standards, and the ecological deficit would not be growing simultaneously. So far, humanity has reaped the benefits of the past technological revolutions without experiencing the full extent of their consequences: the destabilizing effects of the positive feedback loops, and the stabilizing mechanism governed by the outer negative feedback loop. The jury is still out on whether the technological revolutions will be a net positive for humanity in the long run, and the ultimate judge will be the outer loop. It is a stabilizing mechanism that has played a significant part in the continuous existence of life on earth for billions of years: negative feedback underlies processes like homeostasis, predator-prey cycles, and the carbon-silicate cycle.
The AI revolution is an obvious candidate for the next technological revolution, some even consider it to be the final technological revolution (the technological revolution to end all technological revolutions, if you will). It seems to follow a similar trajectory to previous technological revolutions (albeit accelerated), so humanity could reap similar benefits, on an accelerated timeline. It could be one of the greatest legacies that the current era of humanity leaves behind. With a positive feedback loop, it could also have destabilizing effects that could be a great burden for future humanity (like the burden of climate change left by the industrial revolution). All in all, the ultimate judge will still be the outer loop.
One way or another, humanity will eventually have to experience a cycle of the outer loop. The outer loop is a force of nature to be reckoned with. Humanity has exerted some deliberate influence over nature but some forces of nature (like cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic explosions) are still significantly out of deliberate control (technology can be used to predict and protect people from them, but when a big one is coming, it is usually better to stay out of its path of destruction). Similar to weather, climate, and geodynamics, with a lot of computational resources, simulations can be used to model and study the outer loop under different social, political, economic and technology policies. As humanity's capacity to build and deploy computational resources increases, perhaps some of those resources could be used to study the outer loop.
Thanks to Amos Omondi, and Björgvin Björgvinsson for comments/corrections/discussion.