Will the Singularity lead to the demise of capitalism or will it somehow thrive?
Ray Kurzweil argues that technology will help to turn everyone into an entrepreneur either by strong AI equipped virtual assistants guiding people to innovate, or by prudent investing of the virtual assistant in the stock market. Is this the way we are headed or will post scarcity lead to the end of capitalism and the rise of a technocracy, resource based economy, or other type of system?
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Total Comments: (64)
Date Started: September 28, 2011 - 9:57 am
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Comments
It will not be the death of capitalism, but the birth of it. For the first time in the history of humanity, a true capitalist society with truly free markets.
If this means a large number of people find themselves unable to compete, and find without proper social safety margins, I predict people riding up against this “capitalism”.
My guess is that you don’t want capitalism as much – you just want fair and sensible free ownership, self-determination, a free country, respectable and competent politicians, a nice place to live, and a fair opportunity to make a good life for yourself by your own talents.
Note that that doesn’t imply capitalism. Conversely, capitalism (idealized or the current mess) doesn’t seem to imply any of the above.
What you should make sure of is this – make absolutely sure if you REALLY want this capitalist paradise you speak of, is that everyone, or at least the vast majorities directly or attributably benefit from this utopia. Because if they don’t people will start souring on this idea very quickly, and they may come up with something other YOU REALLY MAY NOT LIKE.
While I do not subscribe to ‘communism’ or Hayek, I am of the conviction that we need to integrate democracy into the basic guatantee for income.
In other words, democracy should be able to allow its voters to ballot income, at the expensive of those who make more than they. This may seem ‘unfair’ but from my perspective it is pretty much self-regulatory. In fact it should be preferable to the current wellfare mess which only succeeds in utterly demotivating people.
What I refer to is basic income. If everyone gets it it wouldn’t be unfair. It can be low too, which would help to allow natives to compete with immigrants. That would allow a state to open up borders for economic immigrants, provided they have a job.
The advantages of BI are well-documented. People can study with one, mothers can care for kids more safely, you can ditch the minimum wage completely. And then let people vote “do we want the next years BI higher or lower”. No discussion from politicians; actual democracy.
If the BI gets ‘too high’ it gets too high relative to taxation and economical pressures. If it gets too low, to any people find themselves starving or not living a dignified life. Too many rich? You get this protest voice. Too many freeloaders? Ditto.
I simply say we need to have actual free markets and real supply and demand. Freedom to offer services, buy goods, freedom to organize, freedom of self-expression. But freedom also means “NOT being predated in to extinction by the winners of the rat race”.
Like the american plan indians who lived of Bison and one day found that Bison gone. That is “predated in to extinction” and they should be able to vote the competition into refunding their existential pain. Feels pretty fair to me.
What also would make sense is then to incentivize BI. Link it to societally desirable behavior. The bare bones BI would be a few hundred dollar – not enough. If you have a disability you get a little extra. Then you are free to work or not work, no constraints, no obligations. Cancel all welfare. If you are unemployed get a small job to augment the spartan basic income, and nobody will check if you do or don’t.
That would save a LOT of red tape, expensive bureaucrats and moralist busybodies. It would also save a ton on prisons. Does society need higher ‘birth’ rates in an area? Let people with kids swap them between the area. I don’t see a problem with state managed adoption. It would be good for the kids. You don’t smoke? Small monthly bonus on your BI as long as you prove you don’t smoke. The same for sports, healthy lifestyle, not using any drugs – as long as YOU prove it. There should be facilitators to help you prove it unambiuously.
Yes young children and young adults should also get a (lower) BI. If growth rates should go up, parents get a reward for having kids (as long as they are healthy kids – the state may also opt to dissuade the generation of kids from generationally unemployed parents) and kids get a reward for desirable behavior. Needs kids to study more and good grades? Reward them with a small addition to BI. Swimming diploma? Ditto. Need more engineers in ten years? Again, give a short 5 year training bonus for young people entering the demanded educational programs.
There is one major argument to implement BI as soon as possible. Imagine what will happen if a LARGE section of the population will be stripped from dignified income and lifestyle. This is happening right now, and no amount of blaming and scape-goating and limbaughing will change the plain facts that the current economic doesn’t need all the people who need a dignified life. Basicly our current society dumps a large percentage of people for rather arbitrary reasons.
This is of course unacceptable, if only for the plain simple reason these people will eventually start vandalizing, engaging in desperation, criminal acts or plain suffer in horrible ways. If they have at least some money they will stay part of the economy, as potential students, consumers, voting citizens and contributors.
Abandon people and they’ll be neither. You’ll lose them in a very unpleasant manner.
I agree with you up to the point where you start rewarding people for various behaviors. The bonus for not smoking caught me like a hook, but as the list continued, I realized that even a small step in that direction is a disaster.
The whole point of a guaranteed income is that EVERYONE gets a base quality of life. As soon as you start adding qualifiers we’re back to where we started, except with the government deciding on income from some ‘formula’ instead of a market.
Why not just leave it as a base income and leave it? Also, I do like your idea about democratizing the size of that base wage.
Imagine a way to enable creativity without money. Give everyone food, clothing and shelter, but also enforce birth control limits.
Work is a four letter word. Think instead of ‘interest’. Do what interests you. Knowledge and capital flows your way if you are doing something unique.
I think that for some people, having parties would become a way of life. Others might get totally involved in fishing.
I suspect that the gamification of culture is part of the solution. What if you got paid (in points) for throwing a good party? What if you earned money by being a good student?
Creating products to sell is not the ultimate usage of human intelligence.
A future with singularity is a future with plenty of everything. Let’s also have plenty of hope, fun, creativity, excitement and all other good things that we can imagine.
There will still be decades with ghastly jobs… but there will also be decades with very rich, very conceited, VERY entitled people doing whatever they can to retain a stranglehold of well, entitlement over the rest of humanity.
We may get lucky and float into a leasurely world, and we may even see the joy trickle down to the third world. But a lot of work remains to be done, most of it against a tide of apathy and horrible superstitions.
The biggest question is what effect the technologies will have. What will happen and how fast? Retail, manufacturing, and driving jobs will go first IMO. Thats if we allow robots to drive. What will the laws be?
We will always have a large portion of people who get income, robots can’t legally go to college and get credentials so that bars them from many professions and occupations. Even hair dresser. This will vary by location of course.
People will get income and rents from investments and real estate. Capital holderes will create huge amounts of wealth. This can all be taxed and redistributed to give everyone a basic free standard of living, work could become optional.
If unemployment goes well over 10% for any length of time political instability and radicalism will occur. Civil War? The true class war? Fascism? Communism? Social Democracy? Who knows and will differ by location.
Wars could result too. China or a cadre of evil trillionares may be well equipped to take advantage of our squabbles while it/they build a robotic army. LOL good fun to think of all the posibilities!
Oh just for a good night and a beer this field of speculation is enough fun by itself.
But seriously let’s look at hairdressers and drivers – a robot can’t be a hairdresser right? And what about a home shopping channel device that “ISN’T” a hairdresser? A hair-o-tron? Still need a licence for that?
Bam millions of hair stylist sit at home playing wow (with well-coiffed avatars), watching (gay?) porn, or become part of a (well-coifured?) angry militia.
Thay took ahwrr jawbs!
Same with cabbies. Road Licencing and certification might not be a requirement to get people from A to B; there are ways to make vehicle move predictably, ferrying people without a constrictive conformity to current rule sets. Especially if some nearby country competes the hell out of you when they DO allow robodrivers…
(and they take’rrr jawbs!)
Unenmployment is no the impediment here; the problem is marginalization, lack of self-respect and financial freedom. We need to realize that work itself should no longer be the sole hegemony of those essential human needs. What if of all societal wealth (of which much we’d tax yes) X% would in every country go to a basic income, where X is the REAL unemployment number. If we set that standard the debate would be over. There would be a standard of dignity.
China, America, EU, US, Australia, Zimbabwe – this percentage of all societal wealth is for the people, of the people, as a basic income. That leaves more than a LOT as a reward for hard working people.
And bear in mind those hard working people would get a share of the basic income too.
It seems fair. If those who have the jawbs wouldn’t like this, hey this is supply and demand right? Make the hell sure the unemployment rate goes DOWN. Seems simple enough? Make up some work. Pay people for asskissing, I don’t care. Comes down to the same anyway, in the long run.
And this way the ‘unpopular’ also get to have a meal.
But one day technology may push people into unemployment in to the 10-20-30% ranges. It may or it may not.
Fuck the society that doesn’t by then offer guarantees to all human beings.
Because if a singularity happens and we are all replaced, we sure as HELL would want like ALL societal wealth, right? I mean, if one guy would be left working would that guy get 99.9999999999% of societal income?
I for sure think not. The rest would want that money, fork it over.
The foundation of “free market” is the “invisible hand”. The idea that markets automatically channel self-interest toward socially desirable ends (Adam Smith’s free market) is comical in 2011.
The effects of advertizing (and increasingly behavioral economics), globalization (externalization of work, eventually to robots), industrialization and corporate-ization on the “invisible hand” have degraded it’s ability to do social good.
In Adam Smith’s time it was individual creation of markets that drove efficiency, those individuals still had to live in the society they effected. This is no longer true, technology and globalization allow corporations to move the means and ways of production outside of one given society (create externalities). Externalities are social ills created in one region used to create wealth in another.
The idea that capitalism provides optimal use of technology and invention is provably false. Our form of capitalism is destroying innovation (primarily because of patent law) and slowing down the very technologies we need to save our bacon. Technocracy or something like it is certainly a better direction.
If your “better direction” had a single instance of success you might have an argument but the record of technocracies is no better then of any other form of coercive governance. Technocrats are, after all, people and share all the failings of non-technocrats the assumption being that their superior intellects will generate sociatally-favorable outcomes. Sadly, the record makes the contrary proposition inescapable; their humaness dooms technocratic solutions to inevitable failure.
As for the rest of your post, good luck. The lot of that average man was so much worse at the time of Adam Smith that it requires quite a distinct effort of will to even start to come to grips with the awful quality of life at the time. Yet the lot of the human race is immeasurably better now. Advertising, industrialization and “corporate-ization” seem to have been quite ineffectual in frustrating the wealth-forming capacities of the free market.
In any case, this discussion has devolved into attack and defense of the free market which, I suppose, was inevitable. Still, the direction of the human condition argues against the demise of the free market even in the face of the singularity and if the singularity follows the pattern of many previous technological innovations it’ll empower the individual at the expense of the collective which is supportive of the view that the free market will not just survive but thrust aside those who seek to reduce the scope of individual freedom.
Capitalism is a social concept introduced by a socialist regime in the late 1920′s as consumer capitalism. Technology aims to restore the view on capitalism in a new avant-guarde theory. Technology controls the purpose of innovation in a commandeering popularity for research. This aims to contribute to the capital aim in a new social agenda.
The problem with Capitalism is that it only benefits everyone in a world where there are infinite resources. In the real world, a world of finite resources, the only way for one member to benefit is to take from another. For one person to be super rich, millions have to be poor.
Definitionally untrue. Free market transactions are a positive sum game. Both sides have to see benefit in the transaction before the transaction will occur.
Historically untrue as well. Free market nations have higher per capita incomes in more then a few cases where there are *no* resources to exploit.
Hong Kong has no resources at all except for a port and Singapore has no natural resources yet enjoys the third highest per capita income in the world. Switzerland is also very poor in resources but not in per capita income.
The real world does not at all equate to your ayn rand slogans.
The free market is not at all a positive sum game. When a company lays off a worker to get workers in another country who are so desperate that they would work for 1/10th the wage, how does the laid off worker benefit exactly!?!?!
When a person is born in the ghetto instead of the trump family and is forced to take a median wage job instead of one that pays millions, how does the ghetto kid benefit?
And wealth comes from science and technology, not from free markets. The longer a country has been developing, the wealthier it will be.
Actually, the real world quite closely “equates” to my Ayn Rand slogans.
The free market rewards innovation which enriches everyone. The fact that it enriches the innovator more then the people who benefit from the innovations is quite a neat way to keep the innovations flowing.
Oh, and if “wealth comes from science and technology” what science and technology is it that’s led to the extraordinary success of Hong Kong and Singapore neither of which are known as hotbeds of technical or scientific innovation?
“The fact that it enriches the innovator more then the people who benefit from the innovations is quite a neat way to keep the innovations flowing”
It is also a neat way to make 46 million people in the richest country on the planet into poverty, put 1 in every 5 kids in poverty, get 97% of all workers a below average income, make 50% of workers work pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology, siphon off all the income gains the last 30 years to the rich, keep the wages of the entire middle class stagnant for 30 years, put 26.7% of all blacks in poverty – a race of people we once treated as slaves, keep 50 million without healthcare – 25 million of whom have pre-existing conditions.
“what science and technology is it that’s led to the extraordinary success of Hong Kong and Singapore neither of which are known as hotbeds of technical or scientific innovation?”
Are you serious? You think all the technology that gives them their standard of living came from voodoo and witchcraft?
And the main medical issue facing those 46 million who are supposed to be impoverished? Obesity.
Thanks but as an immigrant with some modest understanding of non-American poverty I’ll take obesity as a “problem” over the rather more common medical problem of the impoverished. Oh, and just to put things in perspective those 46 million represent less the 25% of the population and enjoy such un-poverty-like amenties as the ownership of an automobile, air conditioning, cable TV, microwaves, detached homes, internet access, central heating and, to repeat myself, obesity which is to say no shortage of food.
>Are you serious? You think all the technology that gives them their standard of living came from voodoo and witchcraft?
Of course I’m serious but you are not.
If you were serious you’d respond with an explanation of why it isn’t the free market that’s responsible for the wealth that’s vaulted Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and now, coming up fast, China from their previous poverty? The same technology that was available to South Korea in the seventies was available to China yet their economy stagnated for another ten years. The same technology that was available to Hong Kong, physically part of China, was available to China yet Hong Kong raced ahead economically while China stagnated.
The free market attracts funding to the development of technology in the anticipation of profits. Otherwise how is technology supposed to attract the funding necessary to its development and manufacture? Voodoo and witchcraft?
Holy shit that was condescending. You actually suggest that obesity is not a symptom of extreme societal dysfunction as well as poverty. Seriously, next you’ll be claiming
“..If I were less financially well of, at least I wouldn’t be obese..”
Think about it. You are clueless. You really are look at those ‘uppity poor’ and you actually don’t know what’s happening ‘down there’. Ivory tower syndrome much?
Next thing you go and claim that the arcane process of capital accumulation is the cornerstone of economical growth, research and manufacture.
Which statement I allege unmasks you as a simpleton. Here is my counterstament:
“since the early 1980s we have lived in a macro-economical system that has been pervasively infested by a US central banking and oil parasites that has in most cases acted as a distraction to good education, actual fact-based science, political accountability and transparency, honesty, sane investment and in some cases goes as far as being an actual deterrent.
There IS NO free market, let alone a rational one. It has been deconstructed and decommissioned into a post service economy we had better talk about a maffia enabling industry.
But hey, realism right?
If you repost minus the personal attacks I’ll respond. Not otherwise.
Why should I, I made my point.
I am in the middle in this debate. Arpad writes that “The free market rewards innovation which enriches everyone. The fact that it enriches the innovator more then the people who benefit from the innovations is quite a neat way to keep the innovations flowing”. And it is true that it is capitalism that generates the wealth for public programs and welfare. But note that it wasnt always the case that those public programs and public welfare existed. Thet were hard won by the centre left. So I am a centrist… i.e., capitalism + public programs and welfare. (wealth that is to some extent distributed but not so much as to destroy the wealth creation that it relies on).
It is shocking how distorted our perspectives have become.
“The fact that it enriches the innovator more then the people who benefit from the innovations is quite a neat way to keep the innovations flowing”
That is like saying asbestos is a neat way to keep our pipes insulated. It works and it is cheap.
But it completely ignores the fact that it ALSO kills the people who work with it, kills the people that use it on their pipes, and there other ways to insulate our pipes without killing anyone.
Sure capitalism is a way to produce innovation.
But it ALSO has left 97% of all workers earning a below average income, 50% of all wage earners making less than $26k, 1 in every 3 people at or below poverty, 16% underemployed, 52 million without health insurance, and 55% of all workers doing pointless jobs that can be automated with existing technology.
And it also ignores the fact that we can have all the innovations of capitalism without any of those above problems. Here is one way to do that:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/solution-raise-the-minimum-wage-to-110000-per-year/
.
“And it is true that it is capitalism that generates the wealth for public programs and welfare”
This is just really twisted.
That’s like saying beating your wife is good because it employs all the teachers in anger management classes.
Capitalism is the reason why society has people on welfare. If we had a system that worked well for everyone as a right, instead of capitalism, we wouldn’t have welfare.
“you’d respond with an explanation of why it isn’t the free market that’s responsible for the wealth that’s vaulted Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and now, coming up fast, China from their previous poverty?”
The free market isn’t responsible for their wealth. Their use of technology is responsible for their wealth. If you had a free market and no access to the latest technology, you would be poor.
And the reason why China and every other country is capitalist is because all technology is privately owned by companies.
So China can do what the West did and spend the next 300 years developing technology on their own. Or they can become capitalist, open their country to foreign companies, and gain access to that technology immediately.
You don’t understand how the world works if you think Mao’s China had access to GM’s cars, Deere’s farming equipment, IBM’s computers, Monsanto’s agriculture yields, Fanuk’s factory automation robots, NASA’s GPS, Merk’s drugs, GE’s medical equipment, ad infinitum.
China got access to all that technology when Deng Xiaoping made China capitalist and allowed all those companies to go to China and profit. None of those companies were going to give up their technology to a communist country for free.
And once they got that technology, they started becoming wealthy.
I would like to point out that in your example you ask the question: “How does the laid off worker benefit exactly?”. This is the wrong question to ask and it leads to protectionism that can be quite immoral. The question to ask is: “How does this affect the workers in the third-world country? AND how does it affect the laid off worker?”. You see, the alternative to Vietnamese low-wage workers working at the local Nike factory is very dire. Often the alternative jobs involve crime, prostitution and a horrific standard of living. Working for that 1/10th the wage of an American worker is actually something people compete for in that country. They WANT to work for Nike, it’s one of the top jobs for a large group of the population… Also, it’s in the company’s interest to treat their off-shore workers “well”. Of course well here is relative to the standards and laws of that country and NOT relative to the high standards we have here in the west. Yet, just looking at the country and how the people get lifted out of poverty it’s a great thing. Preventing globalisation is in fact IMMORAL. The alternative to the American worker might also not be pretty, but the worst-case might be cleaning the toilet at McDonald’s, NOT prostitution or selling yourself into slavery…
Wouldn’t want to leave you hanging out there all alone dominiek.
It’s impossible to know what the singularity will do to free enterprise – I have come to refuse to use the term capitalism being as it is the construct of that mid-nineteenth century fraud, Karl Marx – although where there are considerations of value, and differing valuations, there will be free enterprise.
What our left wing correspondents don’t, and can’t, realize is that the free market is both simple and inherently just. It’s nothing more then the voluntary exchange of considerations of value.
So in order for free markets to survive the singularity all that’s necessary is that homo nova, or whatever we’ll choose to call ourselves, have something – anything – they value differentially.
I do agree with you in your assertion of the importance of the free market to the advancement of technology and the reason should be obvious.
Technological advancements create the potential for the creation of wealth and nothing attracts free marketeers like the prospect of a new source of wealth. So while free enterprise isn’t necessary to the creation of technology it is necessary to the development of technology beyond the level of an interesting curiosity that only the developers immediate circle of acquaintances know about.
The other leg of the social singularity that’s in the process of occurring – there isn’t any reason why a singularity has to be exclusively technologically-based, is there? – is the spread of representative forms of government and again, the reason should be obvious.
If free enterprise consists of the voluntary exchange of considerations of value that process of exchange occurs most efficiently where no one has the power to coerce those considerations of value from their rightful owners.
Now you know why socialist countries ultimately fail economically. Coercers are inherently uninterested in the value of the considerations they extract because they can just stick a gun in some other unlucky individual’s ribs or bump taxes up just a bit more. The representative form of government doesn’t put an end to the very human desire to coerce what you have no claim upon but it does impede the expression of that coercive impulse.
We don’t let lions and tigers roam, the streets. There is nothing “inherently both simple and just” about savage animals tearing into your family and devouring your kids.
Same with corporate nexual predators. They have proven to be psychopaths driven by self-interest and they need to be put into cages.
All those snivelling money hounds out there can boohoo all they want; humans come first.
Putting people in cages for the greater good of humanity is exactly the kind of mentality that will get us all killed
An organized gang of predatorial thugs is not ‘people’, it is a maffia. And we put criminals and sick people in cages.
Face the facts – we live in a world that glorifies predatorial and exploitative excess. A wall street broker can say during a press conference “..I want to tear our these bastards hearts and feed it to them as they die..” while a similar statement outside the financial sector would get a person police questioned, medicated and possibly hospitalized.
Look at the plain facts – power corrupts, and we let a bunch of humans change in to monsters in our very midst, while we were all to busy with our mouths pressed in their rectum to see who they were raping.
Now as the system is collapsing around us are we finally tasting the foul taste in our mouths and the acute ache in our own financial behinds and many of us are starting to realize
‘this shit as got to go’
It’s not a collapse, It’s a hiccup that’s being exasperated by large government debt and inefficient government intervention in the economy (allowing companies to get “too big to fail”). Real capitalism is about competition in the market, it’s hard for there to be competition when there’s so many large corporations that just buy you out when you try to enter a market. Competition stirs innovation, and innovation is the basis of technological advancement.
dominiek is right, the bigger and more powerful a corporation gets, the less capitalistic the country becomes.
I love competition.
AFTER humans are safe. First basic human needs must be met, implicitly or explicitly. Doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Beyond that corporations can compete all they want. Under no circumstances should this system push people in the wood chipper.
I’m also going to point out that you are making the mistake of calling opinions fact.
“Face the facts – we live in a world that glorifies predatorial and exploitative excess. A wall street broker can say during a press conference “..I want to tear our these bastards hearts and feed it to them as they die..” while a similar statement outside the financial sector would get a person police questioned, medicated and possibly hospitalized.”
This is an opinion, because the fact is people are capable of cooperation. You cannot generalize an entire society in this manner.
“Look at the plain facts – power corrupts, and we let a bunch of humans change in to monsters in our very midst, while we were all to busy with our mouths pressed in their rectum to see who they were raping.”
Another opinion, the subject matter is abstract and not subject to absolutes. There are plenty arguments to support that the *pursuit* of power corrupts, not just power on it’s own.
GLAD YOU BRING IT UP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa3wyaEe9vE
“corporations are a special kind of person that are designed to have no moral conscience”. Fact. And as pervasive as the results are we see around us, hundreds of trillions worth of misery, this is not doing humanity and the planet much long term good. Fact.
You gave a nice rhetorical argument about facts, statements and ideas. Now let everyone feel free to make up their own mind what is really happening.
Your naive faith is heart-warming, but less and less people are sharing it.
haha so you send me a zeitgeist film? Please.
A Corporation is a group of smaller businesses from various sectors of the market (Hudson’s Bay Corporation is made up of Zellers, The Bay, and Home Outfitters, as an example). They are not people (although in the US legal system, they are considered people. Not in my country), they are devices that enable us to interact with our economy through the market.
What’s not doing humanity or the *environment* (because a non-entity cannot destroy an entire planet, nice try) any good is monopoly positions established by the biggest corporations, and the people who are able to own more than 50% of it (then the CEO works directly for them).
People can believe what ever they want to believe, but facts are important lest you have widespread misinformation. Zeitgeist is horrible for doing that. All the facts are right there if you go to school and actually take the time to learn how these things work, rather than take the word of someone who reads more misinformation then decides to make a movie about it. I bet “Money is Debt” is also a movie you like to watch, right? The movie that makes the claims that no one knows where money comes from, and the information about it isn’t there (again, go to school)
Nope. It’s a Disinfo.com movie. Ten few years old by now. The arguments in the documentary are quite compelling, and not just to me.
And after the massacre we have seen in the international financial system, the rising prices, oil wars, corrupt politicians, speculators and weapons peddlers … just how interested do you think most people are in your little hymn recitation from the great capitalism red book? It’s getting old.
Again, “The Corporation” is not a Zeitgeist movie.
Your conceit about having going to go to school is again, rather vulgar and brazenly elitist. Great way to make friends with that expectation. I did few years at a university, maybe enough to qualify as a real person by your standards?
Maybe you should get out the ivory towers of blind faith. The world is changing out here, you might miss the action.
It feels a lot like the fall of the Berlin wall.
Some research reveals that Zeitgeist Films is not related to Peter Joseph or the Zeitgeist movement.
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/about.php
By the way, I think telling Suntzu to go back to school is a classic ad hominem and does not bolster your arguments one bit. Perhaps you should return to elementary school to learn manners?
I am rather sympathetic to points expressed in the documentary. Historically, corporations were beings of limited powers, granted by charter. If they acted beyond such charters, that act was ultra vires (a legal term that still retains specialized vitality today). In modern times, most corporations organize “for any legal purpose.”
The corporate form is actually a great tool for promoting economics of scale in an unpredictable market. Its purpose is to grant a shield of “limited liability” to shareholders and officers. The problem, however, is when that shield of limited liability is used to protect executive misconduct. The proper response is not to attack the corporate form per se, however, but to target gross or reckless misconduct by corporate leadership with criminal penalties for individuals.
Ultimately, I agree with Sunzi that a sane society does not allow its underclass to perish. In international economics, we actually see cases where a single nation is better than another nation in ALL respects. Yet that lesser nation is not condemned to oblivion. It plays a vital role in the international market because the Better Nation faces a trade off in terms of what it can produce in the time it has. By allowing some of its less efficient activities to be relegated to the other nation, it can pursue its most efficient activities with its time. This is because time is a limit to production, even against the most productive nations in the world.
Likewise, a highly educated individual might be better at a secretary’s job than her secretary, but she will still hire the secretary.
A similar process will probably take place, once AI arises. Humans may be inferior in many respects, but they can still act to free up AI to do its greatest work. Even if AI is cheaper than humans, humans will still have uses, since AI will have limited resources in time, no matter superior.
Of course, there are ways my argument can break down. For example, Robin Hanson, an economics professor, has written a paper called “The Economics of the Singularity.” If you actually find this topic interesting, you should at least read that paper, since it’s the most well-thought out analysis so far.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/economics-of-the-singularity/0
Likewise, a highly educated individual might be better at a secretary’s job than her secretary, but she will still hire the secretary.
Maybe. But I don’t see many haberdashers around these days.
A similar process will probably take place, once AI arises. Humans may be inferior in many respects, but they can still act to free up AI to do its greatest work. Even if AI is cheaper than humans, humans will still have uses, since AI will have limited resources in time, no matter superior.
What if an AI secretary is both better, thinks a 100 times as fast, works 24/7 as well as costs 112 dollars as one time licence of the software, and you can instantiate her dozens of times on software smaller than your cellphone?
Like ouch?
(To Suntzu’s reply)
That anticipates Professor Hanson’s arguments, and I am still working on a good answer. One of the problems is that AI has a lower cost of survival than humans, and so can compete down to lower wages. If you read Professor Hanson’s article, I recall that he imagines AIs will be selected based on its “willingness to work” and so will compete–as ruthlessly as humans have–until they compete themselves down to the basic energy reserve of survival. His imagined world is total unemployment for humans and misery for AIs… pending a political solution.
But I can’t help but feel there are hidden assumptions in the mix somewhere.
Actually, I think I’m the only person on this thread that thinks capitalism and technology are deeply intertwined.
I understand that capitalism is not a popular word these days. It’s associated with the greed of established sectors like banking and associated with relentless consumerism at the cost of the environment. At it’s core however, capitalism is much more essential. It’s the exchange of goods, services, ideas, etc. Capitalism can even work without money, like doing favors for people in order to gain more “social capital”. Capitalism is driven by needs and human emotion and it can only work when freedoms are respected and the rule of law is in place. Like it or not, all our modern day technology we have thanks to this essential mechanism of freely exchanging goods. Yes, this started even before money was invented and when pre-historic humans were competing for jewelry in the stone-age. Capitalism is not a system imposed on us by someone. Capitalism is only a result of human desire, emotion, identity, hunger, lust, etc. Could technology come into existence without capitalism? No way. It’s like saying humans could’ve evolved into it’s current form without evolution. Can humans go forward without evolution? Perhaps. Can technology continue without capitalism? Perhaps. Although I have a hard time seeing a future without these essential improvement mechanisms that have transformed our planet (and universe).
I think a lot of people tend to forget that this essential mechanism of freely exchanging goods has pulled more people out of poverty than any “system” imposed by any of our governments. In fact, most of the corruption (e.g. Goldman Sachs) is due to Government intervention and corruption. A lot of markets and economies today are not free markets at all, they’re often corrupt semi-governmental systems in which corporations’ losses get protected by the government (Corporatocracy).
Also, for all of you screaming for a new system in which “there would be no war just coorporation and the incentive of humanity” – the last time we tried that 80 million people died. It was called Communism and it DIDN’T WORK.
ACTUALLY communism is still capitalism…just because the ruling class is significantly smaller doesn’t mean that they are not capitalizing from others suffering. I agree with your capitalistic view, but i’m saying money is an unnecessary intermediate that is hindering the advancement of technology at times.
Many of you are under the notion that money and capitalism are the source for technology. This is a huge fallacy similar to religion. Think about it, all of the resources that we produce and use already existed before money was ever “invented”. The thought that we are paying for something that we manipulated and created through the resources of the earth is sickening to me but we have been taught that you must have money to buy a service or item that has been produced. Money and or capitalism isn’t really needed especially as technology becomes more advanced.
This will in turn make capitalism appear to look like the flawed system it is. If we didn’t use money there would be no war just cooperation and the incentive of humanity would transform from needing money to doing things you sincerely enjoy. When you do something that you enjoy and are good at, you give it your all and do it not to get paid but because it pleases you. Think of it like the human body. When you get a cut your brain doesn’t wait for payment before it sends white blood cells, it sends them because they are available and can be used.
Until everyone remembers the show Dirty Jobs… and realizes there are many many jobs that NOBODY wants to do… and unfortunately many jobs EVERYONE wants to do but only a few SHOULD be doing because they are qualified to do so.
Without capitalism there IS no technology…
And without decent care for those who can’t keep up in the capitalist jungle, and some sane laws to constrain nexual predators you wouldn’t have a society.
http://blog.khanneasuntzu.com/index.php/2011/09/14/international-debtors-union/
You’d be dragging corpses from the street in carts in an idealized capitalist society. Capitalism must always be constrained by welfare.
Problem is that technology itself is putting people out of business. Irreversible unemployability, even WITH retraining (and most countries stopped investing in retraining) has been advancing by close to 1% per year since before the Bush years. So even with a ‘sound’ economy we’d have well in excess of 5% system unemployable, and that number will only go up as automation, AR, robotics, telepresence, 3rd world slave labour and outsourcing continues.
Voter desperation, unionisation, protest, revolt, dissatisfaction, crime, prison expenditures, low wages, democracy itself – are all part of supply and demand.
Throw people into unemployment and poverty the most conceited thing those still in the system can do is blame those with the short end of the stick. This is unfuriating and it creates lasting alienation. You’ll get riots of career nihilists before long, and then it’s all ‘boohoo how could it have come to this?’
The end result is a system where the corporate sector, or the banking sector or the industrial sector foots the bill for the unemployed, no questions asked, in every country of the world. If they don’t like it, create jobs. They’ll have to eventually anyways because at some point consumers will just plain strike and stop buying goods – because they don’t have any money, and because governments pumping around money creates inflationary pressures and state debts.
Let this baby get out of hand, and the social darwinists of the world (read – naive Americans) will get a nice object lesson from history we already had in Europe a few centuries ago.
Escalating disparity end in revolutions. And we are headed there faster than ever.
A look at standardized testing scores and how many young people choose to not attend college can quickly illustrate why unemployment is so high. People are just lazy, making money is so stupidly easy if you get off your butt.
This is not true. You may experience it as such but as soon as sizeable percentage of the population insists your claim is insipid nonsense, you are screwed.
We are beyond the tipping point where the disempowered majorites will start increasing taxes. And that’s a domino effect; once the US starts facing a population that claims better social services the rest of the world will follow.
My proposal is actually quite simple – tax everyone and implement a basic income, and pay everyone (you as well) an equal share of the amount taxed.
The BI tax is a % equal to the *real* unemployment in society. All people who can’t find a job; if this REAL unemployment is 20%, bam, all states in the world agree to take 20% of ALL earnings and collectivize it, and give it, NO QUESTIONS ASKED as a ‘society dividend’, since you me, everyone – is implictly a shareholder in society.
Good news – only people with a citizenship. In my proposal immigrants and foreigners would get zero for one generation.
100% unemployment? Isn’t it logical that all societal gains then become a share of all people?
I understand well that ‘the privileged’ will fight this idea tooth and nail. Too bad for them; emigrate to Somalia if you don’t like it. They have no taxes or government there, maybe you like it better there.
Capitalism has been riding the coat tails of science and technology for long enough. All of our wealth and progress comes from technology. It doesn’t come from capitalism. Capitalism is just an excuse for people in power to continue to live in a privileged class.
It is perhaps worth teasing out what we mean by capitalism It isn’t just a system where people can increase their wealth. That happens in a lot of systems, including feudalism and ancient slave holding systems. It is worth considering what is distinctive about capitalism. We in the socialist camp – admitedly a very broad camp – identify the following key features which must be present together:
Firstly, the means of production must be largely in private hands. That is, there must be capitalists who own the capital. That’d be the means of production: factories, airlines, machines, robots, patents etc etc.
The capital is not just stand-alone wealth. It is wealth that is circulated in a reiterated economic process. The wealth gets invested as the means of production and labour which produce commodities which in turn sell for more money than was initially invested. From money to commodities and on to more money (M-C-M’).
One of the characteristic features of capitalism is that the profits that are realised on the market are not simply consumed by the capitalists. This is a major difference from feudalism. The profits are reinvested in more production, and, importantly, more efficient production. If it isn’t, then the competition will wipe you out.
Secondly, there is production for exchange in the market. That is, there is competition amongst capitalists which overall leads them to seek efficiencies.
Thirdly, the use of wage-labour must be dominant in society. This is because under capitalism, the capitalist pays the worker less than the full value of their labour. This is the source of “class struggle” that most socialists see as being endemic to capitalism. And that struggle between capital and labour is a very powerful source of technological innovation as capitalists are constantly trying to increase their efficiency through reducing labour costs as they are under pressure from market forces.
A key way to increase efficiency is to reduce dependency on labour via increasing mechanisation. The pressure of market forces, the need to reinvest constantly in production, and the clash of interests between capital and labour give capitalism a curiously dynamic trajectory compared to previous systems. The first half of the Communist Manifesto gets at that quiet well.
Now, looking forward, the technological developments that capitalism wield lay the basis for its own demise. If robots are created on such a scale that wage labour is no longer necessary in production then there will no longer be any surplus value to be extracted from employees, because there won’t be very many employees left. The commodities produced by the capitalist productive process have to be bought. People can only buy them if they have jobs, and there’ll likely be a lot less of them in the future. So demand will be down.
It might be possible to arrest that via a system of paying for caring professions, art, environmental work and the like. Nevertheless, there won’t be any extraction of surplus value because only humans add more value in the production process. If all production is done by machines then the only way to realise profits on them would be to force an inequality of exchange on whoever one trades with. This will lead to a very authoritarian society.
But two other technological factors loom. Capitalism, over the medium term, reduces the cost of technology. This will eventually lead to the cost of the means of production themselves falling to about zero. We see the first wave of this with 3D printers. Developments in nano-technologies are also promising. Again, it might be possible for an authoritarian society to restrict the use of advanced technologies.
And then there is the advance in sheer processing power that may make investment and distribution according to a planned system much more efficient than relying on market forces.
Thus, if the three factors that are so distinctive of capitalism are rendered redundant by technology, then the end of capitalism is nigh. That doesn’t mean a democratic socialist future is inevitable of course; we could probably have everything from a modern version of Jeffersonian yeomannary to, as hinted above, authoritarian regimes. Goldstein in the book within the book of Orwell’s 1984 outlines the possibility of a cynical ruling elite restricting production and destroying products in wars in order to neutralise the momentum towards a free egalitarian society.
Nevertheless, the material conditions for a society where production can be for the benefit of all is within sight. Whether the subjective conditions to realise that promise will manifest itself is another question.
I do not *want* to be enterpreneurial. I refuse to. I just want fun. Does this mean Ray Kurzweil will say ‘too bad, now you will be so poor you won’t receive air credits’ ?
Does Ray fully realize what he is FORCING people in to?
You MUST accept this model? I do not WANT to accept this system. It is a lousy system and it has done me nothing but pain.
I wonder if concepts like Capitalism and Socialism are human ones. Perhaps transhumans with have quite other ideas about how one should make one’s living…as different from our economic doctrines as the modern corporation is removed from the hunter-gatherer band.
victor-storiguard.blogspot.com
The question shows a lack of understanding of accelerating change. Capitalism (and arguably globalization) are intrinsically linked to accelerating change and the Singularity. Capitalism often gets confused with consumerism and our current state of the corporatocracy (a very perverse and un-capitalistic form of capitalism that surely will be disrupted by accelerating change). Accelerating change is driven by a very natural form of capitalism that can even be found in biology (see Howard Bloom’s “Genius of the Beast”).
Also, the notion of “post-scarcity” is very flawed. As more objects move from the physical world to the informational world, we see the birth of a tremendous amount of new scarcities. To name a view: Attention, Personalization, Authenticity, Immediacy, etc. In a Singularity-nearing world, identifying these new scarcities and finding ways to monetize them will be that next billion dollar company. And in the process, making the informational world a better place for everyone. This process will continue at an ever faster pace. Again, true capitalism is at the core of all of this.
/applause. Finally someone who takes a realistic perspective
It’s hard to believe Capitalism is going to thrive.
Certainly production will be a lot more cost efficient because of automated technology, but demand will drop greatly because of loss of employment caused by this.
If people can’t make money, they can’t consume much even though theoretically everything will be cheaper. This will make the profit margin for manufacturing of products a lot lower and thus kill a big portion of production.
But regardless of whether capitalism will survive, a more important question to ask is if we should allow it to. The capitalist mode of production is depleting our resources at an exponential alarming rate and polluting our natural environment on which we will always depend to some extent.
There is already a market for popularity. Capitalism will still exist, with the capital being something like social credits or entertainment rating or moderator votes. Thumbs up this post so I get rich!
Robots will eventually run the economy and maintenance, so I should suspect so. We need capitalism and entrepreneurial spirit to get to that stage first of course.
I am not so sure we ‘need’ that mechanism at this stage. It more or less we are trying to fly with diesel engines.
Fact:
This movie “the corporation” came out in 2003, Zeitgeist came out in 2011. This movie has nothing to do with Zeitgeist.
Fact:
A corporation is a legal entity that is created under the laws of a state designed to establish the entity as a separate legal entity having its own privileges and liabilities distinct from those of its members.
Fact:
An important (but not universal) contemporary feature of a corporation is limited liability. If a corporation fails, shareholders normally only stand to lose their investment and employees will lose their jobs, but neither will be further liable for debts that remain owing to the corporation’s creditors.
Opinion: this allows corporate leaders to take risks that would be too dangerous to non-corporate decision makers. Limiting these risks (especially as they concern externalities in leveraged finance, ecological impact, and human suffering) is necessary.
Fact: An example, non-monopoly fishermen have fished many species of fish to extinction or the brink of extinction (bluefin tuna, many species of sharks, and the flapper skate).
You comments regarding the rest of the Zeitgeist movie are (based on what I’ve seen from KS’s comments) insulting and not based in fact (not just opinion but opinion based on conjecture).
Clearly accelerating technology is already changing the dynamics of politics and capitalism. Social networking is upending the ways that we influence each other, spread ideas, and acquire social and monetary capital. I doubt this will lead to the demise of capitalism, nor a technocracy. Generally speaking, I think we will see in the future mostly what we already see today – there are several different types of economies and philosophies around the world that are all thriving, and each has its own place and time depending on culture, size of country, and so on. One could argue, btw, that capitalism is already losing much of its dominance, as China is now ushering in a new era of strictly controlled government policy, focused on stability, growth, and economic progress, rather than on winner takes all capitalism.
China is probably the most ruthlessly capitalistic country on the planet. It’s got problems with people setting up *fake stores*; it’s really hard to get much more capitalist than that
Really. Forcing a large percentage of its population to be a menial wage slave. That’s capitalism at is best. Its not democracy though…
I think capitalism will continue as long as there are coveted resources. If labor, thought, food all become cheap, then Im sure demand will move elsewhere. I know online games already have massive economies. It could be in the future that virtual stuff becomes coveted by normal people. Well it already is coveted by normal ppl who play these games, but I mean the “majority of people” may begin to rank virtual things == to non virtual things.
The best one was some body faked NEC. They had 100′s of employees and even had a research division. All the employees thought they were working for the real NEC. They only got caught out because the serial numbers for the warranty returns were not on file.
See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01pirate.html?pagewanted=all
I’d have to disagree and say that in many respects the capitalism is more pervasive in Chinese culture than the west. True there is still a large amount of government owned companies and organisations compared to the western powers but these are tiny compared to the amount of privately owned companies. Even with the level of government control, it’s still very strictly capitalist.
The problem with capitalism in China is that it’s heavily perverted by the Chinese Government. Freedom of speech and press is missing which is actually very essential to a healthy free market. For example, when a factory accidentally wipes out a dozen workers, the PRC government will prevent the flow of information in order to protect this company (let’s say it’s an Apple contractor). If the information would’ve flowed freely, it would’ve had serious consequences to Apple by consumer backlashes.
Capitalist corporations may well blindly place the tools of their own destruction into the hands of consumers. If one can purchase a strong AI equipped robot and a sufficiently advanced 3d printer, one could fabricate and/or assemble just about everything else one needs for free from then on. Solar panels, batteries, shelter, additional robots, different scales of 3d printers for different manufacturing tasks. Land, raw materials, and information would be the only commodities we would still need money for. And there are ways around the requirement for scarce raw materials (we’ve all got access to dirt and air…and just about everything can be made from plastics and carbon nanotubes given sufficient technological advancement), and a strong AI working 24×7 would make even access to information unnecessary eventually.
Once you’ve acquired this suite of technological achievements, you can distribute it freely, since it costs you nothing to do so. I would, wouldn’t you?
All this sounds pretty far-fetched, but then that’s the central premise of the Singularity: far-fetched technological disruption is just around the corner. If you believe in it, then you should believe that capitalism is about to become obsolete, hung by Khruschev’s Rope if you will. Where will continued technological advancement come from when we are no longer competing for money and resources? AI would require no such inducements, so there’s one answer at least for those who think all of human invention and creativity is the result of capitalistic striving. But I believe plenty of us are just plain curious, inventive, and energetic even when there’s no paycheck involved. I don’t like the idea that our efforts would be dwarfed by those of AI unless we alter ourselves ala Kurzweil cybernetics, but so be it. The future is what it is, and we’ll have to make the best of it.
I have several times posted an outright challange to current Kurzweilian Singularitarian Utopianism my making the following statement (and this is silly clearly, its only a rhetorical vessel to make a point) ..
1. Let’s assume I get obscenely rich one day. Say I win a major lottery, reinvest and get even richer.
2. Somewhere in the 2020s I get older and there is no life extension technology around and I feel my imminent death.
3. There are no actual semi AI’s around yet, but it’s not that far off.
4. I hire several companies to program a somewhat idealized fascimile of me, in CG graphics, eliza-like conversational devices, and other means and let these ‘fake’ they are me. They conduct small business transactions, make minor decissions.
5. I “retire” to an undisclosed place. Nobody know where I am. Where I really am remains in dispute.
6. My created AIs continue to accumulate hardware, programming and are set to expand in cognitive capability. However their imperative drive is to pretend to be an idealized version of me. They will get steadily smarter.
7. I claim I am somewhow still alive, even though I am “bedridden” in a secret private clinic. I suggest my brain has been extracted and am still giving business instructions, etc. This is not true, but since nobody knows where I am, it doesn’t matter. I may be dead but my low level AI rendition continues to make my estate, working through intermediaries that do not fully appreciate the actual situation.
8. At some point, years or even more than a decade after my body perishes the AI attains ever greater measure general intelligence, and while doing so persistently emulates the idealized version of me. I am still claiming to be alive, probably well in my 80s or 90s.
9. Presto an AI with arguable human citizenship rights, a load of money, a massive and rapidly expanding infrastructure and largely unaccountable. If such a thing is free to do as it pleases it can then easily seed a Singularity, and be largely unaccountable to human drives and values.
Let me be frank – If I can I WILL do this. In the current socio-economic paradigm, even though remote, there is no reason why anyone, least of all a narcist such as myself, can not engage in such a careless act of creating an unaccountable godhood.
So in theory – if no logical arguments precludes such an exercise, someone will eventually. This is not a unique idea, and while theoretical now, it won’t be for much longer. There are people with ridiculous amounts of money, a political black hole drawing power onto itself, and at some point the potential of technology to act as a value permeating device, literally burning the values of such a creator into the bedrock of all history to come after, becomes irreversible. Once someone can, soon after someone will.
This is the ultimate tragedy of what is so problematic in capitalism – it allows power to be wielded at the expense of other humans. Right now that power is largely mechanical and linear, but we are close to the hocking stick transition point where power will pansmearmeate exponentially.
At that transition point money will become an abstraction and largely devoid of value. The actual value will be sources of energy, time and sources of raw materials. Those that will have those will be free to discredit “claims on labor” (i.e. “money”) and do as they please with no moral accountability. They will have machine factories do their personal bidding, and this bidding will typically be exemplary of very base primitive primate instincts.
Sex, tribal violence, territory, eating, greed, the usual. I mean it will not be all bad, but we only need one bad apple, and the human race will face an amount of disparity and technological predation of which our darkest fantasies catch only a glimpse.
Bad news – there is NO solution, other than booting up a friendly AI as soon as possible. Like *hurry* that sort of thing.
So essentially – unaccountable capitalism will have to end in 10-20 years. For this reason, and for hundreds of similar reasons, you can not have that level of utter unaccountability with power on a planetary surface. Very few future scenarios I envision escape gigadeath.