I’m reminded of Scott’s parable below from his 2016 book review of Hanson’s Age of Em, which replaces the business executives, the investors & board members, and even the consumers in your sources of economic motivation / ownership with economic efficiency-improving algorithms and robots and such. I guess I’m wondering why you think your Autofac scenario is more plausible than Scott’s dystopian rendering of Land’s vision.
There are a lot of similarities between Hanson’s futurology and (my possibly erroneous interpretation of) the futurology of Nick Land. I see Land as saying, like Hanson, that the future will be one of quickly accelerating economic activity that comes to dominate a bigger and bigger portion of our descendents’ lives. But whereas Hanson’s framing focuses on the participants in such economic activity, playing up their resemblances with modern humans, Land takes a bigger picture. He talks about the economy itself acquiring a sort of self-awareness or agency, so that the destiny of civilization is consumed by the imperative of economic growth.
Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht. And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.
Now imagine the company fires all its employees and replaces them with robots. It fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.
Now take it further. Imagine there are no human shareholders who want yachts, just banks who lend the company money in order to increase their own value. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place. Every non-economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s just an appendage of Global Development.
Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere. There are no humans left; it isn’t economically efficient to continue having humans. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources and so on forever.
But this seems to me the natural end of the economic system. Right now it needs humans only as laborers, investors, and consumers. But robot laborers are potentially more efficient, companies based around algorithmic trading are already pushing out human investors, and most consumers already aren’t individuals – they’re companies and governments and organizations. At each step you can gain efficiency by eliminating humans, until finally humans aren’t involved anywhere.
I think there’s simply not a good reason to fully automate consumption. It’s one of those ideas that sounds intuitive in abstract, but in practice it means taking a step of automating away the very reason anything was being done at all, and historically when a part of the economy becomes completely self-serving like this, it collapses and we call it a bubble.
There is some open question about what happens if literally the entire economy becomes a bubble. Could it self sustain? Maybe yes, though I’m not sure how we get there without the incremental bubbles collapsing before they combine to form a single big bubble that encompasses all economic activity. If that happened, I’d consider this to be a paperclip maximizer scenario. If no, then I think we get an Autofac-like world.
I’m reminded of Scott’s parable below from his 2016 book review of Hanson’s Age of Em, which replaces the business executives, the investors & board members, and even the consumers in your sources of economic motivation / ownership with economic efficiency-improving algorithms and robots and such. I guess I’m wondering why you think your Autofac scenario is more plausible than Scott’s dystopian rendering of Land’s vision.
I think there’s simply not a good reason to fully automate consumption. It’s one of those ideas that sounds intuitive in abstract, but in practice it means taking a step of automating away the very reason anything was being done at all, and historically when a part of the economy becomes completely self-serving like this, it collapses and we call it a bubble.
There is some open question about what happens if literally the entire economy becomes a bubble. Could it self sustain? Maybe yes, though I’m not sure how we get there without the incremental bubbles collapsing before they combine to form a single big bubble that encompasses all economic activity. If that happened, I’d consider this to be a paperclip maximizer scenario. If no, then I think we get an Autofac-like world.