Is it capitalism?
(draft) Exploring the causes of our discontent, and some fixes.
Bruce Schneier:
To me, almost all of the harms of AI we fear are not inherent to the
technology, but are inherent to the economic and political system the
technology is operating in. That is, the problem is capitalism.
The world was well in trouble before GenAI ate it.
Alienation, addiction, troubling income inequality, loss of curiosity and a sense of agency, regulatory capture, suppressed public anger, neocolonialism and more are all natural byproducts of the system that brought me the Macbook Plus I'm writing this with, as well as the Intertubes that allow this note to find y'all.
I marvel that all of Northern Africa overturned their governments in the Arab Spring, and none of them is better off. Part of the problem is that they didn't have a new, highly functional OS to install, to brutalize a metaphor. When the governance conversation starts up, it often gets hijacked by the thought-terminating cliché "the only alternative to capitalism is socialism/communism, and look how badly that turned out."
I am hopeful that small groups of humans and AIs can help humanity pull itself into a new, distributed and informal social contract that solves the problem of mass unemployment that I think AI is bringing, as it helps us all take care of one another and the pale blue dot we share.
These are not the only problems we face, and capitalism isn't their only cause. But how we see one another and how we agree to make decisions — which would feel good in a great form of governance, instead of oppressive — are important system-level levers that can tip the system in a far better direction.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.