The World After Capital in 64 Theses
Over the weekend I tweeted out a summary of my book The World After Capital in 64 theses. Here they are in one place:
The Industrial Age is 20+ years past its expiration date, following a long decline that started in the 1970s.
Mainstream politicians have propped up the Industrial Age through incremental reforms that are simply pushing out the inevitable collapse.
The lack of a positive vision for what comes after the Industrial Age has created a narrative vacuum exploited by nihilist forces such as Trump and ISIS.
The failure to enact radical changes is based on vastly underestimating the importance of digital technology, which is not simply another set of Industrial Age machines.
Digital technology has two unique characteristics not found in any prior human technology: zero marginal cost and universality of computation.
Our existing approaches to regulation of markets, dissemination of information, education and more are based on the no longer valid assumption of positive marginal cost.
Our beliefs about the role of labor in production and work as a source of purpose are incompatible with the ability of computers to carry out ever more sophisticated computations (and to do so ultimately at zero marginal cost).
Digital technology represents as profound a shift in human capabilities as the invention of agriculture and the discovery of science, each of which resulted in a new age for humanity.
The two prior transitions, from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age and from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age resulted in humanity changing almost everything about how individuals live and societies function, including changes in religion.
Inventing the next age, will require nothing short of changing everything yet again.
We can, if we make the right choices now, set ourselves on a path to the Knowledge Age which will allow humanity to overcome the climate crisis and to broadly enjoy the benefits of automation.
Choosing a path into the future requires understanding the nature of the transition we are facing and coming to terms with what it means to be human.
New technology enlarges the “space of the possible,” which then contains both good and bad outcomes. This has been true starting from the earliest human technology: fire can be used to cook and heat, but also to wage war.
Technological breakthroughs shift the binding constraint. For foraging tribes it was food. For agrarian societies it was arable land. Industrial countries were constrained by how much physical capital (machines, factories, railroads, etc.) they could produce.
Today humanity is no longer constrained by capital, but by attention.
We are facing a crisis of attention. We are not paying enough attention to profound challenges, such as “what is our purpose?” and “how do we overcome the climate crisis?”
Attention is to time as velocity is to speed: attention is what we direct our minds to during a time period. We cannot go back and change what we paid attention to. If we are poorly prepared for a crisis it is because of how we have allocated our attention in the past.
We have enough capital to meet our individual and collective needs, as long as we are clear about the difference between needs and wants.
Our needs can be met despite the population explosion because of the amazing technological progress we have made and because population growth is slowing down everywhere with peak population in sight.
Industrial Age society, however, has intentionally led us down a path of confusing our unlimited wants with our modest needs, as well as specific solutions (e.g. individually owned cars) with needs (e.g. transportation).
The confusion of wants with needs keeps much of our attention trapped in the “job loop”: we work so that we can buy goods and services, which are produced by other people also working.
The job loop was once beneficial, when combined with markets and entrepreneurship, it resulted in much of the innovation that we now take for granted.
Now, however, we can and should apply as much automation as we can muster to free human attention from the “job loop” so that it can participate in the “knowledge loop” instead: learn, create, and share.
Digital technology can be used to vastly accelerate the knowledge loop, as can be seen from early successes, such as Wikipedia and open access scientific publications.
Much of digital technology is being used to hog human attention into systems such as Facebook, Twitter and others that engage in the business of reselling attention, commonly known as advertising. Most of what is advertised is furthering wants and reinforces the job loop.
The success of market-based capitalism is that capital is no longer our binding constraint. But markets cannot be used for allocating attention due to missing prices.
Prices do not and cannot exist for what we most need to pay attention to. Price formation requires supply and demand, which don’t exist for finding purpose in life, overcoming the climate crisis, conducting fundamental research, or engineering an asteroid defense.
We must use the capabilities of digital technology so that we can freely allocate human attention.
We can do so by enhancing economic, information, and psychological freedom.
Economic freedom means allowing people to opt out of the job loop by providing them with a universal basic income (UBI).
Informational freedom means empowering people to control computation and thus information access, creation and sharing.
Psychological freedom means developing mindfulness practices that allow people to direct their attention in the face of a myriad distractions.
UBI is affordable today exactly because we have digital technology that allows us to drive down the cost of producing goods and services through automation.
UBI is the cornerstone of a new social contract for the Knowledge Age, much as pensions and health insurance were for the Industrial Age.
Paid jobs are not a source of purpose for humans in and of themselves. Doing something meaningful is. We will never run out of meaningful things to do.
We need one global internet without artificial geographic boundaries or fast and slow lanes for different types of content.
Copyright and patent laws must be curtailed to facilitate easier creation and sharing of derivative works.
Large systems such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. must be mandated to be fully programmable to diminish their power and permit innovation to take place on top of the capabilities they have created.
In the longrun privacy is incompatible with technological progress. Providing strong privacy assurances can only be accomplished via controlled computation. Innovation will always grow our ability to destroy faster than our ability to build due to entropy.
We must put more effort into protecting individuals from what can happen to them if their data winds up leaked, rather than trying to protect the data at the expense of innovation and transparency.
Our brains evolved in an environment where seeing a cat meant there was a cat. Now the internet can show us an infinity of cats. We can thus be forever distracted.
It is easier for us to form snap judgments and have quick emotional reactions than to engage our critical thinking facilities.
Our attention is readily hijacked by systems designed to exploit these evolutionarily engrained features of our brains.
We can use mindfulness practices, such as conscious breathing or meditation to take back and maintain control of our attention.
As we increase economic, informational and psychological freedom, we also require values that guide our actions and the allocation of our attention.
We should embrace a renewed humanism as the source of our values.
There is an objective basis for humanism. Only humans have developed knowledge in the form of books and works of art that transcend both time and space.
Knowledge is the source of humanity’s great power. And with great power comes great responsibility.
Humans need to support each other in solidarity, irrespective of such differences as gender, race or nationality.
We are all unique, and we should celebrate these differences. They are beautiful and an integral part of our humanity.
Because only humans have the power of knowledge, we are responsible for other species. For example, we are responsible for whales, rather than the other way round.
When we see something that could be improved, we need to have the ability to express that. Individuals, companies and societies that do not allow criticism become stagnant and will ultimately fail.
Beyond criticism, the major mode for improvement is to create new ideas, products and art. Without ongoing innovation, systems become stagnant and start to decay.
We need to believe that problems can be solved, that progress can be achieved. Without optimism we will stop trying, and problems like the climate crisis will go unsolved threatening human extinction.
If we succeed with the transition to the Knowledge Age, we can tackle extraordinary opportunities ahead for humanity, such as restoring wildlife habitats here on earth and exploring space.
We can and should each contribute to leaving the Industrial Age behind and bringing about the Knowledge Age.
We start by developing our own mindfulness practice and helping others do so.
We tackle the climate crisis through activism demanding government regulation, through research into new solutions, and through entrepreneurship deploying working technologies.
We defend democracy from attempts to push towards authoritarian forms of government.
We foster decentralization through supporting localism, building up mutual aid, participating in decentralized systems (crypto and otherwise).
We promote humanism and live in accordance with humanist values.
We recognize that we are on the threshold of both transhumans (augmented humans) and neohumans (robots and artificial intelligences).
We continue on our epic human journey while marveling at (and worrying about) our aloneness in the universe.
We act boldly and with urgency, because humanity’s future depends on a successful transition to the Knowledge Age.
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