It is possible that humanity’s destiny is knotty.

We can liken some coordination problems to knots, and technological progress as being akin to pulling a string. Tugging at the ends of the string tends to stretch it out and make it reach farther. And some knots may indeed be resolved in this manner (“trivial” knots, although in a practical sense they may not be trivial at all); but there is no guarantee that this is true for all knots. Some knots may instead require dexterous statecraft or moral finesse to straighten out. If we’re unlucky, some of these maneuvers may need to take place before technological progress pulls the knots so tight that no fingers can untie them.

We can get more use of this knot analogy. In many cases, if you pull hard on a string with a few knots on it, although you may fail to eliminate the knots, you might nevertheless succeed in stretching the string to approximately the same length as it would have reached without the knots. Analogously we could say that for some—but not all—coordination problems, their inefficiency cost or “deadweight loss” could be greatly reduced by a sufficiently strong technological tug. For example, whereas today a despot might need to resort to brutal oppression to stay in power, with stronger technological options—such as advanced brainwashing or indoctrination technology—he might be able to get all he wants, including a permanent hold on power, without resorting to such heavy-handed methods to control the population. This would be like a tautly pulled string with an ineliminable knot: in a favorable case, it could reach almost the same distance as it would have without the knot.