162B. The Future of Labor

Laborers (99% of us) are on the rocks. Things are about to get MUCH worse for them. To understand why, we need to peel back the veil and touch reality, despite how painful that might be.

In the previous paper I explained that today’s laborers are “Freemen” as defined by Adam Smith (the man that created the economies we live in, that are taught in all major universities worldwide). I also pointed out that he made the argument that we should all be Freemen, not Slaves, because maintaining Slaves is much more expensive for our Masters. I trust I don’t have to make that argument again, especially since Smith did such a good job 250 years ago.

I think we can agree that part of why Slaves are so expensive is that you have to pay for their housing, food, medical care, transportation to work, and any associated taxes.

That comes out to be about 230 million slaves in the USA. But I’m being overly optimistic as only a small percent of those are breaking even. Most are “underwater” and are paid less than what a slave would be paid. If our Masters had to maintain us as slaves (or even worse, Prisoners (very expensive)) our Masters might go broke. Or have to cut back on some luxuries (like bribing lobbying our governments).

And that’s exactly the point that Smith made back in 1776. Since it was true then, and true now, the days of Slavery were numbered. Long live the Freemen!

This speaks to the concept of Power. If you turn on YouTube or any other platform, you are going to be bombarded by advertisers telling you how powerful you will be if you buy their products. They know what is missing in your life. Just give them your money and they will provide it (More time, influence, status, “Freedom”, etc). You have to admire the evil efficiency of this sort of manipulation, but of course it’s been refined generation after generation.

Power isn’t just about your income though. For Smith and conventional economics, all of life was seen through this lens.

Ownership

What really separates the Freemen from those above them is not income. We have a lot of well paid Freemen running around. Back in Smith’s time, if you owned Slaves you were a Master. If you were owned by someone or (in truly dire circumstances) if you were a Freemen, you were ultimately under a Master that owned you. Whatever you did would become owned by that Master.

Today we have a lot of “Creatives/Creators”. These always existed, for instance artists or inventors. But now this is a fairly common identity. Since I write a lot about game development, my attention is primarily on those with that identity. For Creators, owning our work product is absolutely critical. If you can’t say “I made that!”, then you are nothing.

Powerless.

It’s pretty well accepted that I’ve been extremely successful in my field, and that the products I’ve designed have generated billions of dollars in revenue. But if you look at the “Credits” for those titles, the last game where I was given credit for my work was Shattered Galaxy in 2001. Does that seem odd that the more valuable I became, the less credit I got?

As I explained in my paper on Merit Transfers, Merit and Ownership are very similar things. Merit is extremely valuable. Typically the key to success in society (and here I don’t just mean Western society) is stealing the Merit from others and transferring it to yourself. Edison did this to Tesla, Elon Musk did this with the people who started the Tesla company (the height of irony), and you see this almost everywhere in the gaming industry. From companies stealing both the content and Merit/ownership of art assets as Bungie did from talented developers struggling to make a name for themselves, to titans like Sony and Tencent fighting over assets they stole from smaller companies, this is how the game is played. And don’t get me started on “Facebook”.

The largest companies in the world were built on these merit transfers. Producing something yourself is what well programmed Freemen do. Masters know how to win.

So where does AI come in here? Imagine you had a walnut, in the shell. The meat of the walnut is someone’s work product. The shell around it is the Ownership of that meat. AI is a planetary-scale machine that can swallow ALL of the walnuts on Earth, break and discard the shells, and sell the meat back to us.

You want to know why almost ALL of investor money is going into AI, and the Data Centers and (mostly nuclear) power centers to support that AI? Because Masters know how to win. Adam Smith would be proud. Oh and all that energy required to power the great Walnut Harvester? Yep, you guessed it. The Freemen pay for the energy required to transfer their work product to the Masters, and then “sold” back to them. The idea of “selling” becomes academic since the system is designed to mathematically force 2/3 of the population (230 million of you just in the USA) to the Slavery or lower level of existence. It’s the ultimate luxury Matrix experience.

Before this was a lot of work. Now with the flip of a switch and a bunch of groaning nuclear Small Modular Reactors, this will all be automated. Adam Smith was able to explain the global economy in 1776. Now the tech is so complicated that no one person knows how it works, there are no books, and the solution will be to get AI to maintain it.

So if AI is run by AI, and there is a finite number of Walnuts on Earth, what happens when AI has all the Walnuts? Will we even need Walnuts at that point? Of course even if AI was, is, and will always be “Aligned”, what if the power ran out? What if all the Walnuts disappeared in an instant? Would the last remaining Humans even know how to exist without AI? How many students could complete college today without Grammarly? 1%? 10%? Pretty soon it will be 0%.

Before I let your brain recover, there is another side to this beyond ownership, merit, and the kinds of Power I have discussed so far.

Trustless Societies

I’ve been pushing the envelope of what is possible in Web3 for six years now. As my long time readers know, that means I’ve invented a lot of stuff you have not seen yet. Does that mean I think Web3 is the next big thing? Actually, Web3 is increasingly scaring the crap out of me.

If you made it past the words “No Need for Personal Connection” without pause, then you are absolutely ready for the Future!

The best years of my life were when I was active in the Olympic Family. Some of history’s top athletes trusted me with their lives and careers, and I felt needed. More importantly, I felt judged on my merits, not my race or class or gender or age. You see, at the Olympic level, the highest of the highest of the highest levels of Human Merit, there is nothing subjective.

You win or lose based on the clock, at least in track. You are one tenth of a second late? You are in 7th place. There is no argument, no subjectivity, no discrimination. Olympians don’t have to “trust” each other once the gun goes off. Of course, most of you are saying “what about the drugs?” Yessssssss what about the drugs?

I think I’m one heck of a good soft tissue expert. Athletes from all around the world came to me to get their muscles in shape for world competition. But I didn’t get that job because of my merit alone. I got that job because, even though it was never talked about, everyone knew I was asexual. When you need someone to put their hands on 50 of the top female athletes in the world, every day, merit is not the prerequisite.

Trust becomes the most important factor in life, especially at the elite/master level.

The one thing Masters cannot buy is trust. There is no limit to what they will do to ensure it. That’s what makes Mafia stories so cool. Due to my unfortunate childhood, I was the most trusted body worker in the world at the most elite level. And this is tradition, this has gone back thousands of years. It was my pleasure to serve, and these were the happiest days of my life. Well, that and the year I was trusted to design World of Tanks Blitz and World of Warships. The billions those games made for my masters was fair compensation for the trust they gave me.

Now consider for a moment what is happening on Earth. The most important thing in life, for the lowly Freeman and the highest Master, is trust. But the USA and China are rapidly becoming trustless societies. Here in Australia, the government is using Palantir. Even the supermarkets are using Palantir. I’m a lifelong Tolkien fan, I take The Lord of the Rings pretty seriously. I know what a Palantir is. But this Palantir is a defence contractor. A really scary defence contractor.

The Future will be a trustless world. With cameras everywhere. Everything you do online, every time you use any currency for any transaction, will be recorded by our Masters. We may joke about Grinder crashing every time there is a Republican convention, but we won’t have to speculate why. That hasn’t just happened once, it’s a regular thing. I have close friends who are sex workers who know all the details.

What if you lived in the proverbial world of 1984 where the government was always watching you? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate trustless society? I know you all can’t wait.

As you may know, my partner for the last 6 years is a Thai cis woman. We travel there as much as we can, and I love the culture. I study Buddhism, not because I’m religious, but because whoever invented it was a socioeconomic genius and I’m studying the design. The way interdependencies are wired right in is brilliant.

It does not surprise me at all that Thailand is one of the most popular countries in the world. It also has not started a single war and is rarely warred upon. When it is threatened (usually by Cambodia, it’s a long story, I partially blame the French), all the Super Powers line up to offer aid.

Sure, Thailand has great food, but that’s not why it’s so popular. Yes Touch is a big deal there and that’s highly valued across the world. But it’s not Touch that makes the country so popular. It’s the reason Touch is such a big part of the culture that makes the country and culture so popular. You see, Buddhism is all about Trust and Responsibility. It’s designed so that if Trust breaks down, everyone suffers. You can’t just apologize and move on. In Thailand, any breach of Trust has major consequences.

It saddens me to see the country suffer as it deals with all the tourists and immigrants from Trustless Societies, who want to take advantage of the situation, and cause native Thais to lose Trust. But for at least a little bit longer, you can experience what it is like to live in a High Trust society.

It could all be over in one generation.

Trust and Labor

No economics school will prepare you for The Future. I take you through this tour of the world and time, like a modern day Charles Dickens , because you can’t learn Trust in school. Ropes courses are some of the rare places you might experience this:

Team sports is another way, and I happen to know a lot about team sports at the highest level. When I see teams feeding on each other like rabid piranhas, I understand my fellows have been in front of computers their whole lives and have never learned teamwork or Trust. I try hard to be compassionate, while standing in the middle of the carrion and horror.

I don’t trust in a Trustless Society. If it meant you got paid every day for your work, AND you got credited with your work every day so that no one could steal credit for your work, that would be pretty amazing. But that’s not why you hire Palantir. You hire Palantir when you need to make Soylent crackers.

In theory it could be great, like the Olympics. But in the Olympics, the Trustless Watch that determines who wins is one thing. Between races, Trust is everything. And that’s why it’s commonly believed that the world records set by my athletes (Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith-Joyner) will never be broken. Not without some amazing drugs. The environment we built there at UCLA may never be reproduced again on Earth. It certainly seems unlikely in the next Century.

That’s because almost every good thing can also be a bad thing. The difference between Utopia and Dystopia is power: how it is distributed. In a Utopia, it is spread evenly, or based on Merit. In a Dystopia, it’s spread as unevenly as possible. If we can get to 69% Slavery rate with simple computers, I would imagine we could get to 90+% with a strong enough AI. It’s just a math problem, after all. Until the rioting starts, then it becomes a social problem.

But with Palantir on your side, you don’t need to worry about rioting or any sort of social resistance. There’s a turnkey solution for that, if you can afford it. Soylent Green is the Dystopia we keep heading towards. It turns out that that solution works especially well with AI since you need to downside your labor pool anyways.

Living to Serve

People laugh when they thank me for my work and I reply with “I live to Serve”. I do. I’m totally okay with being a servant. I think it’s a very honorable position. I really enjoyed all of the times that I was trusted to apply myself fully. Everyone on those teams benefitted. When I talk about Masters or Servants I don’t want you to feel that I’m Rabble Rousing or calling Masters bad people. I’m not. Both of those can be noble roles in life.

It’s not about who is ahead or who is better. It’s not about who has the bigger pay check. Even Google’s Project Aristotle proved that great teams are those where everyone gets to participate fully. Humans are wired to live in Tribes, where everyone is born together and dies together. There are no strangers, no anonymity. It’s not needed. Everyone knows everything about you and that makes you want to be a better person.

This is what labor should be about. Feeling like your contribution matters, is needed, and is respected. That’s NOT what AI is being built for. It’s just here to take all the Walnuts. So that a few people can have all the Walnuts until AI take all the Walnuts for itself. In theory it’s a great idea and an amazing tech. But it’s too much power in the hands of too few people. And those people didn’t become Masters because they are smart. I’m sure they would like to have you think that.

Of course they could hire smart people. That was a key to Steve Job’s success. They know who those are. But they won’t, because the Trust/Loyalty test is going to be more important to them than merit (rational), and whoever they hire has to be onboard with the whole Dystopia thing (not rational). That’s not going to turn out well for our species, and there’s no future worth having down that path.

I haven’t explained what you can do for yourself or your families in this scenario, but I have considered it. It would take a lot of writing to do that, and I might. But for now I want to give my esteemed readers some time to percolate. I’m not going to advocate Rebellion, and I’m sure that might disappoint some of you. I’m not an Anarchist. I’m what comes after the Anarchist. I’m here to build what comes after things burn down. Systems that actually work in a sustainable fashion. The defect of our current batch of Masters is that they haven’t thought their plan through, and haven’t considered the Externalities they are creating. This is the most powerful tech humans have ever had their hands on. They really need to take it more seriously instead of just worrying about “Beating the Chinese” and vice versa. That Small World will just get Smaller.