The author, Jason Stoddard, claims the current financial crisis is the first step on the way toward a post-scarcity economy in which our notion of value is overturned.
But what if advances in manufacturing efficiencies make it possible to live well, simply by interacting with friends and going about your life? What if below-replacement-level birth rates and advances in biotechnology meant you could check out of the system by claiming a piece of unused desert and planting a house? This surveillance economy might be a very easy place to live.Stoddard is raising a possibility I raised in my earlier post on automation and capitalism, namely that advances in our current social networking technologies, combined with the seamless interface between computing and reality that will come with the internet of things (listen to this talk for more information), will revolutionize the way we both produce and distribute surplus-value. This will happen before we reach a post-scarcity economy.
The possibilities once we reach a post-scarcity economy (through nanotechnology or something else) are almost limitless. What few people are saying—Stoddard stops short of saying this, too—is that capitalism is unintelligible under such circumstances. If necessary labor consists in—to put it bluntly—screwing around with your friends and having a good time, if that's the way we acquire our means of subsistence, then there effectively is no barrier between ourselves and social wealth. If one can take the current emerging paradigm of decentralization emerging now and extrapolate it a decade or two into the future, a paradigm of radical democracy and effortless participation takes shape. It would be a self-sustaining, self-growing, undirected, democratic and organic communist system.
So, I read Marshall Brain's "book." I don't think you can really call it a book, since those tend to be longer than 20 pages.
ReplyDeleteSo, in part, I retract my hopes as far as linking up with this guy. He just can't get his head out of the capitalist model.
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
Take a look at the section called "Capitalism Supersized." Quite clearly, he is off his rocker.
"What if the way to achieve the strongest possible economy is to give every citizen more money to spend? For example, what if we gave every citizen of the United States $25,000 to spend?"
That's his solution to 50% unemployment, tax the rich like crazy and mail every citizen in the US $25k. That's roughly $8 trillion dollars. Granted, the 2008 budget alloted for $1.77 trillion to assistance programs, which would transfer to this fund.
Oh hell, I'm not even going to try and go any further on this. We need a different answer.
That's sad. I was encouraged by some of the broad strokes he made in his presentation, but it sounds as though the details aren't any less far-fetched than my plan to feed the bourgeoisie to the machines.
ReplyDeleteThere doesn't seem to be a grasp of quantity and quality here. For example, let's say just for argument's sake that we could give away that much money to the unemployed. We couldn't do it just once. The state would continually undermine market forces in the distribution of social wealth. Past a certain point, it won't make a lot of sense to call it a capitalist economy. Same issues apply to scarcity. If we developed into a society without scarcity, it's difficult to see how to make a capitalist model work over that. Yet I don't encounter anyone raising that.
What if the post-scarcity economy is drive by a Resource Based Economy ?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thevenusproject.com/
Material interests won't let go of a scarcity economy until absolutely forced to. Directly transitioning to a resource based economy is skipping several steps, all of which go against the grain of society.
ReplyDeleteIt would be far simpler thinkers to acount for as much of society's changing material circumstance with an eye towards having a resource based economy on the other side.
What the futurists talk about with regards to nanites is essentially a vat of base element goo that nanites shape into objects. If anything like that becomes a reality, then that right there IS a resource economy. We didn't have to lift a finger. All we'll have to do is make sure it's clean and justly managed. No small task, of course, but it's much easier than convincing everyone to shift the economy for shifting's sake.
Btw, nanites are one of the lesser known holes in the singularity theory. From the best of our knowledge in the field, such vats operating at the known limits of nanite speeds would take 1,000 or more years to construct a moderate sized object.
Actually, a post-scarcity economy is not only possible *right now* with today's technology, it has been possible for *decades*. For more information and research on how this is possible, check out the following:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.technocracy.org
http://www.technocracy.ca
While Kurzweil can pontificate about how we will all soon be immortal so long as we live to around 2045, the technological singularity may not come for another few hundred or thousand years. Many in the 1940s thought we would have advanced colonies in Mars by now. But when the singularity does comes, the machines might be far worse than any oppressive class of humans, they will not even have any need to exploit and extract surplus value from our labor, there will be no need for profit creation and no need for human life. Perhaps we will simply just be ignored, why should we care if one troop of chimpanzees should wage war against another troop encroaching upon their territory. Then again with current advanced rate of automation in production, human labor is ALREADY becoming or has become largely redudant. It just seems that the future is either going to be a dystopian nightmare or an utopia from a subjective human perspective, but in the meantime we still have to labor away to survive while work still exists.
ReplyDelete