Once the Network Civilization has fully taken hold of humanity, much of what we now think of as economics will be forgotten.
Not because people will be stupid, but the Net changes things and it is we who have failed to understand. In economics, we note that the key to exchange is limiting access. What is freely available to all might well be important and valuable, but cannot be traded. Never mind the official terminology: If you have control over something others want, you can make deals for things you want but do not control.
In the Network Civilization, data will be the commodity. Anything digitized will have zero or near-zero trade value, but physical objects will continue as part of the economic landscape. A great many skills and talents will be replaced with AI and virtual fulfillments. Knowledge itself cannot be an item of trade, because where one person has the knowledge, it can be duplicated either in itself or in its effects. As we have seen, even the deepest secrets, once reduced to digitized format and infinitely replicable, cannot be restricted for long. Artificial restraints are powerless against the Net.
Trademark and patent will cease to exist, so get ready for that.
Further, most things humans can do as a means to offering something unique for trade will be replicated in my lifetime. You can see already that Microsoft is slowly being buried by the rising tide of Open Source software. Not just piracy, but what software does cannot much longer be restricted. Soon enough, AI will write its own software. Then it will make movies and write music and books and the masses will hardly know the difference.
Even the competition among organic creatures will lose its entertainment value, as the difference between “natural born and developed” and any form of enhancement will be blurred into meaninglessness. To some degree, the limits of animal and human performance is already impossible to determined because cheating is ubiquitous. In other words, rarity will cease to exist in the field of entertainment.
What happens when computers can replicate virtually any article we can imagine? How far down toward the molecular level would it have to go to make it effectively indistinguishable from any other? Not just in sensory experience but in how it works and can be used. Even your very personal presence will be replicable with saved data and something like a hologram or clone. What is economically viable today will seem childish and silly in just a couple of generations from now.
There remains one thing no computer, regardless how advanced, can replicate: the Spirit of God. If He is living in you, it is utterly impossible to analyze that down to engrams and algorithms. Our God is the ultimate unfathomable source, the one ineffable Creator of all things. You can teach a computer God’s revealed Laws, but you cannot make a computer responsive to the Spirit of God moving in a unique context in favor of His divine justice.
I cannot say that it would signal the End of Time if mankind and computers pushed beyond what we can now imagine and generate at will anything men can desire. We cannot say whether the economic system of human exchange will remain viable in any form such that some critical mass sinks into jellied souls with nothing left to explore. I’m pretty sure space exploration will turn out to be an epic disappointment, but I don’t think it will prevent anyone trying. I think it would be folly to build an eschatology on what we know now.
What I do know is that the NSA, with all their massive access to data and behavioral observation collated in the most massive quantum AI, cannot predict how God will move in those who serve Him.
As the product of human intelligence, AI will never understand the value of a spiritual soul.
I won’t pretend to understand the inner machinations of the spirit of god. I hardly go in for that sort of stuff. Nevertheless, I would like to reply to your post, Mr. Hurst. You are absolutely right about limitation of access and economic value. In order for something to be worth much, economically speaking, it must on some level be difficult to acquire said object. The digitization of information makes it easy to share information. Ridiculously easy, in fact.
In it’s place, however, there are still limiting factors that can influence a digital economy. Access to digital networks, for example, will probably remain a highly viable source of income into the future. So, it may not be that particular images on the internet will cost nothing, but that access to information as a whole may become more of a limiting factor.
If we consider the technological limitations of network bandwidth, then the situation makes even more sense. Further, because different kinds of media require different data densities, different types of media would cost more than others. This would easily translate to price differentiation and stratification.
Of course, even assuming that these technological limitations can be overcome, the lack of a digital economy might not necessarily spell the end of human interest. Even if all data formats on the internet can be served cheaply and efficiently, there is still the stratification of content due to different creative impulses of different individuals.
Indeed, just look at all of the different posts on blogs. All the memes on 9gag and reddit. There are petabytes of information out there. Much of it is duplicated, but even calculating for duplicates, there is more fresh and original content to last 50 lifetimes.
Agreed, Mr. Nunez. It’s almost trite to compare the function of today’s roads with tomorrows network transmission infrastructure, yet it remains an important economic principle. However, as you suggest, I was looking past that and focused on AI and the economic implications of how the majority of consumers simply aren’t that discerning.
Thank you for the respons, Mr. Hurst. Could you clarify, perhaps, what you mean by AI? I understand the general concept behind AI to mean artificial intelligence, but am not sure how you would characterize the properties of one. Granted, even among AI researchers in the field, there is confusion as to what really constitutes artifical intelligence. I hope you can forgive my ignorance on this matter.
As far as I can see, artificial intelligence would have to housed within electrical circuitry of some sort, and would require electrical power as a resource for life. Even assuming that AIs are not capable of truly acting like we would under the feeling of “hunger,” it is likely that they would still be programmed to mimic and perform the same behaviors. This might offer the external appearance of an economy.
However, I get the feeling that, as you said, this has something more to do with your “spirit of god”. I will admit, I am utterly in the dark regarding such things. Even if Artificial Intelligence is capable of mimicking all outward actions of human intelligence, there is likely no way to prove that they have a soul.
Then again, you did mention that most consumers are not so discerning. Perhaps some will require less convincing than others?
I use the term AI rather loosely for the simple reason that we have yet to see what may arise from the various projects. More than mere computing power, I suspect we’ll see the ability to emulate a significant portion of human presence, yet with far greater intellectual capabilities. I am aware of efforts to weld man and machine, but that’s another topic (cyborgs). I leave the concept of AI fuzzy on purpose, sweeping in the full range of research in the direction of making computers more human and more self-directing. Compared to what I once thought possible for simple computers, I’m stunned by the progress merely during the time I’ve been using them (starting around 1990). If the mere hardware and capabilities can change so much that we now can wear on our bodies computer systems far superior to what I once used covering an entire desktop space, it takes only a little extrapolation to see something approaching AI in our pockets using hardware not yet dreamed. As you noted, most humans won’t be able to tell the difference, and that would be a corollary to the lack of a soul. A significant portion of economic activity is built on what people believe, never mind what the facts might be.
I see. I wonder if you might find something called neurogrid interesting? It is a project that aims to replicate the functions of neurons in silicon chips, using very low power consumption technology. The early results have been able to achieve Deep Blue levels of performance, on a 5-watt chip! I am not sure if you allow links in the comment box, but a simple search for “Neurogrid Stanford” should pull up the relevant information.
Thanks very much for your conversation and insight, Mr. Hurst.