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The real danger to civilisation isn't runaway AI it's runaway capitalism (2017)
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- Title
- Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
- Published
- Dec 18 2017
- Word count
- 888 words
TL;DR (from Matt Levine's Money Stuff): "popular fears about runaway artificial intelligence are really about modern corporate capitalism, that modern corporations actually do what we worry superintelligent AIs might one day do."
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1968/
Three Panel Soul also put it very poignantly the other day: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/paperclip-maximizer
Some years ago I read an article that argued corporations are somewhat like AIs. The difference is that they don't run on computers, they run on people. They are even self-healing: If a human or a unit doesn't perform well, it is replaced by the system.
In Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom covers many forms of superintelligent entities, one of which is collective intelligence, and the dangers of incentive misalignment/loss of control. Groups of humans like corporations are certainly far more intelligent and possess far greater capabilities than any single human and thus fit the definition of superintelligent. We should rightly be concerned with the misalignment of corporate incentives with societal well being and the difficulties regulatory bodies have had reining them in.
I have a front row view of all this in my job (corporate governance data scientist for one of the largest asset manager's investment stewardship departments), and it's more than concerning, to be frank.
I think that's decoupling the agency of individual humans who effectively parasitize big, dumb corporations for their own benefit, i.e. CEOs.
Having lived inside various middle-to-large organizations, I don't believe "corporations" are capable of having greater intelligence than the sum of their human parts. They are force multipliers, in the sense that they coordinate human activity within the scope of their public and unspoken rules. Slightly better organized than slime molds, but still more like flocking behavior than "collective intelligence".
People acting in their own benefit in the prisoners dilemma are still screwing themselves over in the grand scheme of things, but the situation is contrived in a way that incentivises them to do so anyway. The system we work within shapes what "self interested actions" look like and what the long term effects are.
That analogy seems to apply to any human institution and a lot of types of groups. But maybe the article describes something more specific to corporations?
A key similarity may be that corporations are goal-directed entities whose reward function is reduced to an overly simplistic metric that is decoupled from human wellbeing. Most other groups don't optimize for profit like that. This reward function underlies enshittification.
... and shitty reward functions are the underlying justification for any and all AI apocalypse. A subservient AI with a well-aligned reward function might do things that seem to humans to be "coldly rational" (what I mean is actions that are cruel and uncaring, but ultimately correct and serving a good goal) or completely incomprehensible (when us meatsacks just can't keep up mentally), but shouldn't ever lead to an apocalypse.
I'm not a fan of capitalism.
It seems like every country that has tried doing away with it has ended up extremely poor and extremely dictatorial.
I see people all over social media slamming capitalism, as if they were a fine, working alternative waiting to be implemented.
No offense meant.
I don't think capitalism is a binary model in the sense that you either are or are not capitalist. There are components we could implement that would likely lead to better and more equitable outcomes.
For example favoring non-profits, not for profits, and worker cooperatives with private ownership would help us maintain the benefits of the free market without concentrating wealth into the hands of a few individuals. It avoids shifting power and control into the hands of the government.
Decoupling healthcare and various other benefits (dental, vision, retirement etc..) from being controlled by your employer (in the US at least) to being controlled by the individual. Why does my work get to dictate what insurance company I use? Why does my work get to dictate which company I use for retirement planning? This would help employees reward companies based on their merits instead of the choice being tainted with survival concerns.
Better employment law around non-competes, notice periods, etc...
The stakeholder model shouldn't exclusively include the investors - it should also include employees, and if possible community.
In the US, we still are relatively lucky that we live in a time where there are a few public goods that we can enjoy without paying per use. For example, the library, city parks, and fire departments. Tap water is usually inexpensive in most of the country, probably processed by their city with some help from private utility companies.
There is a constant push to privatize everything and these pubic goods are not going to last forever unless we make some political changes. Conservative Americans only yell SOCIALISM when we talk about public healthcare because they didn't grow up with a better system and they've been propagandized by media that claims there's no way to have anything unless it is attached to a corporation that is constantly growing and paying shareholders.
I wonder if there will be admission turnstiles added to Central Park in New York at some point.
I want to point out that this practice is in large part due to wage controls that the federal government established during World War II. Unable to entice workers with higher wages, companies used health insurance and other benefits as a form of additional compensation. The government also did (and still does) allow companies to deduct the cost of these benefits from these taxes, effectively making it impossible for private insurance plans to compete with company-sponsored ones. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to blame capitalism for healthcare woes when government regulations play such a major role in this situation.
It is entirely fair to use it as a criticism against capitalism because companies have indirectly weaponized this against employees. Many people simply cannot risk a job change due to medical reasons or upcoming life events. Companies could easily dedicate lobbying money to being able to provide a tax deductible stipend or similar concept. We already see elements of this with Health Savings Accounts.
Companies would not be able to 'weaponize' this imbalance against employees if it did not exist to begin with, as would be the case in a free market. The whole premise of how capitalism is 'supposed to work'* is that even though individual companies are amoral, if they have to compete on an even playing field, they will be fair to consumers or employees, because if they don't, another company will, and will eat their lunch. Now, we could argue about whether capitalism always works this way, but at least in this individual case, it probably would. If your employer is offering you a benefits package, it is because it is cheaper for them to buy it for you than for you to pay for it yourself. If you level playing field by removing your employer's tax exemptions, their monopoly on health insurance will disappear, or at least be replaced by insurance contract negotiators which aren't tied to employment. In either case, you will be far more free to choose insurance plans, and in aggregate this will force insurance companies to be more competitive and lower prices.
I never said they should lose the tax exemptions. What needs to change is the choice of what services or providers to use. You should not buy insurance or retirement services through your company. That should be an individual choice with potentially a company recommendation. Companies provide the money, not the choice. Choice is a critical part of this.
Arguing over the source of the weapon does not change the fact that it is a weapon.
If you want to keep tax exemptions for health insurance, why not let them apply to individuals too? Whether you're keeping them or getting rid of them, if the playing field is leveled between individuals and employers, then there is no way for employers to use health insurance as an enticement. The fact they do is an absolutely artificial result of regulations.
It seems like you want companies to provide money earmarked for insurance or something, but why not just use your salary? If it's no longer worthwhile for an employer to provide benefits because individuals can just buy those benefits on their own at the same price, then ceteris paribus, the money the employer previously used for benefits would be provided in salaries. There's no difference to the employer, whether they are paying you or paying for insurance for you - it's the same entry in the debit column. The difference would be that individuals have much more choice when they are allowed to just pay for their own insurance.
Employers providing money for a specific purpose (retirement, healthcare, etc) that is tax advantaged for them rather than providing the service directly is an easier transition. It also allows for easier apples to apples comparison between employment offers.
It’s in the overall communities best interests to make sure people have healthcare and retirement. Having money specific allocated to these areas would help ensure people can receive those services. I know "employer matching" for retirement for example is a good incentive for people to save.
The problem I have around these benefits isn't that the company allocates specific money to it, it's that they take away 100% of the choice from the employees over which companies to engage with for those categories of services.
I mean lots of countries have taken measures to reduce the power of capital (e.g. taxes) which have worked relatively successfully. You can also look at kind of centrally managed states such as Singapore or Switzerland to see how models which aren't as capital-obsessed function.
What gave you the impression that those two countries specifically are relatively un-capital-obsessed? Most EU states are significantly more collectivist than those two examples.
Also, Switzerland is a comically bad example for a centrally managed state. It is strongly federated.
If you look at Singapore most stuff that they want to work is not run through a market – e.g. housing is like 80% state-owned.
I mean the Swiss really don't believe in the free market? Look at the CoCos or the Swissair scheme (which ultimately failed when people caught wind of it). By centrally managed I mean economy rather than state. The Swiss government has a lot of influence (which is a good thing) in what happens in the economy and is pretty dirigente.
Housing is "owned" by the state. They give out 99 year leases which the occupants can buy and sell. For all intents and purposes, the government takes over construction but housing prices are nonetheless a determination of a market.
Weren't there instances where the government has rescinded such leases for reasons such as public interest?
I think what would help in discussions like this one is to establish what people specifically mean about alternatives to capitalism, reducing the power of capital etc. The systems of Singapore and Switzerland work because they support capitalism and try to take the best of it, encourage competition and entrepreneurship etc., and this was a conscious choice. Then they make specific decision with the money made in this way, which is the interesting part. But the core is still functioning capitalism, without it the system would immediately fall apart, so personally I would never think of them as examples of alternatives to capitalism.
True also my cases aren't great because the two countries are basically tax havens. I guess the European model in general has been to fix (well perhaps more accurately ameliorate) the ills of private capital dominating society through mechanisms like taxation to fund social welfare programs, pensions, the justice system, etc.
Can you provide an example of a country that has tried to go away from capitalism without being interfered with by the dominant global hegemonic capitalist power?
Spoiler alert: you can't
There are precious few economies ever that have been allowed to form in vacuum. The economic reality of the modern age and how connected things are is that you actually need to be able to handle that or your system devolves into chaos.
It never works because it’s easy to disrupt is not a strong argument.
Totally reasonable assertion but there's a difference between "not operating in a vacuum" and foreign intervention actively working against democratically elected administrations seeking to divest from capitalism
Yeah, I mean look at Russia doing a foreign intervention into the US affairs via mass disinfo and Trump. It took just about a decade to take Crimea and then destroy the reliability of the biggest power that could prevent further conquest of Ukraine and the coming siege of Europe. It seems cheap and easy to destroy systems from afar with absolutely zero risk.
Or a country that wasn't already resource poor and plagued by dictators? Batista (Cuba) was a monster, and Russia was a literal feudal state ruled by an emperor. (As Napoleon demonstrated, people used to a king tend to run straight back that direction despite attempts to the contrary.) Both countries were resource poor to start with.
Having a more equitable distribution of virtually nothing is more fair, but it's still constrained by the initial resources in the system.
I firmly believe that if the USA hadn't been so hellbent to stop the spread of socialism in the wake of WW2, both the Vietnam and Korean Wars could have been avoided, and given a much better chance for a less-authoritarian socialist society to evolve. Resources being dedicated to war means less being used for the population at large, as well as all the destabilizing political factors of perpetual (threat of) war.
Earlier nuclear de-escalation and proper trade (instead of sanctions) to communist countries well could have resulted in a more prosperous and/or democratic form taking root. And I think that was the most terrifying thing to a state that relies heavily on the 'all socialism leads to authoritarianism and poverty' narrative.
Of course.....we're seeing that now in democratic capitalist countries too....so, just maybe, the economics of socialism are not directly responsible for or only able to be implemented by authoritarians.
In tough times, its easy to rely on demagogs, and once they are instilled, it is harder to remove them.
I think you're forgetting that the US was not the only superpower. USSR and China did their best to prevent countries in their sphere of influence from opening up their regimes and they did not have any issues with proxy wars either.
Signed,
a citizen of a country that was invaded by the USSR for this exact reason and wishes that the US actually interfered with the politics of his country.
Czechoslovakia for example. It was negatively influenced by the USSR, but it wasn't part of it and had some autonomy. Before communism it was economically and politically on par with wealthy western states. A comparison with Austria, at that time probably the economically and politically closest neighbor since until WW1 they were all part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, looked really bleak for Czechoslovakia around the velvet revolution after 40 years of communism, and there's still a significant gap over 30 years later.
I think your restriction is too strong and doesn't really make sense. Eastern bloc countries outside of USSR were technically on the wrong side of the cold war, but many of their anti-west restrictions were self-imposed for ideological reasons, and most of them were supported by a different "superpower" even if they were not a part of USSR. I'm a Czech and I can tell you for sure that almost all economical screw-ups were our own. It's really hard to describe how incredibly incompetent and sometimes outright nonsensical the communist system was.
One of the things that happened after the revolution (that, to be fair, was interfered with, but by USSR, otherwise we might have remained capitalist) was that factories needed to be taken away from the bourgeoise and given to ideologically pure people. One of the most unbelievable effects of that was that an owner of a factory would go to work and find out that the literal gateman/receptionist has now been appointed in his place. I don't think I need to explain why this is not a good idea.
I'm sorry but I am a little confused on your logic line. You claim that Eastern Bloc countries (those countries with ideology running parallel with the USSR) had self-imposed anti-west restrictions. The implication here is that by that choice, they hurt themselves economically. That's fine, but simply by being a part of the coalition self-aligning with the USSR would have lead the West to impose the same trade restrictions. Unless I am completely uninformed, WHICH I MAY BE, were there Eastern Bloc countries aligned with the rest of the coalition of communist states that had unrestricted free trade with the west identical to members of the "west" at the time?
Could you rephrase please? I don't understand this question (non-native speaker and very tired right now, so it's probably my fault).
Regarding the rest of your message, I have two points.
Firstly just being aligned with the USSR would not necessarily lead to sanctions. Sometimes even on the contrary: Marshall's plan was offered to all of Europe, including the eastern bloc and USSR. Unfortunately USSR already viewed the eastern bloc as its sphere of influence, so when Molotov made the decision to refuse it for the USSR, our leaders followed. As for what happened after that regarding trade restrictions, I'm honestly not sure, because at least here in Czechia, no western sanctions were ever viewed as the reason why we're not doing well enough, during or after communism, because they pale next to issues like inefficiency of planned economy, incompetent leadership everywhere etc. (together with the ideological refusal to cooperate with the west). So if any existed, they simply are not the focus of studies. Some foreign trade existed, both ways, but no idea how much. Western goods were very sought after and usually available in special stores but rarely affordable for most people.
Secondly, I don't know if your point, basically "if we didn't impose restriction on ourselves, the west would have done it anyway", is realistic, because those self imposed restrictions are in my opinion a non-separable part of the regime. When you want to do radical widely unpopular changes like taking away private property of many kinds, prohibiting normal entrepreneurship and switching to a centrally planned economy, you can only push it through on a state level if you use force. Which among other things always means drastically limiting the movement of people and goods and simply giving people no other option but to participate. In other words, the "what if" situation does not work because in that case I don't think the regime could realistically hold in the way that it existed.
The biggest reason that these countries who've attempted to do any significant reforms of, or banishment of capitalism have become dictatorial and impoverished is capitalist hegemony. Look at Cuba. They've been under embargo for decades for rejecting the capitalist paradigm.
I highly recommend you read The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. He details the fall of the Communist party in Indonesia at the hands of a CIA backed coup, as well as the spread of anti communist sentiment to South America, the rationale of the government in Washington in performing their coups in south and central America. That book holds the answer to your question.
There are alternatives to capitalism, but they are viewed as existential threats by American aligned interests, and therefore are to be put down and resisted by any means necessary. See also, the Vietnam war.
Part of the problem is that people think of 'capitalism' as if that experiment is finished. It's hardly in a final form, and it's long overdue for a shakeup. It's evolution in capitalistic systems we need, not a replacement.
I'd start with the obvious upgrade and the simplest patch. Frankly, I think that's all it needs to put it on track to becoming some kind of hyper-capital star trek stepladder. The fun of moving fast, less broken bones along the way, and a new freedom - to fail, and get many many chances to try again without becoming destitute.
We could also base our economic policy decisions on a more sane model. Might also be good to switch to a better tax mechanism that cannot be cheated or avoided.
I think this slate would fix most of the problems, and it does so by putting both money and power into people's hands, rather than in institutions or governments.
A UBI won't ever happen, because "it's untested" which is ironically an untestable prediction - see it's already been repeatedly tested at a relatively small scale, but what they mean is "it hasn't been implemented at a large scale", but that's not testing it, it's outright doing it, so they block doing that too. It's a perfect catch-22. Come to think of it, it'd be a great chair-throwing meme.
Yeah, that's the meme argument it's become about that repeats endlessly.
All the trials and even the US's own economic stimulus during the pandemic says that it will work, and that well over 90% of the welfare cases will improve themselves past the point of needing it on cash assistance alone over a couple of years. That leaves the other 10% of those cases for the real welfare system, which is no longer being overburdened by the people who just needed the cash assistance. It's a win win that saves on administration costs and improves the care. That's worth busting a few megacorp's balls to pay for it. You do business in america, you pay your share in, and that share goes out to all citizens. That could easily catch on in other countries once it develops a successful track record.
It need not be a federal program either. In fact there's probably a wisdom and some useful economic levers available if cities, states, and the fed all offer their own UBIs, which add up. That's an interesting way to do economic investment in a region, stimulating the development of it from the ground up. We collect what we collect, and we distribute it, and the amount can go up and down with the economy, it need not be a set amount. It'd start small, but the economic boom it should stimulate will also lift the revenue going into the system.
Right now we just give massive incentives and subsidies to corporations, along with bailouts. I'd like to stop giving that to corporations, period. Bailouts go directly back into the taxpayer's pockets to make them whole, not to the businesses that fucked up. They get canned, carved up and repurposed by the market winners who are willing to buy out the mess. Let the market handle the recycling.
There are an awful lot of ways to improve on capitalism that are democratic and empower people along principles of liberty and equal access to opportunity. We've been talking about them for decades, but I'm at the point where I'd like to start voting for some of this, rather than talking about it.
I’d assume cuties or states attempting UBI would need to attach a string of “you must have lived here to least a decade to apply” to prevent being overrun by internal migration.
That's absolutely true, there would be some residency. That could be a very short one of just one year, though - it depends on if the city in question actually wants to attract people. If they are offering factory jobs that are being brought back from overseas, for example, it could be a good thing because they've got the work ready so everyone can hit the ground running as they come in. I like the idea of letting all of the local and regional governments handle it. They are the closest to the problems in their areas and know them best. That means they are in a good spot to decide how to go forward.
I'm hoping that people see the need to have aid and work and wages ready for immigrants. They need a year to get their feet and a lot of them are going to have to learn new languages, no matter what country. If they hit the ground running with aid and work lined up, they will have the resources they need to help themselves. Help flip them over into valuable professions, it's a lot easier than one might think to learn a trade. They'll become taxpayers in no time, and they are going to remember and support any political party that helps make this happen. So will their children.
"Let's only give aid to people who already have a permanent residence" seems like a way to exacerbate poverty problems rather than alleviate them.
Even a modest UBI to migrants would help bootstrap housing and jobs.
Yep. It would also incentivize people to come in legally, because they can't claim it if they aren't on the record.
With regards to technology and capitalism: technology is being co-oped as a means to increase profit margins. Technology itself has never been the threat. Technology is/has always been employed to make our lives as humans easier. Technology is meant to be used to make trivial tasks take less time or be eliminated.
That's not how technology is being used now. Technology is being used as a cudgel to cut operating expenses/eliminating human labor thereby increasing profit margins. AI itself isn't a threat. AI being weaponized to eliminate aspects of the labor force is the issue. AI being used like free labor is the problem (slavery?).
Was that not what they were doing when they replaced skilled artisans operating machines with unskilled labor?
The modern cotton gin circa 1800 didn't free the slave, or make their lives easier, it just increased their output by changing the nature of their work.
Technological advancement has almost entirely been primarily for the advancement of those whom own it, not those whom use it.
That's not to say others didn't benefit...just their benefits were largely secondary or incidental.
To this I would simply ask if you have proof that the wheel was some how monetized by who ever invented it. What about the internet? There was no interest in corporations developing anything like it. Only after the cost of developing it had been undertaken did corporations even think about it. There's hundreds of thousands of examples of technologies being developed by academic and government run organizations without seeking any kind of profit motive and only AFTER their discoveries and a viable monetization strategies developed are they adopted by capitalistic forces.
The whole narrative that "capitalism drives innovation/technology" is completely false. Capitalism is the god of middlemen, figuring out how to develop revenue streams where none exist.
I'm not saying capital is neccessary for techological advancement.
I'm saying that said technological advancement, in the era of capitalism, has primarily benefited the capitalists, not the laborers. The laborers are getting the secondary benefits...they are not seeing reduced workdays at increase wages for all this advancement...heck often the opposite without strikes.
I won't comment on prehistory because we have no way of knowing. Best guess is there were some tribes where that improvement led to less work, and others where it just meant more work.
In fact, we know with reasonable certainty that the first technological revolution---the agricultural revolution---ultimately resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount that the average human worked.
There's also hundreds of thousands of examples of technologies being developed by academic and government run organizations which are left sitting on their workbenches or written up in some paper languishing in an obscure journal. I don't think the profit motive is any better or worse than this - but you point out yourself that capitalism's defining power is monetization strategy, and I refuse to see this as inherently a bad thing. Monetization is frequently a process of determining what people's actual needs are (and thus what they are willing to part with their money for) and shaping/developing inchoate technologies to meet those needs. Monetization usually also entails finding a way to produce a technology cheaply. Call this a 'middleman' if you wish, but it's absurd to think that we'd be able enjoy the technologies we do today without these intermediate steps happening somewhere. And capitalism has frequently shown itself to be superior at it.
Also, your example of the wheel is kind of a straw man - the wheel was such an early development in human history that it's likely that capital as we understand it did not really exist yet. There are, however, hundreds of thousands of counterexamples to the notion that corporations don't invent the technologies they end up selling. Elsewhere in this thread I referred to Joel Mokyr's 'Lever of Riches' as a great book on the intersection of technological invention and market economies, and if you're really interested, it goes into absolutely excruciating detail about the invention/innovation of technologies and their subsequent adoption by society at large. In the majority of cases, inventors play a large role in the commercialization of their inventions, or at least reap a large profit from being bought out, for instance.
It's inherently a bad thing because that means human progress/well-being takes a back seat if it cannot generate profits. When a medication doesn't have high demand, but saves lives do you think corporations continue to make that medication? I'm sorry but fuck your kids because we can't monetize this drug very well anymore.
Yes, but not for some kind of noble reason as if to make the product more affordable. Making something more cheaply is meant to increase profit margins. Whether this means to reduce staff and increase working hours, purchasing lesser quality materials to produce the good, or skirting regulations and potentially making an unsafe product, the purpose of making things cheaper is not to pass savings on to customers but to increase margins.
If by "being superior at it" meaning extracting profit, then yes. It is absurdly brilliant at filtering wealth upwards. Capitalism is an ouroboros that will continue to filter profits (wealth) to a small few until there is no more available wealth to purchase the products it creates thus causing it's own downfall. Why aren't millennials buying diamonds anymore?!?!
I disagree, my premise was that the wheel, something rudimentary to us but probably ground breaking at the time, wasn't paywalled by a capitalist. It was immediately put to use. It was most likely shared between tribes. Capitalism and the concept of capital, was developed far after that point.
Like all economic systems, capitalism may have some bad outcomes - this doesn't make it inherently bad. The profit motive is incredibly useful for spurring invention/innovation, which is, on balance, beneficial for human progress/well-being. To use your example of medication, it takes a massive amount of resources to develop a pharmaceutical drug. What drugs should we as a society develop? The profit motive, as an organizing force, prioritizes drugs that have a wide application. It's unfortunate that rare diseases are less likely to be cured in this case, but would you rather neglect common diseases? Separately, the issue of people currently not being able to afford drugs with low demand is, I think, more to do with health insurance and intellectual property law.
Making a product more cheaply is meant to increase profit, not profit margin. You can increase profit without increasing profit margin by making a product that is better quality or less expensive, enticing a greater number of people to buy it. It's true that sometimes the profit motive results in worse products, but this is just as often due to regulations which make products more expensive to produce (thus incentivizing cutting corners), or by stifling the profit motive in some other way, reducing the incentive to improve products or lower prices in order to remain competitive.
I think you're conflating capitalism with corporatism. The influence of corporations on policymaking has definitely had a negative effect, but it's not one I'd attribute to capitalism per se, nor do I think corporatism is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Meanwhile, capitalism has provided unparalleled technological advancements which has made things like phones and computers so cheap as to be affordable by virtually anyone. All but the very poorest in our society still have a better standard of living compared to all but the richest prior to the industrial revolution. I'm not going to pretend capitalism is perfect, but to see the profit motive as inherently bad is just ridiculous.
Also, for what it's worth, millennials aren't buying diamonds because they'd rather spend their money on more meaningful products or experiences. The whole idea of diamonds is an economic bubble on par with Dutch tulips, especially when the market provides a huge variety of other 'luxury' goods that are far less expensive. Not sure how this is supposed to be some sort of flaw in capitalism.
Yes, but capitalism actively motivates for a single entitiy's self interest, the capital owner over the working class/the rest of society. Any good that comes to a society through capitalism isn't the primary driver, its a tertiary outcome. I suppose hypothetically if EVERYONE could be a capital owner somehow, then arguably you could say that capitalism isn't inherently bad as it promotes the capital owners, but that's not possible. Not everyone can own the means of production in capitalism... after all that's socialism. If we choose to live in a society as a collective group, capitalism is inherently bad for anyone who isn't a capital owner.
I ask you, who do you think is responsible for the development of drugs? Who do you believe is responsible for the bulk of the research for medical developments?
This is a narrative capitalism apologists use all the time. Corporatism, crony capitalism, and techno feudalism are all the same thing... capitalism. A doberman, a golden retriever, a pitbull... they are all dogs. Same concept.
Cultural norms and traditions often run counter to logic. If younger people had disposable income to spend on "real diamonds" they would continue to do so. In the hierarchy of needs food and shelter trump frivolous purchases and take away from available disposable income. Asserting that younger people just want "experiences" is a weird position to take. I've not seen data that that supports the concept that younger people actively choose to use disposable income on experiences over material items and I don't know how you test that hypothesis because the actual value of an "experience" varies while physical material items actually have a value assigned to them, like diamonds. What are you going to set as a control to test experiences over things like diamonds? Example being, a flight to a vacation spot, a hotel, and activities can be more or less expensive than an engagement diamond. Are younger people partaking in experiences that are largely less expensive or more expensive than said diamonds? Additionally a diamond is a particular type of good that falls outside the norms. It is a veblen good (I think that's the name, I am on mobile and I am having issues looking it up). There would need to be more data to support the theory. That theory being:
Going back to something you said earlier in your last post:
I think this illustrates that we are just not going to come to any sort of middle ground. Drugs that we produce should be produced without being bound to profit. The drugs that get produced should be drugs that save lives. Very basically, I value human life over profits. No matter the cost, we should always be working towards saving lives for the betterment of society. Using profit as the motivator, increasing someone or something's wealth as the driving force to save lives is such and irrevocably broken way to exist in society, I am just not sure how to combat that. Regardless, I thought this was a very pleasant conversation and thank you for the book recommendation. I will for sure investigate.
I don't think we can really view an abstract, intentionless system with a teleological lens. Everyone is working for their own ends in a capitalist system, and on the whole, most people benefit. What you call 'tertiary outcomes', I have another word for: outcomes. Profit to a capital owner is an outcome, so is affordable goods to laborers. I think in view of your later comment...
... that you claim otherwise because when capital and labor have competing interests that capital tends to win. But at least in a truly free market, capital loses all the time and this does not have impact on (or merit obligation from) labor. Labor has no need to strive to keep failing businesses afloat, outside of punching the clock in a contractually obligated manner. If a business fails, another tends to fill the vacuum, resulting in little long term effect on employment rate, in most cases. The greatest loss is often just bankruptcy for the capitalist(s). But problems arise when capital attempts to cheat the system, lobbying the government for undue influence in the market, making it less free. I think there's a tendency to view this process as inevitable, because it's the situation we're in. But as long as there are governments, there will be those who attempt to selfishly influence their exercise of power. This is not specific to any ideology or economic system, it's just human nature. If you don't think we can combat corruption that occurs alongside capitalism, then you might as well just say every economic system is the worst version of itself. Capitalism is corporatism, the Nordic model is a bloated, bureaucratic welfare state, socialism is a leftist Soviet dictatorship, anarchocommunism is Lord of the Flies.
If you wanted to continue this discussion you could have given me the answer (not sure if you were going to take the 'it's universities, not companies' stance or the 'it's labor not capitalists' stance). I should mention though that prior to my disability I worked as a pharmaceutical formulation chemist. I wasn't making an off-the-cuff comment about the complexity and resource-use of drug development.
Experiences and physical material items both have a nominal value assigned to them - their price. If a diamond and a vacation both cost 4000 dollars, and a person choose the vacation, then it is more valuable to them than the diamond is. It is a bit more complicated when there are a range of goods at varying price points, but my point was that diamonds aren't really a good marker of disposable income. The reduced popularity of Veblen goods could be due to lower disposable income, or it could be shifting values in a society that is beginning to care less about conspicuous consumption and have more ethical concern for their purchases.
I think you are underselling the complexity of deciding which drugs save the most lives. It's not as though a committee could sit down and simply plan every aspect of the drug development process 'no matter the cost'. The price of raw materials, instruments, performing clinical studies, buying IP rights (assuming the economic system has them), and labor all have to be taken into account. If natural prices don't exist, as in a planned economy, then you might be almost done developing drug X when you realize your supplier of Y can't give you enough of it to meet demand, leaving a huge number of people untreated. This is far less likely to happen in a free market because prices serve as a single unified measure, that everyone involved in every aspect of the process can continually monitor. The moment the drug X project manager realizes Y is an essential input, he can see whether that drug (or at least that production process) is feasible.
And, perhaps unfortunately, the only way to have prices is to allow profits. If people don't stand to personally gain or lose from a transaction, there is no way to guarantee the price reflects something real about it. There is a huge difference between saying, 'I'd pay top dollar for a house with this kind of view', and actually paying top dollar for it.
And even aside from whether profits are a better driving force for saving lives, it's weird to me that you would consider this aspect of society broken. People should be self-interested, at least to some degree. The only one who knows your true preferences, your true needs, is yourself. Whether those preferences are about what makes it worthwhile to fill some productive role, or how badly you want some product, no one else should be deciding that but you. Maybe society should strive to be more altruistic, but altruism cannot accurately judge one person's needs against another's.
Thank you, I also enjoyed our discussion. I do hope you check out the book; Joel Mokyr has about as descriptivist an outlook on economics as it's possible to have. I'm sure you'd get something out of it even if you disagree with some of it. It is a bit dry, but that's just economics for you.
I think this is slightly beside your point, but that sounds like what I'd call the "remake" problem. It goes like this: there are plenty of flawed old games that could have been great and have a very cool/novel core premise, and really deserve a remake (i.e. reworking the game from the ground up but keeping its original premise and core 'spirit'). However, when publishers remake games, they remake the games that don't need a remake, and they basically ground off the core 'spirit' and try to make it a slightly flavored version of successful game formulas.
In other words, 1) publishers can't remake a game, and 2) the games they "remake" are the games that least need a touch-up.
Now, to be fair, you could say they're abusing the word "remake" and that they technically never claimed to be remaking the games, if you just ignore all instances of them explicitly calling it a remake. They're doing whatever makes them profit and clearly if they're not doing "real remakes" then such a thing is simply unprofitable and therefore not valuable.
Similarly, the academic inventions that are monetized by corporation tend to be the type that least need that intervention - research institutions do 99% of the work and then the actual income is captured by corporations doing the clearly-easy stuff, whereas the hard problems that research institutions could really use help with go untouched because it's not as profitable. This is less of an issue if the invention is monetized by the non-profit research institution themselves, and this sort of ideologically-mandated privatization wrecked CSIRO.
There's also a danger here of serious circular logic (or perhaps the texas sharpshooter fallacy) - claiming that if a thing is profitable then it's valuable, and then claiming that corporations are valuable because they're profitable and QED they're good for society.
Meanwhile, the main argument for market forces is almost explicitly that we're bad at defining what is good for society - or more specifically that governments fundamentally fail because their goals are detached from the people whose interests they are trying to fulfil, so even if their execution was flawless they wouldn't reach success (the platonic ideal of this example being planned economies).
So on the one hand, govt fails because we can't properly define what's good for society, but on the other hand capitalism is good because it better produces what's good for society - a claim that can only be verified if we have some way of defining what's good for society.
I feel like half of this type of discussion isn't even objections, it's debate about something that the whole premise basically says is impossible to answer. Like, suppose Konami didn't remake Silent Hill and instead remade, I don't know, Gex, would that have been more or less valuable to society?
Even when corporations monetize ideas produced by research institution, I don't think it's fair to say that the research institutions do 99% of the work. People tend to view monetization as 'not real work' even though it takes a lot of effort and resources, and is usually absolutely necessary to actually produce goods. In reality, there are many steps between the initial idea and the product being made (only at which it point it can become 'good for society'). I'll speak to pharmaceutical development since I have experience with it - there is 1) background research in biochemistry, 2) more specific/targeted research in pharmacology, 3) drug 'discovery' (i.e. finding drug candidates), 4) drug development (i.e. assessing synthesis, ADME, formulation concerns), 5) pre-clincal (in vitro/animal) research, 6) clinical trials, 7) regulatory review, 8) commercialization and production, and 9) post-market surveillance. Realistically, research institutions primarily deal with steps 1-3, maybe 4-5 in some cases. Whereas corporations usually handle 4-9, though often 3 as well. Do you not think that these later steps count as work?
I think you're equivocating on 'what is good for society'. There is a difference between the observed 'what is good for society' - i.e. an outcome that we judge as being beneficial or not - and the predicted 'what is good for society' - i.e. which granular inputs to the economy will lead to the production of things which are good for society. As a society, we can do pretty well with the former, but are terrible at the latter. It's kind of like the helicopter-in-a-tree analogy - I don't know anything about how to fly a helicopter, but if I see it in stuck in a tree, I know someone fucked up.
Similarly, I think you're equivocating about value - there's a difference between value as a measure of a person's preference, and value as an abstract 'good for society' goal. Profit is simply a reflection of the former, the remainder in a comparison of preferences. If I value something you have more than you do, I pay you for it, and the difference in value is your profit. To say that corporations are valuable in this sense is practically a tautology. But it's separate from the notion that it's good for corporations to exist, in the sense that the economics system broadly leads to good outcomes. That is something we can observe without having to pay attention to individual transactions.
I would disagree - technology has always been used by capital to eliminate human labor. I recently read a book that touches on this subject, called 'The Lever of Riches', by Joel Mokyr. More broadly the book is about the role of market economies (among many, many other economic factors) in technological progress throughout history. But here's what Mokyr has to say about 'resistance to innovation':
He goes on to give examples of this happening:
There's another page of examples listed, and the basic theme is repeated in other sections of the book that deal with specific inventions or time periods. It seems like pretty much any time a paradigm-shifting invention is made, there are people who it will put out of work, and in many cases those people resist the invention by any means necessary. It also seems that the most successful, technologically advanced societies are those that quell resistance through strict enforcement of property laws and support for inventors.
I think the question that AI poses is - will it be just another invention in a long line of inventions that briefly disrupt the economy until it becomes an element of new jobs? Or is AI technology so advanced and its disruption so profound that it will permanently limit the number of productive jobs in the economy? In either case, technology is a threat to labor - the question is how large the threat.
That's a lesson running through the Cyberpunk genre. For example, in Johnny Mnemonic, they have invented technology that can store data in the human brain. In another society that could be incredibly useful, but because the world he lives in is only concerned with money, the space taken up by his childhood memories is just rentable space he needs to use to make a living.
I just want to clarify from the start, I don't think an ill has to be a potentially civilization-ending to be horrible. The exploitation of workers is awful no matter what, even if it wouldn't end in the civilization collapsing. This is reason enough for me to want a better system than capitalism. However, I have some issues with criticisms like this.
People tend to think of capitalism as if it's one thing, but capitalism has many forms. Keynesian politics and other less inequal forms (compared to neoliberalism) are also capitalism. People also often argue as if the current capitalism is the worst version, but just looking at the history of exploitation of India and Africa is reason enough to put a giant hole in this argument. Honestly, maybe even the East India Company is enough.
What I think is that "capitalism as is" is a threat to civilization thanks to the strains it creates on a not-very-resilient international order, but this is hardly only the fault of capitalism.
I think the arguments around capitalism and socialism tend to overlook the threat born from the system of nation-states. Nation-state tribalism, whether you call it patriotism, nationalism, "realpolitik", or another word, incentivizes people to otherize each other. As a result, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly, politicians and people prioritize "the nation." This leads to incredible violence and bloodshed. The relative peace developed after WW2 as a result of big nations stopping direct wars isn't statistically relevant, meaning there's no statistical reason to think it's going to last. And mind you, there's always, always the threat of nuclear escalation, which is becoming more relevant again as strong nation-states coalesce into blocks.
So, I think reducing all this to just "capitalism" is a poor critique. Capitalism doesn't exist in the vacuum, and as I mentioned, it can take on many forms. I think partially for this reason many people attribute the said ills to neoliberalism or corporatism, instead of capitalism itself. And I think it's a valid point. If you want to provide a more general critique of capitalism, you can't just focus on one version of it.
Here's some quick general critiques that criticisizes all of it:
Any good produced which would be a net societal gain to be distributed as freely as possible at the lowest cost, say vaccinnes and other medicines, is directly incompatible with profits. Anything on top of cost to produce and distribute is adding cost and limiting distribution, reducing the societal gains. Tweaking the rules to say 'oh but this we'll provide publicly but the rest stands' is moving the goalposts.
Having to continually move the goalposts by perpetually layering on more and more rules and regulations in order to stop "bad actors" demonstrates that the system is not a stable one, its one that encourages and rewards bending and breaking rules. Otherwise hard-fought labor gains wouldn't be facing perpetual regressions.
Profits also rely on paying workers less than the value they produce. It's an inherintly exploititive system, where the owner of the factory (the Capital) recieves an outsized share of the profits compared to the workers who run it.
Money is power. Given the owners recieve an outsized share of profits in capitalism, it is always a system that will tend toward corruption as established players gain more influence to tilt the scales in their favor.
An anarchist walks in, sees this discourse and walks out sighing
As a fellow anarchist, I'm interested what your thoughts on the discourse are.