Monthly Archives: April 2015

Our Idling Economic Engine

“Economy” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a thrifty and efficient use of material resources”. Other wordings of course exist, but I feel this one does the best job. So when we say “The economy…”, we’re really saying “The system we’ve designed to utilize resources in an efficient way.”. Now this makes sense, given that through Capitalism and the pursuit of profit above all else, we essentially mandate efficiency. On paper, this sounds like a good setup. But I see a problem with the definition of the word economy; one that, as far as I can tell, is responsible for  a substantial barrier to the reliable creation of prosperity. That problem is purpose, or rather, a lack thereof.

An economy is just a method of using resources efficiently. A working, stable economy is simply a working, stable method of using resources efficiently. What it lacks is purpose; direction. So what if we’re stupid good at using resources. We could, if we so chose to, create a production process and allocate materials for the purpose of producing a rubber ducky for every man, woman, and child on the Earth, and we could do so with a ridiculous degree of efficiency. We could iterate the design to use less material, streamline the production processes to minimize human involvement by designing modular, robust and scalable automation, and establish highly-automated dynamic systems for the transportation and delivery of our duckies. We could do all this, and we could do it in a stupid efficient way, if we so chose. But I think it’s pretty clear that this course of action absolutely does not constitute an efficient use of resources. Not that rubber duckies aren’t awesome, of course.

As I see it, there are two elements at play here. ‘The economy’ as it’s traditionally understood: The production chains, infrastructure, and organizations that make stuff happen. Then there’s the seemingly overlooked ‘purpose’ element. The direction, the foreman, the brass. The decision makers. We call them ‘job creators’.

This is our chosen method of divining ‘purpose’: We provide resource access (cash) to those who demonstrate themselves to be worthy of wielding resource access (those who achieve financial success), and then those people choose what resources should be used to what ends. Elon Musk, for example, could have chosen to pursue DuckX instead of SpaceX, making it his will to create and provide not cheap rockets, but free duckies instead. It’s his money, it’s his prerogative. Luckily however he chose to do something that most people would agree is a “good use” of resources. Unfortunately for every Elon Musk there are dozens of Donald Trumps and Kevin O’learys who choose to use their resource access in the pursuit of more resource access, instead of striving to achieve meaningful progress.

Now that’s not to say those kind of people are useless. You don’t acquire a fortune by being useless. But they have chosen to profit from exploiting problems, instead of solving them. There are people who seek to make a difference, and people who seek to make a profit. One directly solves a problem by applying resources in an efficient way with the goal being the solving of the problem. The other exploits the problem by creating a solution and working to maintain control of it, not really aiming to solve the problem, but seeking to create a perpetual sort of fix. A good example of this is telecommunications companies in Canada.

You would think the point of creating a telecommunications company should be providing telecommunications services to people. It’s not. The point is to make profit. We have the technology, the know-how, the resources (material and human), and the demand to establish and maintain state-of-the-art communications infrastructure, and yet, the state of internet infrastructure and service in this country is dismal. Why? Because a few companies have found it’s much more profitable to artificially limit the technology; to abstain from striving to provide the best we can create, and instead pursue a perpetual oligopoly and profit by over charging for an artificially scarce resource.

My point is this: There is no one unified effort to use resources to achieve the things we democratically decide we want to achieve. The closest thing we’ve got is the much despised government and the constant battle to fund/defund projects. We have no business calling the economy “the” economy, as it’s not. There’s Musk’s economy. There’s Trump’s economy. There’s my economy, and your economy. Our world; our very notions of freedom are built upon the idea that what I do in my home or business with resources that I’ve attained control over is nobodies business but my own. If I want to build rockets or mass produce duckies, and I have the resource access required to do so, then nothing aught stand in my way.

A colony of ants could be said to have it’s own economy. Many resources are used to maintain a colony, and each flows efficiently to where it needs to be. In a natural ant colony millions of autonomous individuals collaborate to construct, expand, and maintain a colony. Each ant, on it’s own, is able to decide where to go, what to do, and how to go about it… and yet, each seems to follow a very strict set of rules. Ants communicate via scents and movements and are able to relay complex instructions very fast. As such they can react very quickly to changing circumstances. Together, they are able to build vast societies with millions upon millions of individuals and often times bountiful stores of valuable resources. What is it about ants that allows this degree of natural collaboration? Is it the queen? Or just their natural instinct? If our countries were ant hills, and businesses were ants, what would our colonies look like?

Our ants, our businesses, are too autonomous. They too have strict rules in place to govern their operation, however, their rules are for the most part self-imposed. We have no all-powerful entity directing the actions of our ants (at least since we discovered that monarchy doesn’t work so well for us). Our queen is demand. Our instinct is to profit. Our ants perform based not upon what needs to be done for the good of the colony, but rather, what provides the most to the individual. We have millions of highly capable, competent entities each tugging their own direction, using resources for their own personal gain and relying as little as possible on the others. Tunnels would be dug, food collected, young cared-for based not on what would result in the most powerful, efficient colony, but what would provide the most immediate gain for the individual doing the work. It would be absolutely efficient in the eyes of the individual ants, but chaotic and ineffective as a whole.

This situation exists at the same time that we’re trying to rationalize the idea that “the economy” is the thing that creates prosperity, when in reality, it’s individuals with passion, ideas, and resource access that create progress. The economy simply facilitates that by enabling the flow of resources and labor. It’s not the pump, pipes, faucet, or hose that grows crops, but the will of the farmer and the availability of water. Of course sturdy tools and infrastructure make a huge difference, the point is that given water and space, the farmer’s own hunger will drive his efforts. In the same way, given the resources and time, a human’s own desire will drive their innovation.

The system that we have now is designed to ‘weed out’ those who are not passionate. Who would squander resources. Who would be inefficient. But we go too far. We should not relegate those who are not so obviously worthy of resource access to a life of poverty, but rather, a basic existence with avenues to achieve something more, should the desire ever come. Even those who may seem useless may just have some untapped potential. Instead of casting them aside because of their refusal to seek it out, we should provide them with dignity and allow them to live. One day they may decide to do something more with their lives, but until then, they aught be comfortable at least. Lest they lose interest in participating in our society at all. A refusal to pursue profit should not be treated as a refusal to be productive. Most of us want to be productive, but can’t quite seem to find the circumstances that work for us. Many of us wish to solve problems, but to do so one must pursue profit. If people could simply choose to use their time and brains when they wanted to pursue what they wanted, I suspect there would be a lot more output from the “takers” of this world. Not profit mind you, but tangible progress, and perhaps more importantly, genuine happiness and fulfillment.

We purposefully reserve the ability to have a meaningful impact for those who demonstrate themselves to be worthy of such an ability. And yet many who attain this ability demonstrate themselves to be anything but worthy of it through greed and decadence. A world could exist where resources are allocated based on the merits of what they are to achieve, instead of the whims of those who manage to accumulate funds. We could create the means to live from birth to death in a dignified way on a massive scale, in the same way that we’ve created processes to supply automobiles and cellphones to every corner of the Earth. We have the potential to create an economy that is absolutely capable of allowing us to mass produce robotic automation in abundance in a very efficient way. What we lack is the will. What we lack is purpose.

The engine is running, but we’re too busy bickering over who gets to drive to decide where to go.

The Decentralization of Automation

“Who will buy the goods?” is a question I often see asked when one is presented with the notion that robots will displace workers. If employees are made redundant by machines and are then unable to find gainful employment, they will lose their purchasing power and be unable to afford the goods and services they once worked to provide. If we look to the past for answers to this question, we find that the cost of goods will fall as a result of the new found efficiency. Weavers were one of many artisanal jobs to experience this first hand; cloth goods made by a skilled weaver were more expensive and of lesser quality than those produced by their mechanized counterparts. As a result, career weavers were displaced from their work violently rebelled, and were subsequently quelled. Though thousands of highly skilled artisans were made redundant, the goods that they produced became widely accessible and infinitely more intricate. A similar series of events followed in a multitude of other industries, but all with the same outcome: more, cheaper, higher quality goods.

Those who were made redundant would have attempted to seek out employment, but with a now useless skill-set and all the obligations of your average head of household, it’s not hard to imagine that their prospects were bleak. It is often argued that automation does not destroy jobs, but merely move them around. One part of an economy may lose employment opportunities while another will create them, on the whole the amount of work remaining relatively unchanged. Again, looking to the past would seem to confirm this. At the same time the aforementioned artisans were being replaced, new work was being created. Increased efficiency meant more throughput, which in turn meant more demand for raw materials. Despite the mechanization of many of these processes as well, there would eventually have been new jobs created in the pursuit of expanding production capacity, even if they were not in time for those initially displaced. Additionally, the creation of new goods and services, as well as mechanized processes to support them exploded in number creating further new employment.

In the above instance, humanity progressed from simply creating goods to creating mechanized processes to create goods. Nowadays, pretty much everything owes at least some small part of it’s creation to a mechanized process. For decades we have been designing and implementing labor saving innovations to support every facet of our modern world. Just as artisans were displaced, we have continued to displace workers from countless jobs which have been made redundant over the years. Even the term ‘computer’ was once used to identify an individual who’s job was computation, where now it universally refers to electronic computers.

So then. If this is the way things go, why all the concern for robots? Surely they are just another labor saving innovation, fated to follow the same trajectory of the countless others that proceeded them, right? The problem, at least as I see it, is that while an auto-loom displaced a weaver by being ‘more skilled’ (that is, able to do the same job quicker and better), robotic arms are poised to displace jobs that rely on actions performed by human arms, for the same reason. Almost anything that predicated on the use of physical strength or dexterity can, and will soon be done by a machine. Unlike the auto-loom (and other, similar devices) which affected one cross section of the industrial activities of humanity, intelligent robotic arms (and computers) are positioned to simultaneously impact thousands of fields. That will mean hundreds of thousands of redundantly skilled humans suddenly unable to pay their bills, a mad scramble for what little employment opportunities still exist, and ultimately the realization that such an effort is futile anyway.

Judging by the actions of the world’s corporations, I have to conclude that they disagree with my final sentence above. “New jobs will be created.” and, “The economy will adapt, as it always has.” are two of the points I most often see used to dismiss technological unemployment. The belief that new work will somehow be resistant to automation, despite the clear evidence that both physical and intellectual types of work (our two notable abilities as humans) are under threat by robots and AI, is widespread. When pressed however nobody seems to have any idea (even fantastical) what this work (which will apparently provide jobs to literally billions of relatively unskilled people) is. The second point I can agree with, however. We will adapt. But not in the way I suspect the leaders of industry envision. Personally I see the notion of a for-profit business disappearing like a fart in the wind. It was a good idea; the embodiment of carrot-on-a-stick mentality… just keep chasing that profit… but it’s outlived it’s usefulness.

The traditional notion of jobs needs to end. People should instead be free. Free to pursue their own interests; to do what they feel is worth doing, as far as they feel like doing it. Our technology can enable that today. In the same way that the mechanization of weaving led to widely accessible cloth, the automation of the production of automation implements will lead to widely accessible automation. We will have no need to strive for profit above all else, as individuals will instead choose what goods and services they utilize and support based solely on their own specific demands. With limitless ability to create and provide these goods, there will simply be no need for the restrictive policies of corporations, beholden to shareholders and at the mercy of the dollar. We are each of us our own CEO, on the precipice of being handed the reins to a slice of our Earth’s resources. Like the weavers, business as usual will be displaced, with or without the participation of it’s overseers.

Expect a rebellion by the true champions of the status quo, but this time is different. This time it’s the people, not the corporations, who will do the quelling.