Extropia DaSilva
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: What would our lives be like if Amazon or Tinder ran an entire city?
Talk of Amazon reminds me of an old theory of Ludwig Von Mises.
Mises wanted to show why Communism could never work, and he used money to make his argument. Money is not really a thing. You can no more hold a dollar in your hand than you can hold an inch. That should give you a clue as to what the true nature of money is. It is a form of measurement, a calculation. What it measures (or calculates) is relative costs and value.
Mises pointed out that every time money changes hands, be it between two individuals or between organisations made up of many, that counts as a computation. Given all the people on Earth that would amount to billions of computations. So, the market system is like a computer that performs billions of money calculations.
In order to replace the market, Mises argued, Communism would have to be capable of building a computer that could perform just as effectively. He then went on to show that this was impossible. No computer could handle so much data.
However, he was writing in the 1950s (maybe even earlier) and things are very different now. Amazon alone wields more computational power than Mises thought necessary and its data centres etc are but a few nodes in the Web. We now have third-generation Decentralised Ledger Technology like hashgraph that can handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second yet is efficient enough to be installable on your average smartphone (which is orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers of the 1950s). How many smartphones are there in the world today? Hundreds of millions, at the very least, I would imagine.
The point is that it might have been impossible to replace the market system in the 1950s but now, with billions of pocket-sized supercomputers, sensors, 5G networks, third-gen DLTs and all that it would be a relatively trivial matter to inventorise the world’s resources and run production and logistics with technical efficiency. We could have luxury Communusm.
Or we could keep the market system in which case Thomas Piketty’s thorough analysis of 20th-century capitalism has shown us what we can expect: Ever-greater concentrations of wealth until we reach a point where .1% of the population own 99% of the wealth. What would such a world look like? The movie Elyssium, probably. Maybe there won’t be some huge, luxury space station we all gaze up at from our slums here on Earth but there no doubt will be ever-more isolation among the super-rich as they retreat into secure places guarded by private security, protected from the masses who have been displaced from gainful employment and whose anger rises every time the market collapses in increasingly spectacular fashion with ever-bigger speculative bubbles that require ever-greater transfer of wealth from the many to the few.
Socialism for the rich seems very exclusive to me. It caters to a club that, eventually, only .1% of the world will be a member of, so almost certainly none of us will be counted. I prefer Star Trek and its luxury Communism!
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2/14/2020, 2:08 am
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greendocnowciv
Registered: 11-2017
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Re: What would our lives be like if Amazon or Tinder ran an entire city?
Extie,
The Star Trek comparison to socialism or communism is believed by many - and it's needed for all who have some old fondness for either old idea. After all, the real world examples are all so, so bad.
The Mises challenge - replace a money economy with a computerized planned one - is one that some socialist leader should grab and try to use.
As you note, we gots us lot of computer power these days. It'll be interesting to see it modeled and actually work satisfactorily.
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2/14/2020, 6:39 pm
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greendocnowciv
Registered: 11-2017
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Re: What would our lives be like if Amazon or Tinder ran an entire city?
Spike,
That's a good idea that editor had, to get some sci fi writers to use that theme.
The Seasteaders are moving right along and explore many ideas - companies sponsor a Seasteading community and ruling the roost to some degree might work!
For any company willing to take the chance, they could explore negotiating with poor countries, trying to let them run an autonomous region analogous to a free state.
Various first-world nations have expat colonies in this and that poorer nation. A guy living there could have contacts with this or that megacorp - it could happen!
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2/14/2020, 6:58 pm
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