Are We Ready for Post Scarcity? Part 3

So technology has brought us a new world.  The new technologies developed in the 20th and 21st centuries have created a world with changes as drastic as the invention of agriculture over 10 millenia ago.  This new world is awe inspiring in its productive capabilities.  Like the soviets upon seeing American grocery stores or backyard pools, those of us from the old worlds look in disbelief on the abundance the highly automated modern world offers.  Will that disbelief be an awestruck hopeful wonderment, or a horrified cringing at the dystopian nightmare on display?

What becomes of the human being, the individual in the post-scarcity world?  While objectively unanswerable, for now, science fiction and current trends can give us an idea.  Star Trek provides the most hopeful vision, a humanity that devotes itself to self improvement and growth, bravely venturing out to explore the universe or just starting a small restaurant to share the joy of old family recipes (like Joseph Sisko from DS9).  People engage in their passions and become the greatest captains, scientists, or chefs that they can thanks to the freedom from desire and from the struggle for the basic necessities of life.  While this optimism is one of the reasons we love Star Trek it doesn't strike us as realistic.

On the other side of the spectrum we see the 'dystopian,' or broken utopia, genre of fiction.  The lack of scarcity in information and communication enabled by the internet has made government surveillance and monitoring so easy that the protections for citizens seem to come only from law these days.  And that can easily fail, as the victory of the ACLU against ongoing programs of the NSA showed.  The NSA's activities have many shouting that, "1984 was not an instruction manual."  A conversation from the video game Deus Ex indicates another interesting, and all to realistic, future:

JC Denton: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance

Morpheus (an AI system who is 'a prototype for a larger system'): The need to observed and understood was once satisfied by God.  Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

JC Denton: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence.  Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.

Huxley's Brave New World gives us one vision of a post scarcity world that's also terrifying.  People are raised from conception to death to fill a certain role, with much of the population raised to lack mental faculty and drive so that they can be contented with menial jobs.  Innovation is suppressed if the rulers decide it doesn't support the economy.  The population is essentially drugged into compliance and acceptance of the system that promotes nothing but the status quo ad infinitum.  At least everyone has a job, though.

These uncomfortable futures are just fiction, for now, but sadly they seem to strike us as truer to reality.  One of the consequences of post-scarcity living is that power can evaporate.  It can also become much more concentrated.  Abuses by law enforcement that were once prevented by their sheer infeasibility now need laws in place to protect citizens (the supreme court decision on GPS tracking is a good example of this to add to the NSA's recent abuses of power).  However when laws are needed the question inevitably arises of who will write them.

The genius of American government is the idea of the powerful individual, that every citizen has strength enough to make their voice resonate in the halls of power.  The idea has caught on so strongly that it's easy to forgot how revolutionary and unthinkable this idea would be only 500 or so years ago when monarchs were the norm, and for basically all of human history before that when the strong took what they wanted without regard for whether or not the man they were taking it from cared to give it up.

The same power of technology that can eliminate scarcity could also conceivably eliminate freedom.  Corporate influence over lawmakers could barely be necessary if companies like John Deere, Apple, and Comcast continue along their trajectories.  Imagine the power the tractor company would hold if they were able to dictate whether or not their machinery were allowed to be repaired or you would just have to buy a new one to continue sowing grain.  Consider the power of a company with similar power over electronics and personal computers.  All the innovation and creativity in the world doesn't mean a thing if a company controlling the means of distribution for new products and stories can decide to refuse their service.

How can we dilute these powers, without only strengthening centralized government power, and while still providing opportunity and daily bread for the individual?  I don't know.  I have some ideas, but truly I can't say what I'd really do if I were ruler of the world, or even just the US.  What I can say is that no one else really can either.  There's a dearth of ideas and solutions floating around out there because we're not addressing the issue.

The idea of a post-scarcity economy and society is so revolutionary that it doesn't sound real.  Talking about robotics and computing replacing human beings as the driving force in the economy sounds like science fiction, despite the fact that we continually experience it as reality.  The whole issue is so massive and so out there that it's not addressed seriously in politics, and rarely in thoughtful conversation.  If this continues we'll find ourselves in a world clinging to obsolete social mores and struggling to make them fit in the modern world.  We can't let that happen, so let's think about getting ready for post-scarcity.

Are We Ready for Post Scarcity? Part 2

It's easy to romanticize scarcity when looking to address the problems that arise as it fades from the eyes of humankind.  Recent bouts in popular culture of "paleo-nostalgia" show us just how absurd our longing for "the good old days" can get.  But the good old days were never as good as we pretend they were.  The fifties had Jim Crow laws.  Pre-industrial society was awash in the filth of both the horses that pulled carriages and the humans that rode in them.  Why I should have to point out the scourges of humanity in medieval, bronze age, or stone age days is beyond me, but I'll mention crusades and inquisitions, the slavery that built the pyramids, and war among rival tribes of cave men just to be safe.

I bring this up because it's important to note that I'm not advocating we avoid creating a post scarcity world.  Precisely the opposite, I want to acknowledge that we're in the middle of doing so, and embrace the change.  To do that though, we need to be wary and accepting of the consequences.  Some of those may be unimaginable and have to be addressed as they come.  Others are more predictable, especially when we consider history.

I mentioned the abundance of food in part one.  Now consider farming, the production of that food.  Farming is remarkably different in the modern world, and it's so efficient that we can produce so much food that our primary concerns don't regard abundance.  We take abundance of food for granted, instead seeking better quality and solutions for what to do with the excess.  This has come at a price, though.

The great depression featured, "Farming communities and rural areas suffer[ing] as crop prices fell by approximately 60%." (wikipedia, citing three other sources)  The abundance and efficiency of farming is so staggering that only through heavy subsidies is agriculture profitable today.  These subsidies are so severe that Lawrence Lessig in his book Republic, Lost titles his chapter on government farming subsidies, "Why don't we have free markets?"  We recoil at the realization that government is deciding what food gets grown, and yet this might be important and beneficial to society, since we all like to eat.  Surely subsidizing agriculture is better than milk being spilled into gutters while thousands only a few hundred miles away starved, a characteristic image of the depression?

Food is one thing, it's physical and tangible.  We're all familiar with it and easily understand what it means.  Information is quite another, yet it's the next thing whose scarcity is being obliterated.  Personal computing and the internet have done a pretty good job already, once again changing the problems from availability to find-ability of information of high enough quality and relevance.

What have humans done with this?  We haven't become a society of well read polyglots that understand the conflicts between relativity and quantum mechanics as we might hope.  We're very well entertained, though.  Entertainment is just a form of information, after all.  A textbook has roughly the same form as a storybook.  With Netflix, Hulu, & Youtube,  for videos alone we can spend our entire day being entertained for probably not quite $100 a month.

This doesn't (necessarily) mean we're stupid or shallow, though.  Many of the most popular shows are sharply written character and political dramas like House of Cards, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones.  The recent revival of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series did well.  It could be argued more people are writing than ever before thanks to blogging sites like what you're reading now and maybe even social media.

OK, I'll admit I might not be buying the idea that the lack of scarcity in entertainment is improving us as a people either, but on the other hand I'm not going to dismiss it outright.  A stronger example might be video games.  The juggernaut game Minecraft is almost exclusively a creative tool rather than a traditional game.  Gaming has a strong community of "modding," or learning some basic (or in some cases extremely complex) programming tools used in a game to create a variant of that game. These variants span anything between the original game with a failure message changed from, "You died." to "Thanks, Obama!" to entirely new games built on the same graphics and gameplay engine.

In both food and entertainment we do see demand for quality now that availability is so high.  People grow from just being happy to have something to eat to wanting something that is organic, gluten-free, or maybe even something actually important.  People start paying attention to what their food is over whether or not it's there.  Likewise in entertainment we are demanding quality more and more.  We are seeking entertainment that we can, as Kevin Spacey says, "engage with...with a passion and an intimacy that a blockbuster movie could only dream of."

Bertrand Russell writes in his essay In Praise of Idleness about the odd disconnect that exists between our valuation of production and consumption.  While we admire productivity we don't highly value consumption.  Those who earn money have prestige, but not those eager to spend it.  He points out the oddity of this, particularly when we only earn money is by others' spending of it.  "We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer."

Russell also alludes to the caste and class scaffolds that these attitudes seem to stem from.  He even goes so far to argue that the traditional work ethic arose largely as a tool of slave-owners and autocrats to keep their populations  content with their tyrannical rule.  If this is starting to sound like Marxist thinking to you then you're actually very clever.  A serious point of departure I must take to this essay is his praise given to the (only ten years old at the time of writing) Russian revolution and newly formed USSR.

We all know how that experiment turned out, so how can I possibly be suggesting that going at it again is a going to be a good thing?  The short answer is that I'm not.  I am arguing that an economy with abundance for humanity requiring very little input of labor from humanity is on the horizon, or even just finishing its arrival and is starting to settle in.  One of my great concerns is the way this could create a dictatorship masquerading as efforts to provide equally for all men like existed in communist Russia.  I'll delve into this a little more in part 3.