Humans cooperate, but so do cells, and then so do chemical autocatalytic cycles? What is the lowest level where we can say that “cooperation” occurs not as a law of physics, but as an evolved thing where it is beneficial to “work together”. (This needs refining since everything is a law of physics)

Reading about the origin of life, it’s interesting that they’re talking about autopoiesis and how it might have evolved in a pre-biology standpoint just because it was favorable for chemical cycles to stick together. Is this then cooperation?

Questions

Q: How do we build cooperation and trust?

Recent GraphNet paper kind of talked about this, but it was very small scale. Right now, I’m thinking of how it might be the role of technology or urban planning to help foster cooperation. Jane Jacob’s idea of eyes on the street is one, that you can build cities which create cooperation and trust. This is kind of amazing. It isn’t forcing people to, you just give people the affordances to trust and build.

Do we have any social media that truly tries to build in affordances of trust? What would that even look like? Somehow, this also ties into the question of how we increase the agency of kids. It is fundamentally a problem of cooperation and trust.