Technological innovation disrupts society. We know that. From the train to the automobile to the airplane to the computer to the smartphone upon which I am writing this, technology has altered the rhythm and even the substance of our lives, sometimes for the ergonomic worse, the IBM 360, sometimes for the ergonomic better, this smartphone.
The consequent disruption of any given technology can be mild and incremental or it can be grave and catastrophic depending on the technology, the robustness of the society, and the reaction to the disruption of the government involved. Capitalist democracies have proven error prone but robust in their adaptations. NeoMarxist market economies are not yet largely tested. We will see with the advent of autonomous robots, which Reinforcement Learning AI models promise to deliver to us, what these polities’ capabilities are.
My concerns here, with the RL model driven robots, are about catastrophic disruption. There is no mystery about what robot displacement will do to individual lives as entry level jobs become catastrophically scarce. We are seeing it already with LLM displacement in white collar work. The question is, how can it be addressed by effective grand policy implementation of such significance as will match the catastrophic displacement?
The abstract model I am using is simple, a village commons, and a commons’ steward exercising administrative and fiduciary responsibilities. What comprises the commons in an industrial polity?
John Maynard Keynes suggested that aggregate demand drives a nation's economy and that it may be addressed fiscally in times where it is under extraordinary stress, recession or depression. We have strayed so far from that course, lured by the Siren of easy growth, that it approaches slander to term present fiscal policy Keynesian. Be that as it may, aggregate demand has achieved consensus as an important economic driver.
I suggest that aggregate demand be legitimately considered a commons on which we all feed and any injury to it, as it does affect us all, be a matter of legitimate redress by a, now nonexistent, fiduciary steward in the manner of the Federal Reserve, an independent body with fiduciary duties, which it is the suggestion of this blog that we do now create in a timely fashion.
Do Well and Be Well
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