His idea is that the state in the form of bureaucrats is bad (he agrees with me on this). However, his solution to the problem is different. What if it weren’t bureaucrats, but a computer that would calculate everything perfectly? A computer is not susceptible to corruption. His argument against capitalism is that under capitalism, resources are spent inefficiently, which hinders the development of humanity. He says that in a market economy, scarcity is built-in as a motivational mechanism. That is, there is a shortage of something—this stimulates entrepreneurs who try to satisfy the demand for the scarcity and profit from it. I think this topic needs to be analyzed, if it hasn’t been done already.
анонимный вопрос
There is a common point of view that any IT specialist would prefer to replace any bureaucrat with a single simple script. In a free market, this is exactly what happens: artificial intelligence is replacing various mid-level professionals, mainly those who work with their heads rather than their hands: journalists, lawyers, stock traders, designers, and so on. So technically, there are no problems with abolishing bureaucrats, but there is a reluctance among bureaucrats to be abolished, because the state bureaucracy is the strongest union on Earth.
Therefore, if one implements state administration using artificial intelligence without first abolishing the bureaucrats, it becomes an extremely resource-intensive task that is not even close to the ideals of Jacques Fresco. They will surround the implementation process with a mountain of bureaucratic approvals, demand a certificate with a wet stamp for the execution of any e-government command, and will certainly ensure that everything runs on domestic hardware and domestic software with backdoors for the secret services.
It is far more effective to first abolish the bureaucrats, and when a shortage of administration services arises, the market economy already knows how to solve this task—after all, in a market economy, scarcity is built-in as a motivational mechanism. Thus, entrepreneurs will quickly satisfy the market demand for implementing artificial intelligence to solve coordination tasks.
To be honest, in my view, Fresco is something like an Anti-Keynes. Keynes says that the way out of a crisis is through increasing consumption via state regulation; Fresco echoes him: no, people must renounce their unnecessary needs thanks to state regulation, then resources will be in abundance, and our resource-based economy will thrive! Well, it’s simply Escobar’s axiom in its purest form. But it is not necessary to tell all this to the supporters of Jacques Fresco; it is enough to suggest a sensible market way of realizing their dream, as described in the previous paragraph.
