Not only will there be no need for ordinary taxi drivers and construction workers, but lawyers, doctors, artists, and others will also lose their jobs en masse.
Yes, some people will be social workers, jesters, and prostitutes, but why are all the others needed? And what will they live on? People who have a sufficient cushion of assets are the exception, even in developed countries. And why wouldn’t the state be able to use this crisis to build a totalitarian hell?
Vietnamese
I’ll start from the end. The state doesn’t need any special reasons to try and build a totalitarian hell; it tries to do so permanently, and is limited in this pursuit only by the willingness of its subjects to live in a totalitarian hell. All that remains is to understand whether the situation under consideration will create any preconditions for a huge number of people to willingly agree to a totalitarian hell.
So, a vast amount of intellectual labor, which is currently considered an exclusively human prerogative, has been automated. Let’s assume it’s an ancap world. This means a free market. After automation, productivity increases sharply—consequently, the supply of the produced good or service increases sharply. Therefore, with demand remaining unchanged, its price will inevitably fall. The technological revolution leads to a situation where maintaining a standard of living that was quite wealthy by the standards of the previous technological era requires mere pennies.
Those lucky few whose labor within the new technological order turns out to be necessary on a regular basis will earn an obscene amount of money. Those whom the new economy does not need as much will be able to provide themselves with an acceptable standard of living even with rare, sporadic earnings. Want to update the furniture in your house? Donate blood, participate as an extra in a movie, train a neural network. Don’t need any serious expenses? Well, check a box on the websites of a couple of charitable foundations, stating you wish to receive a basic income—and that will be enough.
Again, after every previous technological revolution, those who were no longer required in the former numbers eventually retrained themselves more or less, and for their children, the new reality was completely organic, and they no longer had problems finding an occupation in it. Peasants’ children became workers, and workers’ children became clerks. Clerks’ children will become, for example, motivators for those titans of thought whose labor proved impossible to automate, or enter other spheres that are difficult for us to even imagine now, just as it was once difficult to imagine professional esports.
And what changes if we encounter this new reality while still having modern-type states? It will be more regulated. Those who receive an obscene amount of money will not be those whose labor is necessary to maintain the new technological order, but those who rob them and redistribute the funds. A large class of government employees will remain. Many will consider the state of affairs, if not the best, then the only possible one. Will this be a totalitarian hell? Unlikely; rather a kingdom of apathy, not of artificial totalitarian enthusiasm—but that doesn’t make the picture any more pleasant.
What could allow such a scenario to be realized? Mass stupification and conformism. Do we see tendencies toward this? We certainly do! And what could make such a scenario stable? A high level of professionalism among managers, allowing them to maintain a high-tech society while leading a mass of fools and conformists. The scenario proves to be fundamentally unstable: current trends will inevitably force a transition to some other future. This could, of course, be new Dark Ages. Or it could turn out to be ancap. So let’s work toward making it ancap!
In the modern world, we are surrounded by a vast number of goods, many of which are the result of high-tech production. These goods allow us to have a quality of life that no one had before, not even kings and the super-rich. We can afford to consume more food than our ancestors, fall ill less often, and live longer thanks to achievements in medicine, travel quickly and efficiently across the world, and conduct business remotely with other people. In the long run, the development of technology is the only thing that can ensure the survival of humanity.
However, the theoretical development of various technologies is useless in itself without the organization of the production of the corresponding goods. And the more complex this production is, the longer and more convoluted the associated production chains become. Moreover, even the theoretical development of more complex technological processes is often impossible without the practical implementation of previous, simpler developments. This makes production chains even longer and more complicated.
Take a very ordinary smartphone, which is likely next to you right now, a computer, or a television. To produce them, the work of millions of people is required: those who extract all the necessary chemical elements, process them, transport them, keep records, engage in theoretical development, design and manage production processes, operate and maintain the technical means of production (which, in turn, must undergo all these processes to be produced), assemble individual parts of final goods, assemble the goods themselves from parts, and engage in hundreds, thousands, and millions of other accompanying processes. This is the situation with absolutely any high-tech good. And considering that there are also hundreds, thousands, and millions of such goods, I think it should now be obvious that maintaining high-tech production at the current level requires billions of people, which is precisely what we currently have on the planet.
Several conclusions must be drawn from this. First, there is a concept that population growth only leads to various problems, and therefore it would be better if it decreased to a certain number that could supposedly be provided with an abundance of all necessary goods, while also reducing the ecological and resource burden. However, this is a rather absurd concept. Regulating the population, and even more so reducing it, would force the reduction and simplification of production chains. Fewer goods would have to be produced, and they would be of lower quality. Furthermore, further expansion of production chains would become impossible; that is, it would be impossible to organize more high-tech and complex production. Society would begin to stagnate, limited resources would be consumed without any result, and in such a case, we would guaranteed become hostages of this planet, since the production of spacecraft is one of the most complex productions possible. The death of all humanity under such conditions would only be a matter of time, and most likely, not in the very distant future.
The problems usually appealed to when defending the position of population regulation are solved precisely by the development of technology. Technology allows for more efficient use of limited resources while producing more goods; it also opens paths to more ecological production without reducing its volume. These problems are only not solved when scientific and technical progress is slowed down artificially, for example, by the inadequate and violent policies of corrupt governments that simply destroy the favorable environment for the emergence and development of new initiatives.
Secondly, one must not underestimate the threats that could lead to population decline. This especially concerns threats arising from such a phenomenon as violence. As a result of scientific and technical progress, the appearance of effective means of destruction is inevitable. Moreover, they are becoming increasingly accessible, which means that the violent potential of individual actors grows every day. It is only a matter of time before anyone can synthesize, for example, a very dangerous and contagious virus at home (some employee might even now intentionally take one out of a laboratory or incorrectly dispose of infected laboratory animals). Or, ultra-high-capacity energy carriers will become common (for example, even now, piercing your smartphone battery can cause severe chemical burns; now imagine that in the future there will be devices a thousand times more functional than modern smartphones with batteries a thousand times more capacitive, and that someone could acquire them in large quantities for violent purposes). Even current dangerous means in the hands of certain organizations and governments, such as virus samples or nuclear weapons, also carry serious threats, as nothing excludes the possibility of their use by current owners or their leak into the hands of maniacs and terrorists.
We can observe now what the coronavirus epidemic led to. Even such a relatively low level of contagiousness and mortality was enough to cause global turmoil and bring the economy of the entire world to a crisis. Now imagine that a more dangerous virus is released, or nuclear weapons are used, or something else happens that leads, for example, not to the death of all humanity, but to the death of 10-20% of the planet’s population. It would seem that this should not be critical, as the vast majority of people would still survive. However, let us remember the length, complexity, and convoluted nature of production chains. The disappearance of such a number of people would lead to a severe disruption of their operation; the extraction, processing, and supply of many resources might cease entirely. It is quite likely that such a loss in the modern world would lead to an unprecedented crisis, and a mass shortage of basic goods for survival might even begin, because producing large quantities of food for a large number of people (especially the urban population, who do not have their own agricultural plots) requires, again, long production chains.
In addition, niche organizations and specialists could suffer. For example, what would happen if the main companies producing central processing units for computing equipment, and some of their specialists, did not survive the disaster? Many technological processes would simply be lost, and when the last batches of these companies’ products wore out, we would face a reversal from digital to analog technology—a return to the technological level of the mid-20th century. And one should not think that all processes can be quickly restored. Of course, it is quite easy to restore the production of analog equipment—a radio, a mechanical typewriter, a film camera, a vinyl record player, a tape recorder, and even a primitive black-and-white CRT television can be assembled even in a garage using fairly simple tools and components. But a central processor, without which most microelectronics is just a useless pile of junk, cannot be. It cannot even be reproduced by the efforts of a small number of companies; it requires too vast production chains. And this applies not only to the central processor but to many other technologies that we use in everyday life or benefit from in other ways, including medicines and fertilizers for high-yield agriculture, without which maintaining the planet’s population at the current level would become simply impossible.
The loss of high-tech production processes would only exacerbate the problem of producing and supplying basic goods for survival. It is practically impossible to imagine how, without modern information technologies, one could ensure the supply of food for more than 4 billion of the planet’s urban population, as well as the production and supply of goods necessary to maintain the production of this food. One could even expect mass deaths of people and the decline of modern civilization.
Therefore, the fight against such a phenomenon as violence is critically important to prevent a catastrophe capable of taking a part of the planet’s population, which would trigger a terrifying crisis that could well lead to the fall of modern civilization. Under no circumstances should the threat of violence be underestimated!
In connection with the recent publications from Bitarch regarding the construction of a non-violent society, I would like to recommend the anime series Psycho-Pass to everyone. Three seasons have been released, plus some side stories; so far, I have only watched the first.
The main protagonist of the series is a quasi-minarchist society in which an effective method for the prevention of violence has been developed, but not through genetic modification and BPN, as Bitarch suggests, but through the creation of a Big Brother capable of rapid diagnosis of tendencies toward violence. In all other matters, the state does not particularly interfere, although in the area of material production, it is unclear whether it is a market or socialism—under conditions of robotic abundance, it is easy to confuse the two.
The series is intelligent. It quotes Weber, Shakespeare, Pascal, Foucault, and discusses William Gibson and Philip K. Dick—in short, it is the kind of thing that our Ekaterina Schulmann would not be ashamed to recommend, although she prefers Pixar studio productions. It might be a bit difficult to watch at first; I got into it on my second attempt—but it is definitely worth the time spent.
I listened with great pleasure on Ekaterina Schulmann’s channel to a recording of a discussion about the results of the digital revolution, in which she participated, apparently invited to correct the gender imbalance among a group of three representatives from the digital industry.
I especially liked the moment when Andrey Sebrant, answering a question about who would be responsible for a driverless car accident, stated that to answer, one simply needs to wait for a hundred such accidents. He argued that at the dawn of automotive engineering, completely surprising regulatory measures were preemptively proposed, such as boys with flags running in front of cars, but in the end, we got traffic rules, road markings, and so on, which no one could have imagined in advance. The same applies to courts under ancap, which will, of course, answer the question of how they will work. After they start working.
Be sure to watch it; the format of the discussion itself is quite interesting, the experts for once are not overshadowed by Ekaterina Mikhailovna, and the host is simply lovely—I wish I had such charm.
Briefly about the problem for those who are too lazy to read the wall of text on LiveJournal:
Journalism is dying; it is a global trend related to the fact that the media have lost their monopoly on the distribution of information. On one hand, bloggers and search engines have killed news agencies. On the other hand, quality investigations and fact-checking have ceased to be profitable. There is less and less money from readers in the industry; as a result, the media are becoming servants of sponsors, and this completely undermines trust in them, especially if the media hide their sponsors from readers. How to solve this problem in a society where there are states regulating the industry is unknown. The question is, can the problem be solved in a stateless society, or will the abolition of regulations no longer help here.
For some reason, it seems to me that in a stateless society, the intensity of the problem itself will decrease. Modern media are losing trust because they write about politics, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to write about it impartially: the reader is politicized, the sponsor is politicized, and if you write ambivalently, you’ll be torn apart from both sides. But in the absence of a state, there is also no hysteria about who is in power, how the looted resources are shared, who is stealing from the common fund, and all that.
Of course, in the absence of a political agenda, there will still be issues of business reputation, disputes about the ethics of certain marketing moves, and so on. You can’t unring the bell, and the world will not return to old models of journalism, so after some time we will consume information in ways and in forms that we couldn’t have imagined recently. And then a new method will come into fashion, and so on indefinitely. Nevertheless, the essence will remain the same: the struggle for attention. Some will convert attention into money, some into fame. Some will work for their own money as a hobby, and some will slog along on sponsorships.
Will old-fashioned quality news content with fact-checking remain in commercial quantities? No, fact-checking is the reader’s personal business, and usually, they just don’t care whether the news is real or from the “Panorama” news agency — they read it, laugh, and switch to something else.
Will journalistic investigations remain? It’s unlikely they will be journalistic. Rather, it will be something like “a company found (or invented) compromising material on a competitor and leaks it through influencers” or “read reviews of new market products.”
Is it a good thing when everyone can receive information from many different sources, and you cannot be sure of any of them? This is much better than receiving information from a single source, believing it, and finding out ten years later that you were lied to.
We are given a favorable but completely unfamiliar environment, as well as a company of androids—universal interfaces for transforming this environment. The working conditions of the android exclude its conversion into private property. And so, behold—Ancap-chan becomes a communist!
Features of Android Husbandry
A. Synergy. Non-linear growth of productivity resulting from an increase in the number of androids involved in a task; there is a significant positive economy of scale. Therefore, the constant privatization of androids one by one to serve families or individuals is inefficient.
B. Unsuitability for zero-sum games. Any attempt to requisition an android for tasks that do not benefit others is suppressed with incredible ease. Insisting that an android perform a strictly individual assignment is incredibly difficult. Therefore, the most advantageous evolutionarily stable strategy is to employ androids primarily for the benefit of the largest possible collectives.
C. Uncertainty of the future. According to the terms of the problem, the end date of the experiment is unknown. It is also unknown how complex the production of new androids will be. Therefore, one should proceed from the pessimistic assumption that the growth of the human population will occur faster than the growth of the android population for a considerable amount of time.
Now I will formulate the strategy.
Our goal is the maximum prosperity of the community in the longest possible perspective.
Until it is possible to ensure that the growth of the android population exceeds the increase in the number of people, we should reduce our dependence on androids by developing production chains that do not include androids.
Priority is given to tasks that bring immediate benefit to the maximum number of community members. That is, instead of tasks like “bring me some tea,” preference is given to tasks like “construct a time-cost function for planting a tea plantation for the entire human community based on the number of androids involved in the task; now you three go and plant it.”
Since androids are de facto slaves in public use, the social structure to be adapted as a self-governance mechanism should be one that implies the mass use of public slaves. For example, Lacedaemon, better known as Sparta. That is, decisions on the plans for using androids for public tasks are prepared by a “gerousia”—these do not necessarily have to be biological elders, but some elected body of experts in such optimization tasks. And the decisions are approved by the “apella,” that is, a general assembly.
An obvious solution for the initial setup phase: 5.1. Each family receives an android for family setup tasks during the daytime and has the right to use synergistic effects by cooperating with neighbors. 5.2. A small surplus of androids (at the start there are slightly more than there are families) is immediately assigned to public tasks according to the scheme “gerousia outlines the plan, apella approves.” 5.3. During the nighttime, all family androids must be sent to public works with instructions to return by morning.
As the community grows and becomes more complex, the initial mechanism will inevitably be revised. Questions regarding revision should be raised after a change in the number of families, the end of the primary setup phase (everyone already has a house, a garden, and a sports ground, and androids gradually begin to be recruited for tasks like “scratch my heel”), at the moment of a predicted sharp change in the load on the android fund (start or end of major projects), or at the moment of a change in the number of androids (they begin to fail or, conversely, a production line is launched).
The appearance of a group with radically different views than the majority on the disposal of androids should lead to a proposal to settle further away, taking androids with them proportional to the size of the group. Otherwise, the damage from management collisions will paralyze the plans of both the majority and the minority.
