The Speculist » Post-Scarcity

Distributed Autonomous Businesses

Phil Bowermaster — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 18:50:27 +0000

One of the models for associating individual wealth with productive output in an economy that is predominantly (if not completely) post-labor is to apportion ownership of companies across the population. This could be a matter of distributing shares of existing companies or granting shares or exclusive ownership to new companies.

The ideal fit would be with self-starting startups. As a dedicated AI system (or many such systems) launch profitable companies, their ownership is distributed throughout the population according to whatever criteria make the most sense. It could be random or tied to consumer behavior or other interests / aptitudes.

Or possibly one could gain ownership in businesses by expressing an early interest in them or contributing to the original idea from which they are launched. You might think of it as the auto-pilot of entrepreneurship. The machine does all the hard stuff while we reap the benefits.

For a related idea, see Wealth Robots.

For a road map of how we get from here to there, check out Melanie Swan’s recent piece on Blockchain Thinkers and Smart Contracts.

Wealth Robots

Phil Bowermaster — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 20:08:34 +0000

Humans and their machines are doing a fantastic job of making humanity as a whole wealthier through independent initiatives. But what if we deployed, within certain parameters (e.g., concern for the environment), machines focused on a single task: increasing the material well-being of all human beings?

Arguably, the arms race between intelligent trading systems is working on a goal similar to this, although those bots are concerned only with enriching their makers — not everybody.

Or go back a step: what if we deployed machines working on creating recursively smarter machines focused on the task of making us all wealthier? Machines can only tell us what they think we should do. They can’t force us. But then, machines who can make us rich could make a pretty good case that they should be in charge.

Post-Scarcity Roadmap

Phil Bowermaster — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 15:35:04 +0000

There is good reason to believe that we are heading towards post-scarcity, a new economy in which, basically, anybody can have anything they want. We’ll all be rich:

Post-scarcity is a theoretical alternative form of economics or social engineering in which goods, services and information are universally accessible.[1] This would require a sophisticated system of resource recycling, in conjunction with technologically advanced automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods.

Here’s the problem. Although we can describe what the enabling technologies for post-scarcity will be (nanotech, biotech, artificial intelligence) and while it is fairly easy to provide a sketch of what a post-scarcity world will look like, the question of how, exactly, we get there from here leads to a lot of hemming and hawing.

We need a roadmap that starts with the technology and economy we have now and that leads us, step-by-step, into post-scarcity. The roadmap needs to include thoughts on how we avoid various pitfalls (that is, scarcity scenarios) that a post-scarcity society might fall into.