Humanity Unleashed
Putting AI in Service of the World
2. Social Systems of the Early 21st Century: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
2. Social Systems of the Early 21st Century: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
2. Social Systems of the Early 21st Century: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
To propose a meaningful alternative to our existing systems, we should acknowledge that they do certain things well, and any proposed alternative must at least be able to match or exceed that efficacy.
Existing capitalist systems do well in aligning people's self-interest with some type of endeavor that another party is interested in. Tools such as money, capital ownership, specialization, and trade all enable facilitating this exchange. However, in order to satisfy some form of demand in the world, said parties may be willing to engage in some negative (fast fashion, private prisons) or even destructive (drug trade, sex slavery) externality, and the mechanisms of capitalism have no solution for these harms without government intervention.
Our governance systems, for their part, are generally able to address the most extreme of these externalities, and thus ensure that society does not come to a screeching halt. In democratic countries, this is accomplished by government accountability to the people. However, democratic governments are susceptible to capture by special interests, capitalistic and otherwise, motivated by power aggregation. This, in addition to data and information processing asymmetries between the public and private sectors, has created a gap in democratic governments’ abilities to regulate their economic systems and resulted in emergent externalities.
In autocratic countries, the government typically wishes for their country’s economy and society to be healthy as a matter of creating durable power for the government itself or as a matter of national or ethnic pride. Note that this works better in technocratic countries (China, UAE) and less well in countries with established cults of personality (North Korea, Russia) or religious dogma (Iran, Afghanistan). Within autocratic regimes, draconian interventions to prevent emergent market externalities are possible, but at the cost of subverting the will of the people and potentially causing the loss of human rights. Other significant issues pertaining to the centralization of power are also present.
The unfortunate reality is that if it proves impossible for democracies to rise to the challenge of protecting their people from exploitation and despair, they will elect autocrats who, earnestly or not, promise them help. As is now playing out across the global stage, the backsliding of democratic function becomes increasingly prevalent. As it currently stands, the world walks a dangerous path that escalates the risk of a totalitarian end state.
Luckily, our options are not limited to the democratic free market and autocratic command economy systems that are on offer today. There is a technical solution that addresses the critical failure points of modern, liberal economic and governance systems and enables their best features (incentives to align individual and collective priorities, value amalgamation among diverse parties, technocratic selection of approaches best suited to satisfy those values, accountability of decision makers to the population) only now possible through emerging AI capabilities.
To propose a meaningful alternative to our existing systems, we should acknowledge that they do certain things well, and any proposed alternative must at least be able to match or exceed that efficacy.
Existing capitalist systems do well in aligning people's self-interest with some type of endeavor that another party is interested in. Tools such as money, capital ownership, specialization, and trade all enable facilitating this exchange. However, in order to satisfy some form of demand in the world, said parties may be willing to engage in some negative (fast fashion, private prisons) or even destructive (drug trade, sex slavery) externality, and the mechanisms of capitalism have no solution for these harms without government intervention.
Our governance systems, for their part, are generally able to address the most extreme of these externalities, and thus ensure that society does not come to a screeching halt. In democratic countries, this is accomplished by government accountability to the people. However, democratic governments are susceptible to capture by special interests, capitalistic and otherwise, motivated by power aggregation. This, in addition to data and information processing asymmetries between the public and private sectors, has created a gap in democratic governments’ abilities to regulate their economic systems and resulted in emergent externalities.
In autocratic countries, the government typically wishes for their country’s economy and society to be healthy as a matter of creating durable power for the government itself or as a matter of national or ethnic pride. Note that this works better in technocratic countries (China, UAE) and less well in countries with established cults of personality (North Korea, Russia) or religious dogma (Iran, Afghanistan). Within autocratic regimes, draconian interventions to prevent emergent market externalities are possible, but at the cost of subverting the will of the people and potentially causing the loss of human rights. Other significant issues pertaining to the centralization of power are also present.
The unfortunate reality is that if it proves impossible for democracies to rise to the challenge of protecting their people from exploitation and despair, they will elect autocrats who, earnestly or not, promise them help. As is now playing out across the global stage, the backsliding of democratic function becomes increasingly prevalent. As it currently stands, the world walks a dangerous path that escalates the risk of a totalitarian end state.
Luckily, our options are not limited to the democratic free market and autocratic command economy systems that are on offer today. There is a technical solution that addresses the critical failure points of modern, liberal economic and governance systems and enables their best features (incentives to align individual and collective priorities, value amalgamation among diverse parties, technocratic selection of approaches best suited to satisfy those values, accountability of decision makers to the population) only now possible through emerging AI capabilities.
To propose a meaningful alternative to our existing systems, we should acknowledge that they do certain things well, and any proposed alternative must at least be able to match or exceed that efficacy.
Existing capitalist systems do well in aligning people's self-interest with some type of endeavor that another party is interested in. Tools such as money, capital ownership, specialization, and trade all enable facilitating this exchange. However, in order to satisfy some form of demand in the world, said parties may be willing to engage in some negative (fast fashion, private prisons) or even destructive (drug trade, sex slavery) externality, and the mechanisms of capitalism have no solution for these harms without government intervention.
Our governance systems, for their part, are generally able to address the most extreme of these externalities, and thus ensure that society does not come to a screeching halt. In democratic countries, this is accomplished by government accountability to the people. However, democratic governments are susceptible to capture by special interests, capitalistic and otherwise, motivated by power aggregation. This, in addition to data and information processing asymmetries between the public and private sectors, has created a gap in democratic governments’ abilities to regulate their economic systems and resulted in emergent externalities.
In autocratic countries, the government typically wishes for their country’s economy and society to be healthy as a matter of creating durable power for the government itself or as a matter of national or ethnic pride. Note that this works better in technocratic countries (China, UAE) and less well in countries with established cults of personality (North Korea, Russia) or religious dogma (Iran, Afghanistan). Within autocratic regimes, draconian interventions to prevent emergent market externalities are possible, but at the cost of subverting the will of the people and potentially causing the loss of human rights. Other significant issues pertaining to the centralization of power are also present.
The unfortunate reality is that if it proves impossible for democracies to rise to the challenge of protecting their people from exploitation and despair, they will elect autocrats who, earnestly or not, promise them help. As is now playing out across the global stage, the backsliding of democratic function becomes increasingly prevalent. As it currently stands, the world walks a dangerous path that escalates the risk of a totalitarian end state.
Luckily, our options are not limited to the democratic free market and autocratic command economy systems that are on offer today. There is a technical solution that addresses the critical failure points of modern, liberal economic and governance systems and enables their best features (incentives to align individual and collective priorities, value amalgamation among diverse parties, technocratic selection of approaches best suited to satisfy those values, accountability of decision makers to the population) only now possible through emerging AI capabilities.