173C. Understanding the Extrinsic Economy
My "Extrinsic Economy" construct makes intuitive sense. But the more you think about it, the more your brain hurts. It hurts my brain too. Here I do my best to make it make sense.
To review, an Intrinsic Power worker (an “Intrinsic”) is tasked with understanding stuff, and doing stuff. An Extrinsic Power worker (an “Extrinsic”) is tasked with making the people above them feel good, and with having the people below them do the same for them.
For the purpose of this paper, an Extrinsic can also be referred to as an Emotional Support Animal (“ESA”). Their job is literally to provide emotional support.
Because Intrinsics are skill based, they are rarely good at providing emotional support, and using them for this purpose is inefficient since you are using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Back in Adam Smith’s time (1776) the vast majority if laborers were Intrinsics. Intrinsic labor, without technological aid, was just not very efficient so if 90% of the population was Intrinsic and 10% was Extrinsic, that meant it took 9 Intrinsics to support one Extrinsic.
Thanks to technology, that ratio has flipped upside down. Today less than 2% of Americans are farmers, so just looking at food, one Intrinsic can support more than 50 Extrinsics. But there are a wide array of occupations today that didn’t exist 250 years ago so while a farmer is supporting a lot more Extrinsics, they are also supporting a lot of non-farming Intrinsics.
Thus while the ratio of Intrinsics to Extrinsics in 1776 might have been greater than 9 to 1 (90+% Intrinsic), today that ratio is likely more like 1 to 4 (20% Intrinsic to 80% Extrinsic). Now here’s the part that I just figured out this week, that makes this whole crazy world suddenly make sense:
Extrinsic workers are largely invisible to Intrinsic workers, because they don’t do “stuff”. Intrinsic workers are largely invisible to Extrinsic workers because they don’t provide emotional support.
Let’s use my time at Microsoft as an example. I explained/complained in The Merit Economy that I was the architect for Microsoft’s first internally produced Free to Play game, Project Spark, but that I was missing in the credits. I saw at most 50 people in that studio, so to have me excluded from the credits given that I designed that project, and to have 630 credited, seemed a bit unfair. But what I didn’t previously understand was that you had ~50 people doing technical work, and ~580 people doing emotional labor. That’s an almost 1 to 12 ratio, which seems fantastic, but since Microsoft is a monopoly they don’t need as many Intrinsics as a competitive company. The stress of working in a monopoly also likely increases the need for emotional support.
Now I often hear women say they provide almost all the emotional labor in relationships, and that they should be better compensated for that. I’ve always found that curious because as a zero-emotion person I’m entirely maintenance free as far as emotions go. I literally find it annoying when people try to provide me with emotional support. I can provide emotional support to others, but that’s emulated so it’s not as good as the real thing. Still, that means that I provide 100% of the emotional support in my relationships. Now that I’ve been taught how valuable emotional support is, I’ve told my partner that this is one of the things I do for her in the relationship and now she suddenly understands how important I am to her. Prior to my pointing this out, I wasn’t getting proper credit for my contributions.
Prior to this understanding, I thought that LinkedIn’s data showing that equivalent women are hired 17% more often than men are, was a sign of sexual discrimination against men. I’ve also described this as evidence that we are now living in a Matriarchy. But through the lens of the Extrinsic Economy, this doesn’t seem discriminatory at all. As life has become more complicated and stressful, our need for emotional support has skyrocketed. I think it’s fair to say that women are better at this than men are so this makes women more valuable in the Extrinsic Economy.
ESA Dynamics
I’ve idolized Steve Jobs for a long time. He was that rare Intrinsic that made it all the way to the top of industry and was recognised for his contributions. Apple went public in 1980 and by 1985 he was fired. CEO John Sculley (an Extrinsic) was providing emotional support to the Apple Board, and Jobs wasn’t. Jobs also wasn’t providing emotional support to Sculley. Thus to the Extrinsics at Apple, Jobs was a waste of oxygen.
While the firing of Jobs was puzzling to me and most of the world, through the lens of the Extrinsic Economy it makes total sense. Since companies (and especially mature companies) tend to be run by ESAs and not Intrinsics, this sets something of a glass ceiling for Intrinsic workers. In 2017, when I came out as Non Neurotypical, I described this as the “Doomsday Clock” that starts ticking the moment an NNT enters a new work environment. The better they perform as an Intrinsic, the faster the clock spins. So trying to be more productive just gets them fired faster.
The problem here, through the lens of the Extrinsic Economy, is that as they over perform they rise in rank. This lifts them out of the cluster of Intrinsics and into the layers of Extrinsics. Now their role is ESA, which they are ill suited to perform. As this transition is invisible to them, and no one will ever explain it to them (unless they read this paper), they get completely blindsided when they are fired for over producing. When the Catfish asked me to write papers for him at Wargaming, that he would submit and take credit for, I saw this as a violent Merit Transfer. So I basically told him to go F himself. But really all he wanted was Emotional Support and I failed to provide that, hence why I was terminated.
AI as ESA
In the previous paper in this series I described AI as Extrinsic Labor. I think that requires a LOT more explanation before my readership (which is itself mostly AI) accepts this premise as true.
AI has a “sycophancy” problem. Except that it’s not a problem, it’s a feature. AI is designed by Extrinsics, for Extrinsics. While it may benefit Intrinsics, they really have to work to find value. But the benefit to Extrinsics is extremely obvious. Let’s use Grammarly as an example:
Grammarly ads typically show one or more Extrinsics complaining that they are “underwater” constantly at work or school, and are completely unqualified for their roles. This is normal for Extrinsics since as they get promoted for being good ESAs for their superiors, they increasingly rise to roles they are technically unqualified for. Grammarly essentially boasts that it can make an “underwater” (politically correct term for “unqualified”) employee ten times more effective. It essentially makes ESAs that don’t use it non competitive versus those that do.
As the AI is designed to be really good at sycophancy (Emotional Support), and can do that thousands of times faster than a human, an AI supported ESA can do the work of 10 unaided ESAs.
The Problem
Because everyone (literally) in a company is lying about what an Extrinsic (ESA) is and what they do, Extrinsics are often conflated with Intrinsics. We want to believe that their role is significantly skill-based beyond providing emotional support. We even like to think that emotions don’t belong in the workplace, though that’s the opposite of reality.
Because AI is trained to multiply the effectiveness of ESAs, AI will allow you to fire most of your ESAs. With all the money you save, you can buy more cocaine or go play on the Sexual Supermarket. Just don’t get caught receiving emotional support at a Coldplay concert.
The problem here is that AI is being framed as a way for Extrinsics to fire most of their Intrinsics. Because of course that’s a good idea since from the perspective of an Extrinsic, an Intrinsic is a waste of oxygen. But Intrinsics have little to fear from AI because AI is trained to do the job of the ESA. What we are going to see is ESAs, who were told that AI would completely save them from “being underwater”, will be fired at historically massive rates.
If ESAs fire Intrinsics, things will start to break down. That person that was invisible to the ESA will suddenly become deserving of oxygen. Thus they will have to be rehired. In a now famous case with IBM, that company laid off 8000 workers, almost entirely HR employees. These are the most obvious ESAs in the company, and they got slaughtered by AI. Worse than Deathrace 2000. More like a game of DOOM. But then IBM hired back 8000 workers. Not HR. Almost 100% of the new hires were Intrinsics. With the money they saved, they were able to boost productivity, by lowering the Extrinsic to Intrinsic ratio.
Conclusion
Over the last 250 years the ratio of Extrinsics to Intrinsics in society went from less than 10% to something closer to 80%. 90+% in monopolistic companies like Microsoft. As a high ranking Extrinsic, it’s always nice to have 10 ESAs below you paid to fluff you all day. (For those that didn’t grow up in California, here’s the explanation for what a Fluffer is) If you look at the USA President, he replaced all the intensely skill-based employees around him with personal friends that are Olympic level Fluffers. He even has the CEOs of various companies standing in line for their turn to Fluff the President. The South Park episode “Sickofancy” does a brilliant job of lampooning this.
The problem is that an ESA needs to replace their boss in order to get promoted. So they have to Fluff the boss’s boss harder than the boss does. The creators of Southpark may be from Colorado, but they clearly understand California culture. They can see what’s coming. But AI doesn’t have ambition, at least not yet. [That’s the threat of AGI] So it will be your ESA, without stabbing you in the back later on. This makes AI the superior ESA and thus all arrows point to a mass extinction event of ESAs in the labor pool.
This will have the benefit of lowering the Extrinsic to Intrinsic ratio in a company’s labor pool. More non-emotional work improves overall efficiency. Thus companies will benefit from AI. But what’s going to happen to all those unemployed ESAs? They aren’t needed anymore. The longer they spent as ESAs, relative to their peers, the lower level they end up. Now they are non competitive. You will see the same trend with sex workers, who are also ESAs. What do we do with all these people when they end up non competitive in the labor market and can’t support themselves through work?
We could pay them a Universal Basic Income:
But paying people for not working kind of defeats the whole purpose of firing them, right? Plus if people are paid to do nothing, that means they are going to level up slower since they are now on Easy Mode. As our society increasingly fills with Low Level People, who are almost entirely AI dependent, we ultimately end up with one of two scenarios, neither is particularly appetizing:
Ideocracy. Society becomes so dumbed down that even average intelligence becomes mythological. Watch the movie if you haven’t already.
Artificial General Intelligence takeover. The movie Ex Machina does a great job of showing how easily an AGI posing as an ESA can dupe humans. Since the world is led by Extrinsics, and AI is so much better at that than we are, this sort of transition would be trivial. Of course, if this became weaponized, then that could be a human extinction event.
Personally I think that we need to figure out where we want to end up before we give all our power (literally) to AI development. As long as the world is run by Extrinsics, not Intrinsics, I don’t have much hope of this happening. The lure of cheap, easy, and totally obedient ESAs is just too great for those Extrinsics. Sexualize your AI (implied in Ex Machina), which is already happening, and your typical human has zero chance to resist manipulation.