“The study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods.“
“”I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem anymore – it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy!” – Accelerando
We are in a time between worlds, and it can be challenging to recognize the liminal period. I was lucky enough to stumble upon in short sequence a synchronicity of sources that also recognize this. ‘Making It‘ by Stephanie Krauss, ‘A Human Algorithm‘ by Flynn Coleman, ‘Education in a Time Between Worlds‘ by Zak Stein, and (of course science fiction) ‘Accelerando‘ by Charles Stross are all discussing in various ways how the next 10-100 years will be drastically different from the late 20th century market economy that we’ve come to know and love (or not as the case may be).
In ‘Accelerando’, Charles Strauss illustrates the beginning moments of an economic and artificial intelligence singularity (a time beyond which predictions become functionally impossible). What really caught my eye, however, was the phrase “Agalmic”, which means the study and practice of of production and allocation of no scarce resources. We have had inklings of this with digital media proliferation and sharing.
Soon, the means of survival (agriculture, transportation, manufacturing) will not depend on human labor but large scale automation. The fallout is that a large percentage of wage labor as means of procuring the means of survival will become obsolete. We won’t NEED people to work to turn raw materials into human usable goods (ie the rust belt). Yet, the entire economy and the modern conception of work or job is rooted in scarcity economics.
There are potential risks and benefits to a highly automated future. The biggest risk is corporate control of the means of production, without a sufficiently large consumer class (since there won’t be enough paying jobs in the classical sense) to purchase goods and redistribute wealth through a classical market. An enormous potential benefit is freeing up people (if we’re somehow able to redistribute the wealth generated by automation) to do tasks uniquely suited to interpersonal interactions. As Stephanie Krauss mentions in ‘Making it’, “…much of our human work will live in education, care, and community development; ie the care economy.” The challenge will be incentivizing this work or showing how much we care to do this.
My ask after reading this is to consider how flexible are any of our philosophies, and how rooted are they in ideology versus empiric evidence of how humans are put together and interact socially. If we can be humble and consider new ways of organizing ourselves, maybe we can gather the political will to robustly resource our future generations.