Envisioning a Post-Scarcity Economy
Posted by Jeriaska on August 13th, 2007
Verdant’s Michael Ekstract and Reason’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey at TV07
Ronald Bailey is the award-winning science correspondent for Reason, the libertarian monthly named one of “The 50 Best Magazines” three out of the past four years by the Chicago Tribune. Established in 1968 and a four-time finalist for National Magazine Awards, Reason has a print circulation of 40,000 and won the 2005 Western Publications Association “MAGGIE” Award for best political magazine. Reason Online, the magazine’s Web edition, draws 2.4 million visits per month, and the staff weblog Hit & Run has been named by Playboy, Washingtonian, and others as one of the best political blogs.
He is the author of the new book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus), and his work appears in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004. In April, 2006, Bailey was shortlisted by the editors of Nature Biotechnology as one of the 22 personalities who have made the most significant contributions to biotechnology in the area of society and ethics in the last 10 years. At Transvision 2007, he presented a talk entitled “Envisioning a Post-Scarcity Economy.”
The following transcript of Ronald Bailey’s 2007 Transvision presentation, “Envisioning a Post-Scarcity Economy: Mount Olympus, the Borg or Something Else?” has been approved by the author for publication.
Envisioning a Post-Scarcity Economy
I am delighted to be here. This is my third Transvision. I want to stress that what I will be talking about today will not be a forecast. It is speculative. But one of the things I wanted to get out of the way is that I carried with me a whole box of Reason Magazine. It has a particular article that is very dear to my heart. It is actually an interview (Our Intangible Riches) with an economist named Kirk Hamilton, who has written a wonderful book called Where Is the Wealth of Nations. And one of the major conclusions of that book is that the wealth of the world, 80% of it is intangible. That it resides, in fact, in our institutions and in our brains. It’s a breakthrough kind of book, and I really recommend that you take a look at the article and explore these ideas further.
The foundations of economics is the notion of scarcity. People struggle to get things like food, shelter, energy. They also have to economize on relationships and time. And this has been going on since we became conscious beings on the planet. So, I was thinking, what might transhumans have to economize on in the future, and for how long? It turns out that it is a very difficult problem for me to think about. But one thing is, does not a finite universe imply that there will always be scarcity of one sort or another? And how will transhumans divvy up those scarce goods in the future? And then how far into the future can we attempt to peer?
So, to try to imagine what scarcities might still afflict transhumans, I decided to focus on scenarios in which immortality has been achieved. The scarcity constraint of time, at least in the length of life, has been lifted. There is still going to be the scarcity of time in the sense that until we can find a time machine, time is still going to be just one damn thing after another and we are not going to be able to make it go faster. But I’ve decided to choose two scenarios, which I am calling “Mt. Olympus and the Borg.”
In any case, economics, we have a nice definition here. “The social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants (and wants are unlimited, at least so far). This involves analyzing production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services.” What kinds of things have been traditionally scarce? Again, resources, time, relationships, and then of course position, status in society. A very highly sought after good.
But I want to take you down a path to illustrate how scarce resources have been first for our species. And this is data from a wonderful economist Angus Maddison, and what he intended to do hear was in real dollar terms, and you can go to his website and see if you agree with his analysis, is to figure out what the income per capita GDP of the world was, starting with the year 1, to the present time. And what you will see is, it took a long time, until about 1870, for income on the planet to double. It took almost 19 centuries to do that. That indicates that a lot of people lived lives that were nasty, brutish, and short.
As I always say, abject poverty is humanity’s natural state. And what you see is that over time, you get a shift here where it begins to become more exponential. And currently on the planet, real income is around $7000 per person. Of course, it is not equally distributed. And it’s still not a lot of money. 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, which is less than the average Roman citizen got. And they are still at least 2 billion people living on $2 a day. So they are living basically in the 18th century. This has to be fixed and people are working on that.
But another thing I always like to point out is that something happened during the Enlightenment. What I would like to suggest to you is that what changed was that three institutions came into existence at once. And those institutions were capitalism, which is how we decide who gets what). Democracy, and the rule of law, which is how we decide who wields legitimate power. And the final one, which people don’t think about and I think is absolutely critical, and whom Jonathan Rauch, from whom I am stealing this wonderful shcema, calls liberal science.
Liberal science is absolutely critical to the way we live, because it is what sparked the technological revolution. It is essentially the notion of the Royal Society, trust no one’s word. Everything is for critiquing. It’s basically free speech, writ large. Everything from the worst activist’s pamphlet to peer reviewed science. And it is absolutely critical that we always be able to say what we think in order to keep this going. What you see is a huge exponential shift in both Western Europe and the United States, the first places where the Enlightenment began.
One of the things in looking into the future, and I’m not going to make a forecast here, but if you make a simple extrapolation from about 1850 to now, the average economic growth rate on the planet was about 3% per year. And if you extrapolate that until about 2100 it will be about $550 trillion, ten times bigger than the current world economy of $47 trillion, and the average income on the planet would be $70,000 per capita. That could buy a lot of toys, I hope, anyway.
So, well, what about time? Average life expectancy in early agricultural societies was probably somewhere around 25 years, because of the high infant mortality. This is data showing what happened in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. What we had was life expectancy at birth was about 46 years. That has now increased to over 70 years, on average. A male and female gap still exists, but is now closing, fortunately. And what you also find is that the life expectancy of people who are 50 is also increasing in the second half of the 20th century. For someone my age, this is very good news. It’s not going fast enough. Unfortunately, life expectancy is going up at a rate of three months for every year. It needs to go up one year for every year. But Aubrey de Grey is working on that, I hear.
What about relationships? Well, the fact is that this has been one of the hardest scarcities to ever come. Fortunately by means of the division of labor and the rise of institutions, like the market, which foster cooperation across continents, we have been able to partially overcome this constraint. But it remains the case that the individual is limited by our social brains that were evolved in the savannas of Africa. We can devote only so much time and attention to maintain close relationships and friendships and promote cooperation directly with only a couple hundred people in our lives. Our physical bodies limit what we can do.
And then status, which is probably the scarcest of all resources. It is true that during the Enlightenment we all got a promotion up from serfs and slaves. People don’t recall this, but “mister” was actually a title that was reserved for only a certain class of people in the 18th and 19 century. And then we all got promoted to being mister and missus and so forth. So our status was improved in that sense. But it remains of course that some people have more wealth and more power. I will have some comments on the evolutionary value of status later on.
Post-scarcity in a posthuman world. As I said, I have two scenarios. The Olympian option: immortal, but retains individual personalities. And the Borg option: immortal, but individual personalities absorb into the collective consciousness. And then there’s the singularity, which I don’t know what to do about. All bets are off. I will leave it up to Eliezer and others to tell me what those forecasts will be.
So let’s briefly visit, if you will, Mt. Olympus. One of my very favorite people on the planet, Leon Kass, has said, “Immortality is a kind of oblivion–like death itself.” I would be willing to experience that oblivion. I’ll risk it. But Leon has said, in 2004, the following: “Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey presents human beings who he names as mortals. That is their definition in contrast to the immortals. And the immortals for their agelessness and their beauty live sort of shallow and frivolous lives. Indeed, they depend for their entertainment on watching the mortals who, precisely because they know that their time is limited, and that they go around only once, are inclined to make time matter and to aspire to something great for themselves.”
Well, is that true? What did Homer actually say about death in The Iliad and The Odyssey? This is from The Odyssey. Odysseus when he is wandering around the land of the dead and visit Achilles. He is trying to cheer him up because he knows Achilles is a little down about being dead. He says, “As for you Achilles, no one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been or ever will be, for you were adored by all us Argives as long as you were alive. And now that you are here, you are a great prince among the dead. Do not therefore take it so much to heart, even if you are dead.” To which Achilles replies, “Say not a word. In death’s favor I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than be a king of kings among the dead.”
I think that’s a pretty good sentiment, and I think that Kass gets it wrong. Is immortality the root of all evil? I don’t think so. The Greek gods are immortal, they do have the luxury of long lives. They have no physical needs: food, clothes and shelter. Though interestingly it turns out that Zeus wanted to destroy humanity because he found them annoying, but it turns out they did need the smoke from the sacrifices, so they had to put up with us. They could also conjure up anything they wanted, though some items were scarce. It always puzzled me that with the technology of the time, Zeus could not IM anyone, he had to send Mercury around. Very primitive technology for immortal people.
In any case, Kass points to the frivolity of the lives of the gods in Greek myths. Nothing is serious to them, he argues, because eternity stretches endlessly for them. And they are clearly not overly concerned with practicing virtue or striving for moral excellence. The gods are competitive, jealous, lustful, adulterous. Zeus had a lot of kids, and Hera cuckolded him a lot. It was not a good relationship. They are deceitful, arrogant, and display pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. And they certainly did exhibit that.
Max More, Ronald Bailey, and Jerome C. Glenn answering questions from the audience
But I would like to suggest that as immortal as they were, they remained distinct personalities. And they were not, for the most part, omnipotent. So they had to deal with one another and other creatures face to face. Again, the technology was pretty pitiful. Zeus was allegedly omniscient, so he had to be obeyed. But he kept getting distracted. For example, during the Trojan War, Hera wanted the Greeks to win, so she seduced him and got him in bed so he wasn’t paying any attention to the War in Troy, and Poseidon came along and helped the Trojans.
But the question is, do these myths about immortal beings provide a warning to the pursuit of that on the part of humanity? First I would like to keep in mind the context of the all-too-mortal Greeks who conceived of these Olympian gods. Like all humans confronting disease, decline, and death, they tried to explain to themselves why they must suffer these existential horrors. What better way to cope with the dismal situation than to create capricious and cruel gods who would be blamed for the many evils that befall us. They solve the problem of evil in the world by blaming evil gods. They don’t have the problems of Christian theodicy. And if some good fortune should come their way, the gods could be praised for their mercy, but you don’t really expect too much.
I believe the Greeks gave their gods immortality because that is what they yearned for themselves. In fact, the oldest myth that we have is the Gilgamesh saga, which I have read in as many translations as I can get. It is a tragic story of a quest for immortality by a man who wants to bring back his dead friend to life. I think it is a wonderful, inspiring story. The conclusion of the Gilgamesh saga is that the only immortality given to mortals is the founding of cities, which I also think is a wonderful conclusion.
Another problem with Greek gods as cautionary models is that they existed in an eternity without progress. They had no goals other than to play the same endless round of games among themselves. Many of the visionaries who are in this room would argue for dramatically extending human lifespan. They foresee a day when could use technology to become very much like gods with vast abilities to apprehend new knowledge and achieve new goals. For a very long time such godlike people will be neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and so much wisdom will remain to be sought after.
The crucial thing for me to make the distinction here is that these gods remain individuals still. And so I wanted to contrast that with an immortality that is a collective immortality, that of Star Trek’s the Borg. They are immortal. There is no competition among them for resources. While not omniscient, the Borg is a hive mind. Unlike Greek gods, the drones do need physical resources to maintain as cyborg entities. Competition does not exist within the collective, but it does exist against all other species.
Are the Borg virtuous? In a certain sense, they are. They’re not competitive within the collective. They are neither jealous nor lustful. They’re not very happy; they’re kind of anhedonic. At least the Greek gods have a lot of fun. And you know these guys are always goin, “Resistance is futile.” Again, they do suffer from pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others, namely the individuality of every other sentient creature in the universe. Which is probably a flaw.
But, with all due respect to Mike LaTorra and James Hughes, I had to ask this question. The minds of all the Borg drones are connected via implant networks to a hive mind. The Borg goal is to improve the quality of life for all species, not a bad goal. But by integrating organic and synthetic components in their quest for perfection, they travel the galaxy, assimilating those species and their technologies, and incorporating individuals by injecting them with nanoprobes and surgically implanting prostheses to match the Borg standard. Those assimilated by the Borg generally lack individuality or any knowledge of their former lives. The Borg being essentially one individual, all resources belong to that one collective individual, and if one of those assimilated drones needs to be sacrificed for the good of the whole, it would be no more important than my body shedding a skin cell.
In its own terms, the Borg is indeed trying to improve the quality of life for all species. All you have to do is give up your individuality to achieve immortality, if you think that’s a good deal. This is my one little bit of forecasting. I think that if transhumanity moves in the direction of uploading minds onto digital substrates, they would result in something like the Borg, as distinct individuals gradually chose to integrate themselves. I may be showing a lack of imagination here, but I think that a road to collectivity would mean that competition over resources and status between individuals would cease. I am particularly struck by Marvin Minsky’s notion yesterday that 10 billion minds could be run out of a computer measuring just two cubic meters and using just a few hundred dollars worth of energy. Well, we’ll see. But yielding up one’s individuality to such a digital collective has striking parallels to me to the notion of Nirvana, in which all suffering is extinguished. Individuality is gone, there is no more lust, jealousy, and so forth. So I ask, is the Borg a Buddha saint in disguise?
So, I have a general theory of competition. What is it? Why is it that we as a species do what we do? And this is simply Darwinism. You need wealth to get power, to get status, to get the girls. And I don’t think that that’s too, too controversial a thought. I would suggest, I don’t want to be sexist, but this applies especially to males. The central feature is the drive to reproduce. So, does immortality reduce that drive, and if it does, what effects will that have on future transhumans? Is the drive for reproduction behind all this competition?
So I consider in the two cases, physical immortality, why reproduce? After all, you have immortality. Would this lessen the drive for wealth, status and power? Possibly not. I should point out that the Greek gods were certainly eager to hop in bed with anyone at anytime. The Greek gods apparently were not interested in contraception. But it is an interesting fact, nevertheless, that as their lives had gotten longer, health and wealth go together. They are also the societies where population and reproduction are falling off. So, perhaps physical immortality would lead to that.
And then digital reproduction. We have heard from people saying you can make as many copies as you want. And would this form of reproduction lessen the drive for wealth, power and status? Possibly yes. Multiple copies could ensure security. You could be fairly certain that you will make it through. Anyway, those are my two scenarios for looking at post-scarcity. It’s an interesting concept. I guess my bottom line is, are 80 billion galaxies enough to go around? Thank you very much.
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