Technological advances broaden the space of the possible for humanity.
With the internet we can give everyone free access to education. But we can also share hate speech globally. With artificial intelligence we can build self driving cars. But we can also more effectively manipulate people.
There is nothing fundamentally new about this duality of technology.
With fire we were able to warm ourselves and cook. But we were also able to burn down forests. With steel we were able to construct more effective plows. But we were also able to forge swords.
And yet there is something special about our moment in time.
We are near an event horizon or singularity which renders many of the existing predictions about society based on extrapolation useless.
Humanity has encountered two of these transitions previously. The first was the invention of agriculture which ended the forager age and brought us into the agrarian age. The second was the enlightenment which took us out of our state of ignorance about nature and helped usher in the industrial age.
Imagine foragers trying to predict what society would look like in the agrarian age. Cities, rulers, armies all would have come as a surprise.
Similarly much of what we have today, from modern medicine to computer technology would look like magic from the perspective of most people from as recently as the late 1800s. Not just the existence of say a cell phone but even more so their widespread availability.
The purpose of this book is twofold. The first is to argue that we are in fact at the beginning of a third such transition. The second is to propose policies for making this transition smoothly, unlike the two previous ones which were marked by massive turmoil and upheaval, including two World Wars in the transition from the agrarian age to the industrial age.
So how should we approach this coming third transformation? What can we do now if, as I claim, we can't make good predictions?
The answer is that we need to enact policies that allow for social and economic changes to occur instead of artificially suppressing these changes only to have them explode eventually.
I will argue that the way to accomplish this is by expanding individual freedoms through
- instituting a basic income (economic freedom)
- investing in internet access, rolling back intellectual property rights, and rethinking personal privacy (informational freedom) and
- practicing and encouraging self-regulation (psychological freedom).
At the same time we need to double down on a set of values that allows increasingly free individuals to peacefully co-exist and for humanity to progress, including critical inquiry, tolerance and responsibility.
Why this specific set of freedoms and values? The starting point is the primacy of knowledge for the fate of humanity. The internet as a global network and artificial intelligence based on general purpose computing together are dramatically accelerating the creation and sharing of knowledge. This in turn is shifting scarcity away from capital and towards human attention.
Increasing economic, informational and psychological freedom will let everyone participate more effectively in this knowledge acceleration by making attention less scarce. Critical inquiry, tolerance and non-violence are essential to doing so peacefully and achieving progress.
Each of the previous two transitions can also be seen as a shift in scarcity. The transition from the forager age to the agrarian age was a shift in scarcity from food to land. The transition from the agrarian age to the industrial age shifted the scarcity from land to capital.
Today capital is no longer scarce in the world. We should consider that the great success of capitalism. We now face a new scarcity, however, that of attention. Individually and collectively our attention is scarce. We are bad at allocating attention and capitalism will not solve that for us in its present form.
This is what "World After Capital" is about. It is a work in progress and what you see at present is an incomplete draft. I am still in the process of rewriting several chapters from an earlier version that I was not happy with.
I welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement. The contents of the book will always be freely available at worldaftercapital.org under a Creative Commons license. I retain final "commit rights" for changes and as such take responsibility for any and all errors.