[Course] Intro to Collective Action: From arms races to planetary cooperation

​A short online course on why cooperation fails, how it succeeds, and how it scales – from arms races and the commons to AI, climate and the metacrisis.

​Humans cooperate at a scale no other animal does. We went from bands of a few dozen to villages, cities and nations of millions, and each jump came from new institutions and culture: ritual, kinship, law, money, the state.

​We also fail to cooperate in ways that could be catastrophic: arms races, overused commons, the race to build AI. These are collective action problems (sometimes called Moloch, or the multipolar trap) and they sit underneath the metacrisis. This course looks at both sides: why cooperation fails, how it has been made to work, and what it would take at planetary scale.

​This course will be led by Life Itself co-founder and University of Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock (PhD). As well as being co-founder of Life Itself and co-initiator of the Second Renaissance project he has been a leading global expert on information commons and collective action problems.

​Course will be ~5d online.

​This will be a "prototype" course where material is being actively developed and trialled with participants. It is therefore being offered on a free-through-refund basis: we'll refund your fee if you attend all the sessions 🙂

​Dates: Wed Oct 28th to Nov 4thth (excluding weekend) from 1530-1700 European.

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​When groups of people — or nations, or organisations — could all be better off by working together, why do we so often fail to do so? And when coordination is possible, what makes it happen?

​These are among the most consequential questions of our time. The opportunities for collective action are vast: agreements that could prevent catastrophic wars, institutions that could stabilise a changing climate, governance structures that could ensure powerful technologies benefit everyone rather than destabilise the world. The gains from cooperation are real and often enormous.

​Yet we consistently fall short. Individually rational choices aggregate into collectively irrational outcomes. Shared resources get depleted. Global agreements collapse. Technologies race ahead of governance. The gap between what could be achieved through cooperation and what is achieved is one of the great tragedies of human organisation.

​This course explores both the opportunity and the failure. It will include game theory, economics, political science, and history and many examples. What are the cultures, worldviews and structures that make cooperation possible? What undermine it, and what are some of the possible things we can do to help make cooperation more likely?

​The issues are urgent and wide-ranging: governing artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies, addressing climate change and managing environmental commons, preserving shared information ecosystems, building international institutions that actually work.