The most important social technology we have is government. Government has a very important role: to prevent members of the same country from killing each other. The biggest flaw in our current government technology is that we have no good system for coming to agreement among the 200-ish countries in the world. We have had the UN for the past 75 years, but there have still been plenty of wars and plenty of fears of nuclear war, and there’s still a good chance of nuclear war in the future. Nations still spend large amounts of money on armies that are essentially wasted from the point of view of humanity overall.
A more advanced social technology would prevent war among countries, at far less expense than the current expenditures on armies, but more importantly with a lower chance of global nuclear war. We need some political way to consistently resolve international conflicts without having them spill over into war. It’s somewhere between legal technology, mechanism design, and coordination technology on your list.
The most important social technology we have is government. Government has a very important role: to prevent members of the same country from killing each other. The biggest flaw in our current government technology is that we have no good system for coming to agreement among the 200-ish countries in the world. We have had the UN for the past 75 years, but there have still been plenty of wars and plenty of fears of nuclear war, and there’s still a good chance of nuclear war in the future. Nations still spend large amounts of money on armies that are essentially wasted from the point of view of humanity overall.
A more advanced social technology would prevent war among countries, at far less expense than the current expenditures on armies, but more importantly with a lower chance of global nuclear war. We need some political way to consistently resolve international conflicts without having them spill over into war. It’s somewhere between legal technology, mechanism design, and coordination technology on your list.