We may be pleasantly surprised by what is possible with future technologies, ASI being a prime example. What if the energy problem is solved, and energy becomes unlimited and essentially free? New manufacturing techniques that we can only imagine today might erase the competitive advantages of big corporations. It feels like we just have to limp through the transition period without killing each other in enormous numbers (our own stupidity being a way bigger risk than a terminator AI in my opinion).
Great read, and quite insightful. I have my concerns regarding the new "holy trinity" of AI+Crypto+Blockchain but I do thing it may do the deed with regards to doing business WITHIN the digital marketspace (i.e. the future metaverse where it all comes together). However the physical world (factories, producing things, moving things around) is very different, and the fact that capital needs to be deployed massively means that proper incentives will have to be put in place to assure the proper guardrails. Then again, building the digital marketspace required for a metaverse to operate ALSO requires enormous amounts of capital, so I am not sure we will be able to bypass corporations for quite some time.
Basically we need to protect competition. Stricter anti-trust enforcement, more limited patent protections,etc. The problem is that big corporations get political clout and capture the regulators.
People who are motivated mainly by money do not create Amazons or Teslas.
Corporations exist to facilitate some initial person or group's vision, to express their values, and to achieve some goals that they value.
They make money when other people also believe that what they produced is in fact valuable to those people who are buying the product or service.
But beyond that, corporations are subject to evolutionary processes... Capitalism is evolution applied to human organizations.
Evolution, because it optimizes for many important variables at a time... Produces systems that are rarely all that clean and pretty when you start looking at them deeply.
It's like democracy. Corrupt governments are a natural byproduct of the fact that rule requires compromise between major groups who have different values and interests.
So that, from the perspective of any of those groups (who don't respect the others), the compromises appear corrupt.
The problem is in some ways less with the system, and more with human intelligence being too shallow to properly grasp the complexity of what works in the real world.
That and most of us were raised to garbage fables as kids, that just plain did not encode useful frameworks of real world understanding w.r.t what does and doesn't really produce better outcomes.
It's hard to really fix wrong understanding that is part of the foundational framework with which you understand the world.
We need an efficiency tax on corporations that benefit from AI robots, both digital and physical and those corporations need to be transparent (block chain). The tax should go to those folks that lost their jobs (UBI or similar). And perhaps some to government to bring down the debt. Efficiency will decrease costs substantially overall and first adapters will gain market share. The problem I see is that corporations will try to capture as much profit and not share (the top 1%). The only hope there is that "excessive profits breed ruinous competition".
Large corporations are an inevitable result of ruthless competition.
The solution has something to do with willing cooperation. The winners have to be willing to share the benefits. Not just share them “fairly”, but share them generously.
Sounds religious, but Prisoner’s Dilemma teaches something similar.
1. Become unviable or never grow to be meaningfully large corporations.
2. Their prices would go up.
What you really want from corporations is for them to create as much value as possible, as cheaply as possible, so that whatever people's income is, they can have more than they would otherwise be able to have.
IMO, a better way of thinking about this (assuming that one didn't need investors you need to pay back to do big things), would be something like Amazon's approach to innovation vs. maintenance:
1. When research is being done, a lot of talent is thrown at the thing to develop new capabilities.
2. Once it's solid, you create forcing functions to minimize human involvement in making those processes work, to maximize efficiency, and reduce the cost to deliver that service... Thus increasing your competitiveness.
Companies need more money when they're exploring, but assuming that they've figured it (and after they've expanded their ability to deliver to more customers also), they no longer need as much money to run day to day, to deliver.
To some degree these kinds of things happen organically as long as there's no major regulatory capture, and assuming that what the company is delivering isn't too difficult to replicate... And even if it was difficult to replicate, if the profit margins were high enough, investors and other entrepreneurs would still attack in the absence of regulatory capture.
One of the more garbage examples of regulatory capture is healthcare in the US... If we can't get cheap medicines locally, we should just as well be able to get them from a country like Germany for cheaper... What's good enough for them is good enough for us.
Although, the other side of that is that because there's more money in US healthcare, the US does more than 70% of the world's medical research... The rest of the world is mostly in maintenance mode and not innovating..
... They should pay us more for our healthcare tech than they do.
No, this line of thinking is tantamount to "everyone just needs to be enlightened" you need to think structurally and systematically. Incentives have to be right.
Maybe the trick is to create systems to tease-out the incentives that already do exist, but are currently too hidden to be actionable, such as the very tangible benefits of generosity.
there are more of us than there are of them. we can make democracy stronger through transparency and accountability, namely with things like blockchain and AI
It's more likely that AI enhanced capitalism allow more smaller entrepreneurs to take marketshare from big players, resulting in everyone being able to have comparatively more.
There are real world constraints on such things though.
IMO, empowerment is a better general target than attempting democratic control... Because democracy implicitly require giving over power to representatives, who can win by just courting the dumbest voters... And who also then get to have influence in shaping the minds of voters, thus compromising the value of democracy.
We are stuck in this stupid 2 party system because the voters minds have been captured.
We may be pleasantly surprised by what is possible with future technologies, ASI being a prime example. What if the energy problem is solved, and energy becomes unlimited and essentially free? New manufacturing techniques that we can only imagine today might erase the competitive advantages of big corporations. It feels like we just have to limp through the transition period without killing each other in enormous numbers (our own stupidity being a way bigger risk than a terminator AI in my opinion).
Great read, and quite insightful. I have my concerns regarding the new "holy trinity" of AI+Crypto+Blockchain but I do thing it may do the deed with regards to doing business WITHIN the digital marketspace (i.e. the future metaverse where it all comes together). However the physical world (factories, producing things, moving things around) is very different, and the fact that capital needs to be deployed massively means that proper incentives will have to be put in place to assure the proper guardrails. Then again, building the digital marketspace required for a metaverse to operate ALSO requires enormous amounts of capital, so I am not sure we will be able to bypass corporations for quite some time.
Basically we need to protect competition. Stricter anti-trust enforcement, more limited patent protections,etc. The problem is that big corporations get political clout and capture the regulators.
People who are motivated mainly by money do not create Amazons or Teslas.
Corporations exist to facilitate some initial person or group's vision, to express their values, and to achieve some goals that they value.
They make money when other people also believe that what they produced is in fact valuable to those people who are buying the product or service.
But beyond that, corporations are subject to evolutionary processes... Capitalism is evolution applied to human organizations.
Evolution, because it optimizes for many important variables at a time... Produces systems that are rarely all that clean and pretty when you start looking at them deeply.
It's like democracy. Corrupt governments are a natural byproduct of the fact that rule requires compromise between major groups who have different values and interests.
So that, from the perspective of any of those groups (who don't respect the others), the compromises appear corrupt.
The problem is in some ways less with the system, and more with human intelligence being too shallow to properly grasp the complexity of what works in the real world.
That and most of us were raised to garbage fables as kids, that just plain did not encode useful frameworks of real world understanding w.r.t what does and doesn't really produce better outcomes.
It's hard to really fix wrong understanding that is part of the foundational framework with which you understand the world.
We need an efficiency tax on corporations that benefit from AI robots, both digital and physical and those corporations need to be transparent (block chain). The tax should go to those folks that lost their jobs (UBI or similar). And perhaps some to government to bring down the debt. Efficiency will decrease costs substantially overall and first adapters will gain market share. The problem I see is that corporations will try to capture as much profit and not share (the top 1%). The only hope there is that "excessive profits breed ruinous competition".
That's what competition is for. AI productivity gains will drive prices down - which is more desirable than artificially reducing profits.
And a company profiting more barely affects the economy... Because:
1. In order to get anything, they have to spend money, and it's thus recirculated.
2. If they hold onto the money in cash form, the banks will give out loans against it and it'll then recirculate.
The human tendency to think that the rich are hoarding does not apply to the modern world.
Money is not grain or meat that can be hoarded. It's an abstracted IOU.
If you haven't spent your money, that's like saying that you gave value to others and haven't yet taken anything real back.
The meta question is … How do we defeat Pareto?
Large corporations are an inevitable result of ruthless competition.
The solution has something to do with willing cooperation. The winners have to be willing to share the benefits. Not just share them “fairly”, but share them generously.
Sounds religious, but Prisoner’s Dilemma teaches something similar.
If they shared out aggressively, they would:
1. Become unviable or never grow to be meaningfully large corporations.
2. Their prices would go up.
What you really want from corporations is for them to create as much value as possible, as cheaply as possible, so that whatever people's income is, they can have more than they would otherwise be able to have.
IMO, a better way of thinking about this (assuming that one didn't need investors you need to pay back to do big things), would be something like Amazon's approach to innovation vs. maintenance:
1. When research is being done, a lot of talent is thrown at the thing to develop new capabilities.
2. Once it's solid, you create forcing functions to minimize human involvement in making those processes work, to maximize efficiency, and reduce the cost to deliver that service... Thus increasing your competitiveness.
Companies need more money when they're exploring, but assuming that they've figured it (and after they've expanded their ability to deliver to more customers also), they no longer need as much money to run day to day, to deliver.
To some degree these kinds of things happen organically as long as there's no major regulatory capture, and assuming that what the company is delivering isn't too difficult to replicate... And even if it was difficult to replicate, if the profit margins were high enough, investors and other entrepreneurs would still attack in the absence of regulatory capture.
One of the more garbage examples of regulatory capture is healthcare in the US... If we can't get cheap medicines locally, we should just as well be able to get them from a country like Germany for cheaper... What's good enough for them is good enough for us.
Although, the other side of that is that because there's more money in US healthcare, the US does more than 70% of the world's medical research... The rest of the world is mostly in maintenance mode and not innovating..
... They should pay us more for our healthcare tech than they do.
No, this line of thinking is tantamount to "everyone just needs to be enlightened" you need to think structurally and systematically. Incentives have to be right.
Maybe the trick is to create systems to tease-out the incentives that already do exist, but are currently too hidden to be actionable, such as the very tangible benefits of generosity.
there are more of us than there are of them. we can make democracy stronger through transparency and accountability, namely with things like blockchain and AI
It's more likely that AI enhanced capitalism allow more smaller entrepreneurs to take marketshare from big players, resulting in everyone being able to have comparatively more.
There are real world constraints on such things though.
IMO, empowerment is a better general target than attempting democratic control... Because democracy implicitly require giving over power to representatives, who can win by just courting the dumbest voters... And who also then get to have influence in shaping the minds of voters, thus compromising the value of democracy.
We are stuck in this stupid 2 party system because the voters minds have been captured.