What do the elites actually do for us?

“Ask not what use are we to the elites, ask what use are the elites to us.”

AI and robots are coming for jobs. The marginal utility of human labor is dropping like a rock. So, then, what good are we? “Why would the elites keep us around?”

It’s a fair question, but it’s a far more interesting question if we ask the reverse. Why would we keep the elites around?

It’s very obvious what the proletariat does for society. We work. We increase value. The economic primitive is “state transformation that adds value” not labor itself. But once AI and robots can create value without human input, then most humans become a “useless class.”

But elites also kinda become useless.

Right now, some elites believe that VC are going to be final job. But what is the economic primitive of a VC? It’s allocation of capital to make a new thing exist. We can already crowdsource this with platforms like Kickstarter. Sure, that’s not an Earth-shattering platform on its own, but it’s a proof of concept.

Historically, elites have marshalled resources to achieve large scale projects. From wartime projects, including mustering soldiers and weapons, to peacetime projects like the Apollo program or Hoover Dam, the economic primitive of an elite is fundamentally a Schelling point.

With the advent of AI, DAOs, quadratic voting, and internet algorithms, it seems to me that the elite’s days are numbered just as much as ours. After all, we can come to decentralized consensus about what we want to achieve as a species. No, pure democracy would not work, but it’s a matter of allocation. Allocation of time, energy, attention, capital, networks, and other resources.

In a future where ideas are even cheaper than they are today, and execution is fully automated on the substrate of AI and robotics, then you don’t need big brains like Elon Musk to make things happen. At best, the Elon Musks of the world serve primarily as foci of vision, values, and reputation. But the collective preference of humanity is expressed in the attention allocated, and capital follows attention.

But what if we did not need someone like Musk to serve as the nexus of attention and vision. Sure, we are apes, so our chimpanzee brains absolutely love the tribalism of being Team Elon or Team Elon Haters, so perhaps that’s going to be a durable feature of humanity.

But what about politics? Electing a human makes sense because you need a terminus of accountability. Someone that can be fired or jailed for executing the collective vision and values poorly. If your reputation gets low enough, the collective mandate gets rescinded. Plain and simple.

This is, more or less, how humans have always operated. The tribe wants you to be chief because of your vision, values, and reputation. And what the chief provides in return is that nexus of responsibility, coordination of effort, attention, and energy.

So, when we ask “what do the elites do for us?” the answer isn’t “nothing” but I think it’s going to radically change. AI, robots, DAOs, and blockchain could radically alter the structural advantages of having a Senator speak for you. It could also change the calculus of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

I think that we will see a reckoning of sorts, not a la The Purge, but rather, there will simply be fewer opportunities for elites to arbitrage power and resources into opportunities. And this outcome will arise organically as we invent better coordinating technologies and platforms. Consider that AI is already erasing the arbitrage opportunity around software, and software is the primary way to create new coordination technologies.

That’s not to say that all opportunities and society will be flattened. There will (and are) of course be new opportunities to arbitrage information, reputation, and other positional goods. What I’m personally coming to believe is that “vision, values, and reputation” might become the primary arbitrage opportunity in the future.

“Ask not what use are we to the elites, ask what use are the elites to us.”