The Parts Are Here But Not A Whole
Let me unpack this a bit. Liberalism is a philosophical ideal. While the verbiage is regularly couched with the rubric of Democracy (a misnomer because no country is actually a Democracy, rather a republic, at best), there are degrees of liberalism operating in any society. The how much liberalism is actually available is key.
You are correct in noting “ liberalism and our democratic principles face threats from developments in biology, economics, and of course, technology.” They were always facing threats because they are merely human artifacts. But invoking determinism is tricky because it depends on the framing of nested systems and timeframes. For example, there is no doubt AI will become smarter than humanity. Only issue is when.
The cosmos is a fungible information process system. As with entropy, there is determinism. But in the context of the quantum world (like biology, economics, and tech) each information processing level needs to sort through a myriad of possible organizational structure to find the path to the next level (this is what deep learning and neural nets do). So, from the initiation of one info processing level to the next level there is natural selection, an invisible hand or what is better described as soft-determinism.
However, when all nested systems in the cosmos are seen as a single evolving system, determinism in these info process levels reappears. Thus, it turns out, there are finite number of possible alternative routes to the next level beyond where we are at politically because the amount of time for the next system level to emerge is fast approaching. Kevin Kelly calls this the infinite game. I prefer to call it maximizing evolvability.
You might want to read some articles of mine that pulls all of your ideas here into a single framework and lays out the finite alternative paths open to us as a species and civilization. You will see what comes next.
Doc Huston
