It's a lot of fun reading timelines for things like the technological singularity or even just the implementation of robots in our economy. But have you ever wondered what a political/economic/social timeline would look like? I decided to put a short one together, just for fun.
2010 - We show signs of emerging from the recession we're currently in, but the rate of job growth is less than what it was at the beginning of the recession, i.e., another "jobless recovery".
2013 - We begin to enter another recession, deeper and longer than the one we're currently in. Tremendous job loss forces the federal government to take larger role in ensuring people have necessities, though relative weakness of the government compared with social democracies makes this difficult and somewhat inefficient. Still, we get by.
2017 - Again we recover from the recession, but recovery is again less than it was last time. This is owing to the vast number of jobs that have been automated. New jobs in the information technology sector are not sufficient to make up for it.
2019 - The economy enters recession again. Unprecedented job losses seizing the entire world. Unprecedented interventions from world governments manage to keep the economy going, though they are incredibly inefficient compared with the market forces they are attempting to replace.
2020 - Period of perpetual economic crisis begins. Permanent recession. Internet 3.0, the "internet of things", is ubiquitous. Production processes increasingly automated but also democratized through the next generation of social/material networking technologies.
Mid 20s - Capitalism is in severe crisis. It can't prop itself up anymore by means of market forces alone. The state can no longer prop it up in a way that is profitable. This is not localized either but is global. Growing demand for the basic necessities of life, but a smaller and smaller role left for the state. Needs are increasingly met through an organized though decentralized process which takes place over the "internet".
2025-2030 - Drastic fall in the cost of means of subsistence. Large portions of the means of subsistence are removed from the value-form all together. By the 30s food, housing, and medicine are free due to the ease with which they're produced by automated labor. Due to exponential increases in information technology and robot design, work becomes obsolete. "Unemployment" nearing 85% of the global population makes the category almost meaningless.
2030 - Though there are perhaps isolated markets, capitalism as a world system no longer exists. Neither markets nor state control of production even approached the efficiency with which the fully automated, open source economy operates. The state still exists, though it is more and more restricted to policing information, protecting against identity theft, etc.
2040 and beyond - There is no longer any state or economy as we understand them now. Society is fully "online", though the distinction between the internet and the world (and indeed machine and person) no longer exists. Flow of information and personal identity completely impossible to protect or regulate from the outside. World intelligence system totally self-regulating and communistic.
Obviously I'm just making this up—even Marshall Brain doesn't think we'd have that much automation that early. But I really haven't seen a lot of timelines like this alongside the technological ones. People seem to assume that capitalism will coexist indefinitely with this kind of explosion, and that just seems preposterous to me. But I think this is something we need to start thinking about. We need to extrapolate political, social, and economic change into the future just like we do with technology.
What's your timeline look like? Post it here.
Showing posts with label Topic: Singularity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Topic: Singularity. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Robots for Hire (Rob) by Rob L
While running through some research, this short talk jumped out from the Singularity Summit in 2008 on robotics and the coming economic shift pre-singularity. Marshall Brain (what a name for an AI researcher, just wow) relies mostly on labor statistics that are all fairly common knowledge to us. Using this data, however, he makes some interesting points about the 2000 - 04 recession, maintaining that IT replaced many jobs such as grocery clerks (a personal threat to yours truly), call desks, and travel agents. The resulting productive obsolescence of simple service jobs is a reduced exponential growth in global jobs contained within the economy. That trend continued ended up hobbling the uncharacteristically short recovery after 2004. In just a few years we hit another recession, where we sit now at the tip of the downswing.
Based on this, I feel it is important to consider that our present problems, while largely caused by debt, are concurrent with a deconstruction of our industrial economy and its transition into an information economy. This deconstruction has been long to build, itself an exponential process, but we are now past the knee of the curve. Is it possible then that the declining rate of profit is itself an exponential phenomenon?
The service sector which was touted to replace manufacturing and heavy industry is itself disappearing. This isn't all terrible, since these jobs are mostly held at below subsistence wages anyway. That is about as positive a spin you can wrap this in once it is also accepted just how broad sweeping these job losses will be.
The convergence of these forces, debt and obsolescence, among other factors, will result in a deep and long depression while the world economy adapts to the next paradigm. Brain's panic scenario hinges around the likelihood that nearly all service, transportation, and education jobs will be replaced by sufficiently functional robotics, resulting in 50 million jobs lost over the next 15 years. These people, Wallmart workers up to Fed-Ex drivers, are already at or just above poverty. They have little access and even less support for the education and loans necessary to enter the creative class. While 50 million may be excessive, even a significantly smaller percentage would be catastrophic to existing economic structures.
At the same time, the rest of the world is catching up to our productivity, i. e., "the world is flat/spiky". IT is transforming Africa, South America, and the rest of the world at an amazing yet welcomed rate. The potential here is the realization of our dream. Massive efficiency in production can allow for a fractional work week, material equality, etc. But without major preparation and the incentive, political or otherwise, to assist the poor in their own transition, this dream seems improbable.
However the transition is navigated, exponential learning continues. We run smack into the singularity just as we recover our footing, if we do at all. I postulate that we must be standing as equals in at that moment, or we will fail to singularize as a species. The dynamic between rich and poor will mutate into a new dynamic between smart and left behind.
Based on this, I feel it is important to consider that our present problems, while largely caused by debt, are concurrent with a deconstruction of our industrial economy and its transition into an information economy. This deconstruction has been long to build, itself an exponential process, but we are now past the knee of the curve. Is it possible then that the declining rate of profit is itself an exponential phenomenon?
The service sector which was touted to replace manufacturing and heavy industry is itself disappearing. This isn't all terrible, since these jobs are mostly held at below subsistence wages anyway. That is about as positive a spin you can wrap this in once it is also accepted just how broad sweeping these job losses will be.
The convergence of these forces, debt and obsolescence, among other factors, will result in a deep and long depression while the world economy adapts to the next paradigm. Brain's panic scenario hinges around the likelihood that nearly all service, transportation, and education jobs will be replaced by sufficiently functional robotics, resulting in 50 million jobs lost over the next 15 years. These people, Wallmart workers up to Fed-Ex drivers, are already at or just above poverty. They have little access and even less support for the education and loans necessary to enter the creative class. While 50 million may be excessive, even a significantly smaller percentage would be catastrophic to existing economic structures.
At the same time, the rest of the world is catching up to our productivity, i. e., "the world is flat/spiky". IT is transforming Africa, South America, and the rest of the world at an amazing yet welcomed rate. The potential here is the realization of our dream. Massive efficiency in production can allow for a fractional work week, material equality, etc. But without major preparation and the incentive, political or otherwise, to assist the poor in their own transition, this dream seems improbable.
However the transition is navigated, exponential learning continues. We run smack into the singularity just as we recover our footing, if we do at all. I postulate that we must be standing as equals in at that moment, or we will fail to singularize as a species. The dynamic between rich and poor will mutate into a new dynamic between smart and left behind.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Pirate Bay Piracy Trial (Keith) by Keith
This is a press release from: The Bureau for Piracy and The Pirate Bay via the internets.
The trial against The Pirate Bay that started three days ago in
What differs this trial from most earlier trials is that everything in and surrounding it will whirl round and round in diverse channels of communication; to be discussed, reinterpreted, copied and critizised. Every crack in their appeal will be penetrated by the gaze of thousands upon thousands of eyes on the internets, in all the channels covering the trial. Old cliches from the antipiracy lobby wont stick. You won’t be able to say stuff like, ”you can’t compete with free” or ”filesharing is theft” without a thousand voices making fun of you.
We will create numerous scenes where quite different plays will take place. In local channels like spectrial.bloggy.se where the immediate physical surroundings of the court are being discussed. ”Which cafés nearby will give us connection?” ”How can we get electricity to the bus?” But also in international channels like Twitter, where right now the torrent of information is being translated into fifteen different languages. Translations and coverage being made by ordinary users of internets. Volunteers sign up to make trial-tourist guides to the surroundings, drive the bus or hook up audio. People fly in from far away countries to cover the trial and tell the world their video story of the
Here all participants are potential actors in the Spectrial. Our channels form a meltingpot of reporting and engagement.
Our communication around the spectacle aims in no way towards an objective report on an external chain of events. Rather, the trial is a hub around which a whole new network of actors is instigated. Neither is the spectacle a question of old media against digital, social medias. Our social medias include a paper fanzine and a 32 year old bus, connecting us and others physically.
It’s not about the protocols nor the technology. It’s about using these to create new congregations, where anyone is invited and anyone can find their role, build new scenes and make their own performances.
The future is built by us. Us who participate in conversations. The future is built by us who explore how information and performativity is coming together. To refuse a debate and still expect to be able to charge consumers is since long a closed door. To also try and outlaw certain types of conversations is downright disgraceful.
The coverage of the trial is not unique in these qualities. More and more areas see the creation of conversations on and the exploration of new stances on culture and cultural economy. A gigantic collective exploration has set sails. Every route differs from the other. But they have one thing in common: The industry interests that the state is representing are never present in these conversations. This is why they wont be part in building the future.
maintain hardline kopimi
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Futurism and the End of Capitalism (Keith) by Keith
The Financial Times has published a number of commentaries on Ray Kurzweil and the “singularity”. The FT columnist takes a standard conservative view of radical change but it is interesting that the FT is covering these developments with such regularity. This relatively intense coverage is because Kurzweil research is a part of the central contradiction of capitalism: rising productivity of labor manifests in a falling rate of profit. In other words the systems development brings about its demise. At a moment of intense crisis like now, the need to dramatically increase the productive power of labor is felt along with the danger of that increase.
For a very long time socialists, radicals, and Marxists asserted that the main contradiction of capitalism is between private ownership and socialized production. The idea here is that workers work together to produce the wealth of the whole society but ownership of the means of production and therefore the power to appropriate that wealth lies with a private few. The problem with this old view is that there is nothing specific to capitalism about this contradiction (so it isn’t a part of capitalism’s essence), slavery and feudalism also had private appropriation of socialized production.
.
The central contradiction of capitalism is expressed in the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The contradiction was expressed by Marx this way: “The rising productivity of labor is manifest in a falling rate of profit.” That is why Marx says the only insurmountable barrier to capital accumulation is capital itself.
In Marx’s mature work the falling rate of profit is the essence of his crisis theory. The falling rate of profit is an expression of labor’s productive power outstripping capitalist social relations and a falling rate of profit crisis can only be solved through socialist revolution or destruction on a mass scale (like world war), in other words the falling rate of profit expresses the limits to capital. There is no solution to this kind of crisis within the exiting social relationships.
So on the one hand rising labor productivity undermines capitalist social relationships and on the other hand rising labor productivity is the essence of capitalist social development, capitalist compete with each other and at the heart of that competition is technological and organizational innovations that increase the productive power of labor (more social wealth –use values—are produced with less human labor), but paradoxically this results in the long run in a falling rate of profit.
Kurzweil’s new university will function within capitalist social relationships and for a time any successes towards dramatic technological innovations can be utilized by capitals to increase their competitive advantages. But in the long run these social relationships will become increasingly felt as fetters to further development and the barrier of these social relationships will compel more and more people to the camp of revolutionary democracy. One of our mid term tasks is to develop the our understanding of this contradiction and our ability to popularize it so that people working in other fields (like Kurweil himself) can understand it.
For a very long time socialists, radicals, and Marxists asserted that the main contradiction of capitalism is between private ownership and socialized production. The idea here is that workers work together to produce the wealth of the whole society but ownership of the means of production and therefore the power to appropriate that wealth lies with a private few. The problem with this old view is that there is nothing specific to capitalism about this contradiction (so it isn’t a part of capitalism’s essence), slavery and feudalism also had private appropriation of socialized production.
.
The central contradiction of capitalism is expressed in the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The contradiction was expressed by Marx this way: “The rising productivity of labor is manifest in a falling rate of profit.” That is why Marx says the only insurmountable barrier to capital accumulation is capital itself.
In Marx’s mature work the falling rate of profit is the essence of his crisis theory. The falling rate of profit is an expression of labor’s productive power outstripping capitalist social relations and a falling rate of profit crisis can only be solved through socialist revolution or destruction on a mass scale (like world war), in other words the falling rate of profit expresses the limits to capital. There is no solution to this kind of crisis within the exiting social relationships.
So on the one hand rising labor productivity undermines capitalist social relationships and on the other hand rising labor productivity is the essence of capitalist social development, capitalist compete with each other and at the heart of that competition is technological and organizational innovations that increase the productive power of labor (more social wealth –use values—are produced with less human labor), but paradoxically this results in the long run in a falling rate of profit.
Kurzweil’s new university will function within capitalist social relationships and for a time any successes towards dramatic technological innovations can be utilized by capitals to increase their competitive advantages. But in the long run these social relationships will become increasingly felt as fetters to further development and the barrier of these social relationships will compel more and more people to the camp of revolutionary democracy. One of our mid term tasks is to develop the our understanding of this contradiction and our ability to popularize it so that people working in other fields (like Kurweil himself) can understand it.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Artificial Intelligence and the revolutionary process (Keith) by Keith
The Financial Times reported on Feb 3rd that the futurist Ray Kurzweil will be opening a research institution with backing form Google and Nasa (private/public partnership). Kurzweil is pointing out, perhaps unwittingly and among other things, that in the foreseeable future, human labor will be so productive (with the aid of machines) that it will be possible to produce, with little to no environmental damage, an abundance of social wealth. The interesting thing politically is that as society approaches what Kurweil calls the “singularity” capitalism will enter into deeper and deeper crisis because the capitalist social relations will be in increasing conflicts with these developments. The rapidly increasing productivity of labor has the effect of driving down the costs of commodities and in circuitously this development causes profit rates to fall. Profit is the reason for capitalist production and so without profits the system will grind to a halt. Capitalist social relationships will have to be completely abolished before “new era of civilization” envisioned by Kurweil can come into existence. Here is the article:
Google and Nasa back new school for futurists
By David Gelles in San Francisco
Published: February 3 2009 05:02 | Last updated: February 3 2009 05:02
Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.
The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.
Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.
To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.
The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.
Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.
Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.
Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics.”
The school is backed by Larry Page, Google co-founder, and Peter Diamandis, chief executive of X-Prize, an organisation which provides grants to support technological change.
“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”
Despite its title, the school will not be an accredited university. Instead, it will be modelled on the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, the interdisciplinary, multi-cultural school that Mr Diamandis helped establish in 1987
Google and Nasa back new school for futurists
By David Gelles in San Francisco
Published: February 3 2009 05:02 | Last updated: February 3 2009 05:02
Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.
The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.
Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.
To be housed at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, a stone’s-throw from the Googleplex, the Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.
The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularised the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.
Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.
Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.
Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics.”
The school is backed by Larry Page, Google co-founder, and Peter Diamandis, chief executive of X-Prize, an organisation which provides grants to support technological change.
“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”
Despite its title, the school will not be an accredited university. Instead, it will be modelled on the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, the interdisciplinary, multi-cultural school that Mr Diamandis helped establish in 1987
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)