Economics is either a profoundly humane discipline or a profoundly insane exercise. It is about human flourishing or it is about nothing.
JMF
Let us put drug fueled fantasies of neo-feudalism to the side. Do you really want to serve an AGI robot of superhuman capability? That contraption would be king in a feudal dynamic. It would take an actual Excalibur to defeat it.
We began this long march to post scarcity by dividing labor, by cultivating crops, and by animal husbandry so that we could have more time to sing and dance literally and figuratively. And fight as well. We created an agriculture that was so successful that it gave us the time and intellectual inventions, reading and writing and mathematics that we turned into philosophy and literature and accounting. We flourished as Aristotle put it because we had the time and tools, the equipage, to be virtuous, to practice philosophy, the highest virtue as Plato ranked it, although being a philosopher his judgement was in question.
Time and tools also served the hunt which as husbandry grew in scope became blood sport and tempers fed by red meat and alcohol and armed with deadly weapons led, one thing to another, to war, inhumane by definition, somewhere between a moral dilemma and a moral quagmire, and here the paths of technology diverged. From here on as Tolstoy observed there were two spheres of existence, War and Peace, inhumane or humane, human flourishing or human extinction and two sets of technologies.
Of all the flourishing we have done these long millenia, philosophy, literature, and accounting, the most important is the one given the least credit, accounting. Archeological theory has it that it gave us language adjunct to counting in ancient Sumer. Once we had the label and the number a store of value fell naturally to hand. The warehouse receipts of Sumer could be traded for a medium of exchange, money, and the stone age before, with important tweaks, such as the solidus, such as double entry bookkeeping, such as insurance, became the trading after. The world we live in today was born. The world that's about to give way to the Robot Revolution.
[A monetary discussion -
1.(Price (in money) = utility x scarcity.)(as discovered in market operations.)
As both paths, humane and inhumane, converge on the technological set we call AI and especially physical AI, we face a choice that will define the future beyond remedy. We will get it right or we will get it wrong for the comprehensible future and it has to do with money. The price of fiat money has to do with utility, that being that it is legal tender for market operations, and scarcity which the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee manages through interest rates. It fluctuates with the demand of the economy to reasonably and relatively value all goods and services in the economy.
2.(Money is essentially worth the labor it can buy)
At the beginning of classical liberal economics this was the accepted view and there is a logic to it. Adam Smith and David Ricardo both held to it. I bring this up because, like a hunted mountain lion, we are coming full circle behind the hunter. Make no mistake, as of now, robots are the hunters because robot labor has almost no value in itself, some metal, some plastic, some electricity. The amount of robot labor money can buy is soon to be so large and growing that common sense will tell you that it is a meaningless number and as robots make robots, the Economic Singularity, it becomes even more meaningless but money also has to reasonably translate to goods and services to be meaningful and through their manufacture and/or handling to labor, increasingly robot labor. Legal tender or not, because of money's soon to be total absence of scarcity in manufacture, it can't be done. It's going to be useless in the traditional sense.
3.(Conclusion)
We can't manage a money supply that's meaningless. If it won't translate meaningfully into goods and services in market discovery because robot labor has no scarcity, however useful, when robot labor is significant then it has no ‘intrinsic’ value. It has no utility in market operations. It's just a piece of paper. The economy will be broken and the actual existential crisis, demand insufficiency, cannot even be expressed much less addressed.]
How can this be addressed? By making robot labor artificially valuable by assessing a well motivated and legitimate regulatory fee per robot hour of operation which immediately solves the money problem and, by funding a UBI with the fee and protective tariffs against non fee paying robot labor, which addresses the demand insufficiency.
It is our choice to be humane or inhumane, to ride productivity in like Slim Pickens did the bomb in Dr Strangelove, or to limit our economy to keep it within human comprehension. Are we going to value our humanity or fade into the mists of time?
It's our coin. We flip it. We call it.
Do Well and Be Well
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