One final thought before bed

[andrewducker]

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

There's possibly even worse news further down the line: The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

Perhaps the rule is something like:

Country SUCCESS: Everyone works 8 hours a week and all the rest of the work is done by robots.
Country FAILURE: 1/10 of people work 80 hours a week and 9/10 of people starve and all the rest of the work is done by robots.

[andrewducker]

And this is why I'm in favour of a citizen's income...

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think so much depends on how widely spread the ownership of the capital is. If capital is widely held, and held by a diverse range of individuals and institutions, and they are prepared to use their ownership of capital to influence the management of capital then I think there are fewer social and political problems to resolve and the problems are more along the lines “What do we do with all this spare time?”

If the ownership or control of capital is narrowly held then I think we have a set of harder to answer problems.

[andrewducker]

Why does the diversity of the capital holdings matter? Unless absolutely everyone has a source of income then we have people starving. When we reach the point of mass automation we're left with the question of what we do with the labour that has nothing to do - and how we support that 90% of the population.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think a diversity of capital holding helps make for more diverse input to the decision making about what to do with the capital and how ownership of capital interacts with politics and social policy.

I want owners of capital who have interests in their investment beyond just making money.

For example I think a situation where bits of capital are owned and managed by private individuals at all life stages, by community groups, by arts trust funds, by anti-poverty or poverty mitigation charities and so are going to produce a richer response to the questions that automation of labour rises than if the capital was just owned by a narrow group of people interested in maximising their own wealth and power or if the capital was owned by many but managed by investment funds with a narrow brief to maximise investor returns.

When I imagine a situation where the owners of a large manufacturing plant near Edinburgh are thinking about what to do I am more comfortable if I imagine that I own a share and so do you and so does the scholarship fund for Edinburgh Uni, the local council pension fund, the local church and the local am dram club etc and that the wind farm that powers the plant is community owned rather than some fund with shareholders equally distributed around the world.

I’m concerned about a monoculture of ownership and management of ownership.


I think we're less likely to have a situation where we beggar ourselves in a round robin fashion if we are all exposed to the results of the experiements with what to do with all that spare labour in our own communities and have levers we can pull to change the outcome.

[andrewducker]

I can see that it might lead to better outcomes. But a system with lots of small capital holders does have a tendency to lead to selfishness, as they are all very stretched. I am distrustful of the efficiency of decentralised solutions to general problems. But in general I'd like to see wider ownership of capital. More credit unions, for a start!

[del-c.livejournal.com]

No, a system with a tiny number of capital holders has a tendency to selfishness. See eighteenth century France and nineteenth century England for famous examples.

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that your statement contradicts mine. I suspect that _both_ situations tend towards selfishness.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

But a system with lots of small capital holders does have a tendency to lead to selfishness,

I agree. I'd like to see many varied holders of capital, with different time horizons and some different desired outcomes. So, homogenous multiple small pensioners as holders of capital would raise most of the same concerns as a few Donald Trumps.

I am distrustful of the efficiency of decentralised solutions to general problems

Again, I broadly agree. Decentralised solutions run the risk of lacking bite or co-ordination or being picked off one by one by a more organisated opposition. However, I think a more heterogenous ownership pool has two effects on this question.

Firstly, a more hetergenous owernship pool might offer a less coherent opposition to any initiatives to curb the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of lottery winning wealth holders. (I would, for example, expect the Church of England to hold different views on the legislation required to implement an citizens' living wage than the 18th Duke of Gormenghast).

Secondly, I think there is something about the ecology in which owners and users of capital operate. I was thinking about this in the shower this morning and can feel a post exploring this coming on. Briefly, I think businesses with similar shareholders (who are not fussed so long as the dividends keep rolling in) and with similar customers (who are not fussed so long as the goods keep arriving will behave in similar ways and won't change.

If the ownership of organisations that hold capital is heterogenous and activist then we have some evolutionary pressure on the organisations that administer how capital is used.

More credit unions, for a start!

Yes; this and more so. More credit unions, more co-opts, more direct micro-finance, more of anything that has a mission that is more complex than increase shareholder returns in any way available.

[andrewducker]

Actually, yes, I agree that a mix of large and small organisations that are all viable would be my preference.

And more micro-credit and non-profit organisations would make me happy.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I saw an intersting proposal to use the internet to match up micro-finance providers with micro-finance requirers.

I thought that's what the internet should be really good at.

I'm genuinely wondering if there is a viable business doing that that I could be involved in.

[andrewducker]

Have you investigated Kickstarter at all?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Not in much depth. Just looking over the website ATM.

One of the guys in the office was funding the new album of a band he liked through a scheme that looked not disimilar.

I like the idea.

I wonder how easy it would be to roll out for micro-financing developing world businesses or businesses in our country. There is a well known funding gap for SME's looking for investment below the £1m mark.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure how high Kickstarter goes - but I think that Kickstarter, or something like it, would be a positive disruptive force. I helped get a short film made, for instance :->

All of the things I've been involved in have been funded in tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know if Kickstarter goes higher than that.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

.I helped get a short film made, for instance :->

Kewl!


I can see one project which was funded to 103% of its funding requirement and raised over $200k. If I understand the data correctly they must be dealing in projects that have funding requirements into six figures

[andrewducker]

Oh, and the link today on the reification of legal systems was partially inspired by our conversation last week!

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I did see that and I thought of that conversation.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

How long will the starving last? I mean, will 9/10 of each generation starve until there are no humans left, or is this a one-off population reduction?

I mean, there are upsides to the second case.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think there's usually a revolution before it gets to that point. I think it ends badly somehow, but I really don't know for sure.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

The starving lasts (doctors tell me) about two weeks, as I pointed out to a friend who said that "except in the short term" there is always as much employment as there are people to be employed. I said this was obviously true if you swept things like the Highland clearances under the carpet on the grounds that they were "in the short term".

Keynes would have slapped him with a fish. People's whole lives are about "the short term".

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I was thinking mostly about the benefits to the survivors of not having to worry quite so much about carrying capacity - ecological overshoot, saturating the atmosphere with CO2, running out of resources.

The statement "there is always as much employment as there are people to be employed" is, on first blush, nonsense. But having thought about it some more, it's still nonsense.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The starving last for a few weeks.

The chronically malnourished last for generations.