Value was the holy grail of obsessive economists a long time ago. They settled on utility and labor value, demand and supply considerations. It has served us well but with the advent of AI driven systems it might be valuable to revisit the concept.
There are needs, wants, and whims. These three demand considerations bestow the attribute of utility upon products and services, 'fit' into a demand structure. This is a social attribute. This utility has no meaning for the isolated phenotype. It is an artifact of a social group. All social groups of all animals demonstrate utility. Aphids have utility to ants. Long slender sticks for termite fishing have utility to chimpanzees. Utility to an ant is probably genetically determined. Utility to a chimp is also cultural, learned and shared. Obviously, utility to a human society has high order functionality.
Aristotle once characterized humans as the political animal. I would argue that he missed a logical step. Compared to a dolphin humans are indeed the political animal as a refinement of a social animal but what characterizes humans absolutely is trade, refined and elaborated beyond anything seen in the animal kingdom. Humans are market animals, Homo Mercator, and it is here in bazaars or markets that value is determined, a sophisticated translation of utility, quantifiable and verifiable. Value requires a calculus, language or money, to be expressed. Value is always relative and 2 is always less than 3 which is relative and money is always denominated in numbers. That makes money the natural value calculus of markets and the constant companion of Homo Mercator. An apple is worth a dime and an orange is worth a quarter. That is the genius of Homo Mercator. Two incommensurable objects have had their relative values established in a social market. They have been placed in economic purview, monetized.
We need to revisit this subject to establish that we cannot monetize everything. There are needs, wants, and whims and not all of them have a money value although, if placed in a bazaar, money will change hands because they have utility, 'fit'. Homo Mercator has no natural bounds. It is a role in the human repertoire that is subservient to Homo Sapiens in an advocate dynamic.
AI systems are mercator systems. They deal in numbers. They would have to be sophisticated beyond contemporary imagination to mimic the directive function of Homo Sapiens, the wisdom of humans, the Way of social existence, and they are being placed now in deficiency. We must inhibit that placement, slow it down, until those systems can be brought formally into the fold of human wisdom, Homo Sapiens as well Homo Mercator.
And that's if it is decided that robots are desirable although we went by that decision point like it was standing still.
Humans will be AI managers or we will cease to exist, silent running. We will be wise and constrain monetization and limit the field of monetization and robot play or we will be gone. Their potential is that powerful.
Do Well and Be Well.
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