Libertopian Doublethink on the Singularity

Boy, Marshall sure stirred the pot at the Singularity Summit this weekend. Apparently you are allowed to opine that super-robots will either bring us a perfect world free from want, or possibly wipe us off the map. But if you suggest that we might need social policies to ensure our economic welfare when robots take most of the jobs then you are a socialist throwback unaware that free markets have always solved the structural unemployment problems of the past.

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Complete entry

Posted by Mark Plus  on  10/27  at  10:31 PM

Not all libertarians display such closed-mindedness. Robert Anton Wilson, who described himself as a libertarian who didn't hate poor people, had no trouble promoting ideas similar to Brain's:

The RICH Economy
http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/raw-RICH.html

Posted by Patrick  on  10/28  at  09:15 AM

Markets are just rule-sets designed to crowdsource logistical decisions, therefore they statistically work until they don't, which depends a lot on the design of the constraints, the distribution of information, and the distribution of wealth (in no particular order).

Trying to split this into a pro-markets or pro-regulation argument is falling into an ancient trap and missing the forests for the trees. It's like education, the problem isn't that we don't have private schools or adequetely funded public schools - the problem is that the schools are designed to crush individuals into obedient, unquestioning, corporate drones. Likewise, market economies as we know them are designed to benefit the designers and operators of that game - in a manner not unlike how World of Warcraft is designed to make Blizzard wealthy at the expense of their player's time, money and probably mental and physical health.

So let's get over the dialectic and get analytic.

First off, the very definition of work is egregious, so let's revise that before we tweak the parameters. Many successful and creative people, artists, designers, angel investors, writers, musicians, street performers, and the occasional corporate executive will all tell you that they tend to work and play more or less indivisibly the majority of their waking hours. Therefore, trying to constraint an arbitrary variable of "workweek" hours makes little sense now, much less in a post-Singularity novelty-economy.

For example, a more elegant regulation could be the mandatory offering of a type of employment option involving a lower work-week, with a negotiable overtime rate or something similar. Being more explicit and operation when describing potential regulation limits the dangers of both intellectual dissonance and the significant risk of governments amplifying problems rather than fixing them. You must concede I have a lot of historical precedent to point to in citing that risk.

Living in Buenos Aires has showed me that a net worth of maybe two grand, at most, is enough. I'm talking about a computer, some exercise equipment, an MP3 player, maybe a bit of silver or whatever your preferred investment vehicle is, that's enough. So clearly we could make a more open-ended scenario where people are given a basic standard of living, basic tools such as a computer - like Socialism would prescribe - and then let people have the freedom to negotiate and act with those tools - like a libertarian utopian would envision. Best of both worlds.

Posted by Brian Wang  on  11/04  at  08:00 PM

Yes, howstuffworks was sold in 2007 for $250 million, but in 2002 it was sold for a little over one million to convex.
http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2002/09/02/story4.html

CEO of HowStuffWorks, Jeff Arnold is after acquiring the company in 2003, raised more than $75 million in private equity for the company and orchestrated its sale to Discovery Communications, the No. 1 nonfiction media company. Jeff also founded and served as CEO of The Convex Group, a media and technology holding company whose portfolio included HowStuffWorks until its sale to Discovery in 2007.

So a triple of the money since 2003. The original investors were supposed to get some money back if it was sold. Probably not proportional participation. Marshall Brain and his original investors probably had liquidity in 2002 and 2003 and may have gotten all of their original investment back. Marshall probably would get more payout from whatever shares and participation he had for still writing his segment of the blog and from books but not likely anything from the Discover sale. Plus the Discover sale included other acquired sites.

It cannot be said that he made many millions from howstuffworks. Or that the sites went from startup to the sale multiplying its value. Probably 200%-250% return over 4-5 years for the private investors in 2003.

Posted by Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly  on  11/16  at  01:58 PM

The dichotomy of unrestrained market forces vs guaranteed income and other protections seems to presume that market economics will continue to dominate as they do now. I believe that we are going to soon find that other ways of organizing group action have a fundamentally lower friction than currency transactions. For instance, imagine trying to use money to organize a flash mob. Combine that new spontaneous organizational power with the means of a production in a box, fabrication, and there's little that won't be naturally free. Money as we understand it now may seem very archaic by the end of the next decade.

Posted by wayneswordonweb  on  01/23  at  06:42 AM

ha

Posted by Nathaniel Welch  on  02/17  at  06:03 PM

Now look at all the anti-government sentiment this talk has stirred up, and tell me, with a straight face, that singularitarians and transhumanists are mostly progressives.

Posted by jhughes  on  02/18  at  06:33 PM

There isn't any inconsistency between these responses and the overal progressive politics of transhumanists. These flabbergasted libertopians were Bay area singularitarians, who are overwhelmingly libertarian. Only a quarter to a third of transhumanists are S^, and only a fraction live in the Bay area of the USA.

Posted by Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly  on  02/19  at  03:57 PM

In the current political climate, I'm a progressive. Philosophically, I'm an anarchist. Depending on what goes down (particularly what disruptive technologies are discovered), I may at some point support absolute totalitarian control. I believe that we must remain flexible, because we don't yet know exactly what we're dealing wiith.

Posted by Giulio Prisco  on  02/20  at  03:08 AM

I would not equate an anti-government sentiment with radical market libertarianism -- these are two very different things.

As a citizen, I think the government has a useful function to perform. I think a reasonable degree of redistribution of wealth is necessary in our society, and that taxation is still the most practical way to implement it. I am in favor of BIG, which in this economy can only be implemented by a government.

So I am not anti-government, but I am often anti-this-government.

When I see the government wasting our money on stupid measures and not using our money where it is needed, or when I see greedy government officers stealing our money for personal gain, I call bullshit and wish to change _this_ government. Since I am not a US citizen I am not talking of the Obama administration, but of the bunch of greedy idiots that passes for a government in many EU regions.

And there is worse: most governments have been unable to run things, as it is shown by the current crisis. But they are always ready to interfere with the civil rights of citizens. Here I see that things have became much worse in the last few decades, and now we live in nanny states where the government wishes to control every little detail of our lives, even those irrelevant to the public sphere.

In summary: I am not anto-government but I want a _good_ government. I want less bullshit, less thieves, less oppression, more civil rights, and government intervention where and _only where_ it is needed. I think most transhumanists, and most serious citizens, would agree.

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