Capitalism is a system organized around the constraint of limited resources, the most limited—i.e., the most expensive—being human effort.
The notion of a prosperity shared by all human beings, and in fact all living things is a beautiful moral ideal, it is what we all strive to provide for our family and to all people we love. Indeed, within our families almost all of us are socialists, parents are selfless towards their young children, and later children are selfless towards their elderly parents.
People struggle to see universal prosperity as an ideal because it is so hard to imagine a world without the requirement of our limited human effort. If you think deeply though, any other ideal implies that you enjoy the suffering of others, as you definitionally do not enjoy the suffering of yourself. This may indeed be the unspoken heart of seeking power for power’s sake. To seek the suffering of others as its own end is evil.
The reason Marx’s ideal of shared means of production has failed abysmally is that he didn’t account for the fact that this production, to date, has always required as an input the world’s most limited resource: human effort.
Human effort requires incentives, i.e., relative individual benefit, in order to prevent rampant freeloading to a degree that has historically made attempts at equal societies first resort to correcting freeloading with fear and, eventually, to collapsing.
This requirement of incentive for human effort is the basis of cynicism but also what economists view as “rational” reason. Yet, many parents are willing to make huge and enduring selfless sacrifices for their children, who they are not required to have but choose to. Many think of a system of strong incentives as liberating, yet this is delusional, as incentives definitionally reward things we would not choose to do otherwise. They take away agency rather than providing it.
The requirement of incentive for human effort exists because our love of the collective—of people we have never met—in aggregate is not enough of a motive for us to put forth the aggregate effort required to sustain the collective.
The largest relative individual benefits in capitalism go to the owners of technical inventions that are able to scale human effort: sometimes in direct ways like the sewing machine, but sometimes in less direct ways, as with phones replacing postal delivery, television scaling the reach of thespians, or social media scaling our ability to entertain each other.
The breakthrough of general-purpose computing in 1987 allowed humans to begin writing code to automate their work, scaling human effort in leaps and bounds—particularly when combined with the subsequent breakthroughs of the internet for fast and seamless information sharing.
So capitalism is oriented around the limited resource of human effort. It therefore rewards most the inventions that are able to scale human effort. It follows that capitalism is designed to motivate an invention that reduces the requirement of human effort to zero.
Therefore, the final invention of capitalism will be making human effort free, with the invention of a general-purpose computer that can write its own code, a robot that can build another robot in order to fulfill the request of a human. Directional inventions are what we call “generative AI” today; many refer to this final invention as “artificial general intelligence” or “AGI.”
There are two possible outcomes upon reaching this invention:
a) We continue to have capitalism, in which case it is winner-take-all for the owner of this invention. They will effectively be an absolute dictator, as any competing force would have limited human effort, and they would have infinite. This would destroy agency for all but the dictator.
b) We convert to socialism and collectively own this machine, providing infinite effort for all, maximizing agency for all, and enabling all beings to seek self-actualization.Perhaps human nature is incompatible with b, in which case our best hope is that a figure of messianic benevolence owns the invention of AGI and is able to embed and infinitely replicate their own goodness into it.
This final invention is inevitable, as it cannot practically be prevented worldwide, and Western powers have a track record of distributing benefits and power to their people.
Through this lens, fiscal politics within the context of capitalism are operating on a temporary situation rather than a permanent one and right or wrong must be viewed as a tradeoff between the speed with which we achieve this final invention and providing for those alive today who will not be alive when this destination is reached.
We must also do our best to financially reward those who act with genuine interest in the collective and financially punish those who seek to harm the collective for self-interest, because we must do our best to increase the likelihood that the eventual owner of AGI genuinely desires to benefit the rest of us.
I wrote this back in 2015, not realizing at the time how rapidly this would all begin to play out in the middle of the following decade, who knows, maybe those of us alive today will see if I was right.
At the time (and I’m sure still) these statements occupied an odd space: socially controversial yet, to me, intellectually clear.
(image generated by providing this article as a prompt to Dall-E 😉)