We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day The political system tends to lag behind technological change, which is often a good thing. I remember attending a House subcommittee hearing in the 1980s on whether the U.S. should create a phone-computer system modeled on the state-funded French Minitel, a text-only network being promoted as the wave of the future. Fortunately, the Internet exploded – making Minitel obsolete – before Congress could fund such a project.
– Glenn Harlan Reynolds reviewing this book
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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You know that governments are very very stupid when they fund projects after the private sector has established a superior equivalent.
French: Quaero, EC: Library digitisation:
Do you see a theme emerging?
Government is full of politicians: politicians excercise what power they have to gain more power and wealth.
For a politician, pouring taxpayer’s money into something is only ‘very very stupid’ if it doesn’t result in some personal gain. Whether the money is wasted is only a consideration if the public will find out AND if you can’t blame someone else.
But what about where the private sector has not yet established such a solution? Or where it cannot? Or where it could but will not? Is it valid in any of these cases?
The internet, of course, started as a government project under DARPA…
EG
On 17 August 1993, Kurweil Applied Intelligence Inc launched a prospectus for the raising of just under $17M net, for development of a device for automatiuc speech recognition.
Does anyone remember how that went (the technology, not benefit from the money)?
That would surely be a good reference on the ability of this particular technology seer.
Best regards
That old fallacy? Sheesh. I suppose it is hardly surprising a utilitarian like you would fall into that hole.
So maybe that solution is simply not needed or was needed but was crowded out by the state… just read this and follow the link to bastiat.org. That which is seen and that which is not seen…
The market will pay for things once it is economically viable (read profitable) to do so.
Much of man’s greatest achievements have been driven by commerce, be it the Age of Exploration, seeking out sea trade routes to the Indies to bypass the blocked spice routes, or the expansion of the United States west, the Manifest Destiny, to open trade and commerce back to the established east coast.
Great Wonders, such as the pyramids, were built by primitive cultures seaking everlasting glory in afterlife. Great engineering feats were built by mortal men building fortunes to enjoy in the here and now.
…and the Internet?
I see. So if the market doesn’t provide something – and since the state is slow and incompetent it won’t get there first – then we don’t need it? Stuff like sewerage, clean water, disease eradication, and so on?
Honestly, this kind of state-can-do-no-good stuff is really Pythonesque. What has the state ever done for us? Nothing! Er…the drains?
Yes, but what about when it is NOT profitable?
Manifest Destiny
A political statement of strategic interests, not a commercial endeavour.
Such as…the pyramids? Great Wall? The pantheon (in Rome, not the French one)? 2,000 year old aqueducts that still supply water?
EG
And so if the state does not do it, no one will? Really? If indeed no one will, then perhaps it ain’t as important as you think it is. Are you saying there is no demand, i.e. no one would pay for, for sanitation and water unless the state provides it? ‘Essential’ services provided by the state, such as fire departments, are done privately and work just fine in other parts of the world.
And as for the Internet, I wonder if ibanda is under the impression that what the internet became was due to government action? Perhaps if we had had privatised telecoms 40 years ago, we would have had something more like the modern internet 20 years ago.
The absurdity here is the notion that just cause the state did something, that is the only way it could have been done.
The core of the internet is surely still supported by the US government and it was developed initially with public funding. What it has become is a separate issue, but while its existence still depends on the goodwill of one major state it can hardly be seen as a major success story for private enterprise.
The other part of the equation is that the state has no money, only the power to take other people’s money and put it to uses they don’t want it used for. So when it takes the available money, private citizens are unable to fund visionary projects that might not fit the vision of the statists. Space Shuttle, anyone?
The Internet is something of a technological “sport”, in the genetics sense of the word. It probably came about, like Quantum Physics, a bit before it’s time and took everybody by surprise. One of the features of that painful weird birth being how hard it is to monetise many of the services – something not lost for a long time on people like Bill Gates.
The mobile network operators are working damn hard to ensure that mobile data doesn’t end up like the web to make sure they can make money off it.
To put things in context, the French had large scale Minitel systems up and running twenty years ago. It delivered a good range of services and it wouldn’t have taken many very slight changes in what happened to still leave them as the most connected people on Earth.
Fortunately, we got the net – yay! I’m happy about that but this train of thought is, as Euan points out, somewhat Pythonesque.
People often mutter about what would happen if the state had done x,y or z. Ignoring the point that without the state, or without constant state involvement, most of those things would have never ended up in the mass market. It’s the kind of reasoning that could ensure that Liberatarians never get out of the fringe.
So you are saying that the capital spent by the state to get things to that point would have just sat around doing not much at all and leading to nothing in particular?
I am curious why that question never gets answered.
No, Perry, and this is obvious. You’re creating a false dilemma of either the market does it or the state does it. Like much libertarian thinking, this is somewhat simplistic, to put it politely. It’s also obviously incorrect.
You are leaving out other options: for example, the state requiring that it be done and leaving it to the market to figure out how (e.g. drains), or the state paying the market to provide it (e.g. disease eradication, nuclear energy).
Cholera was eradicated in Britain (and in most other European nations) because the state required the creation and provision of things that the market had not provided and arguably could not or would not provide. I don’t see that as a trivial or unimportant thing.
Again, there is a distinction be made, which you plainly can’t see, between the state doing something and the state paying someone else to do something. The “someone else” can be a private company, a group of volunteers, whatever.
From the quotes around “essential,” I take it that you don’t consider the provision of fire fighting and control measures as particularly important?
The question is not what the internet has become, but its creation in the first place.
If you want to know what a private, profit making internet would be like, consider Compuserve (didn’t they do well?), or Microsoft’s idea that the net should run their (closed, proprietary) protocols. Would you be blogging on a private internet? Quite probably not, because you’d need permission from the owners of the network to create a blogging system. If they denied it, you could set up your own network, but probably couldn’t reach your old one unless you paid to access it. And of course, you’d have to pay for your own network so if you wanted anyone to read your blog probably you’d have to charge them.
In a sense, the internet has become what it is today because of government action. Government has at least made sure that the network does stay open and transparent, which private companies would not do.
Basically, like it or not, you’re blogging against the state on a system that wouldn’t exist without the state having created and maintained it, and kept it free. Oh, the irony (not just a property of steel, you know).
Will, I suspect, not could.
EG
Money sometimes does this – what do you think causes recessions?
However, addressing your question, the capital spent by the state would otherwise have been spent on something else. Perhaps more useful, perhaps less useful. But it cuts both ways.
The money spent building drains, public schools, sewer systems, and so on could have been spent privately. It might have been spent on developing the horseless carriage long before it actually happened. But, then again, the money not spent on drains and sewers would later be spent on additional medical care for the sufferers of dysentry, cholera, typhoid, etc.
You can’t create a perfect system. You have to do what you think is best at the time and using your best judgement as to how things are likely to shape up in future. Arguably, spending money on drains and sewers is better for the long term interest and development of humanity than spending it on inventing the car. I would say that taxation spent that way is actively better than the same money spent privately. But that doesn’t apply in all cases, of course.
You don’t read the right books, magazines, web pages, etc, then. This is a simple question that has been answered many, many times before. One can’t say that it’s necessarily better to spend the money privately (your assumption), or necessarily better to spend it via the state (your assumption of what I think). The ideologue, however, WILL adopt such a position one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean the real world is actually like that.
EG
‘The internet, of course, started as a government project under DARPA…’
Um, No. It started as a communications tool between several universities and then DARPA got their gloms into it (and got some control of it by promising ‘funding’ – read – taxpayer money).
Just a question – are there any privately owned, profitable mass transit system(s) in Europe ??
There are none in the U.S.A.
ALL of them are gov’t ‘owned’, run, etc.
ALMOST all of them operate at a loss.
ALL of them are beauacratic nightmares.
Could it be that they were never really needed at the time they were started but we were told that transporation using these systems would be cheap, clean, wonderful on and on (really ?? try the New York subway ‘system’ at any hour of the day or night, if you dare).
Had the idea been truly viable (profitable – yes, I know, a dirty word to many) they would have been started by private industry.
Now, so many depend on them (nanny state, we’ll take care of you from cradle to grave, government is the solution to everything mentality) that making them profitable would be a disaster (at least politically).
The problem with government versus private business is that government has a bottomless checkbook ( by going ‘back to the well’ and telling taxpayers to cough up more moneyand they will enforce this demand by seizures and/or force if necessay) whereas private companies have to make a profit or perish.
Government has no requirement to be efficient (and it isn’t ). There is ALWAYS more taxpayer money.
Whether or not that money is spent on something necessary is open to debate but if whatever it is spent on will garner votes, COUNT ON IT being spent.
Have a look here and see that the role of DARPA and similar state institutions was critical right from the start.
Lots. Most of the bus outfits in Britain, for a start.
Whether mass transit is profitable or not depends largely on population density. Most of Europe is very densely populated and therefore mass transit is not only feasible but in many places pretty much essential. One must also consider that mediaeval town planners had the lack of foresight not to consider the invention of the car and so built our towns and cities around the concept of the horse and cart. Many Americans who don’t travel seem to be surprised that most European cities don’t have the sprawling suburbs that many American ones do, and it is this difference that makes mass transit unprofitable in large parts of America but indispensable in much of Europe. It’s a different culture and a different society, therefore one expects different answers.
EG
A guide to photographers’ rights in the UK can be found here:
Photographers’ Rights
I believe there is an equivalent for the US but can’t provide a link. For other countries I have no information.
I like the idea of a mass photo taking demo…
We’re not talking about what the state has done, remember the old premise of net present value? We’re talking about what would happen in the future under a more libertarian regime. Money spent by the state is history, and it isn’t contradictory to say that I’m glad that the countries of the developed world have had state sponsorship of infrastructure. To a certain extent, the state has created the demand. Without history and the knowledge of what life was like without utilities and other infrastructure, and what it is like with them, we wouldn’t demand these services. The point is, there is nothing stopping the private enterprise from providing these services.
Perhaps there wouldn’t be great leaps forward in technological development such as nuclear technology, space exploration or the internet in future, as yet undefined spheres of technology, but that isn’t to say they wouldn’t happen. If government stopped sponsoring research, we wouldn’t all be magically transported back to the middle ages. The capital that is used by the state to progress special interests such as space exploration would be diverted to private citizens making money with existing technology that would probably have a greater NPV than equivalent state investment. It is hard to quantify precisely, because the state concentrates the resources of all citizens, but without such overlordship, who knows what each individual would do with their own capital? As libertarians, we argue all the time that individuals make better use of capital than the state, yet we are also susceptible to being bribed with the bells and whistles of the internet, moon landings and supersonic jets.
But by that logic, they’d never exist because we would not demand them the first time because we wouldn’t know what it is like with them.
True, in theory. In practice it doesn’t seem to be like that. Sewerage and drain systems, for example, cost a great deal of money to install and take a very long time to pay back – even then, a large part of the payback is not monetary. The market is not so good at making investments when you get a very small return after a very long time, and it is likely the money would be invested elsewhere in search of a quicker and better return. Because the state doesn’t need a quick return, or indeed any return, it can make such investments far more easily. The price is lower efficiency in most cases.
And the market just didn’t supply these things anyway. It’s not like the technology didn’t exist: in Rome the 2,500 year old cloaca maxima sewer is still a functioning part of the city infrastructure, the Segovia viaduct in Spain is 1,900 years old and still supplies fresh water. It’s just that the return for private enterprise doesn’t make it worthwhile, therefore it is unlikely the market will provide it, even though there is no reason in principle why it can’t.
Mostly they would happen, it would just take very much longer.
Quite possibly, but is making a quick buck the sole point of social and economic organisation? And what if, to use the example earlier, the money not spent on drains is spent instead on medical care to offset the consequences of not spending it on drains in the first place? Wouldn’t that just illustrate that progress would be slower and the gains of libertarianism rather smaller in practice than theory might suggest? Isn’t it better to have a once off high expenditure on drains now and then NOT spend money in the future treating the consequences of no drains? Jam tomorrow, as it were, and no flies swarming all over it?
Perhaps so, but the maybe libertarian should really be sufficiently honest with himself to concede that the most probable result of his policy IN PRACTICE is slower progress funded by an economy that booms terribly well (less regulated) but will also crash periodically (no money supply control to offset recession), coupled with a markedly increased gap between rich and poor (socio-economic Darwinism) and an increase in the numbers of people in real poverty (no welfare). Anarcho-capitalism is even worse, but would admittedly correct itself as it transitioned rapidly to a semi-feudal structure and then back in short order to a functioning state.
Having seen at first hand societies where government to all intents and purposes does not function, people don’t pay tax and everything has to be sorted out by the individual, family or village, I seriously don’t recommend it. It simply doesn’t work out the way theory suggests. This suggests the theory is wrong, or at best overly simplistic.
EG
Your logic only works if you can go back in time and change history. Sewers exist, utility networks exist, the internet exists.
Yes, but would you buy a house in an estate that didn’t have sewage or electricity or gas or a telephone network? Subsidisation of the provision of basic services enables conspicuous consumption, larger houses, sprawling cities. If landowners were forced to pay the real cost of the infrastructure they benefit from, it certainly would promote more efficient land use.
If everyone is richer, do you not think that the number of philanthropists would grow? Wealthy individuals prepared to sponsor other people’s dreams and visions? We already have the X Prize for private space travel, and in the twentieth century we had prizes like the Orteig Prize which spurned on Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic. Of course technological development would be slower, but in the meantime the wealth of individuals would grow to provide for a better off population. Imagine a world stuck in a technological vacuum of America 2005, simply by applying current technology, the welfare of the 6 billion current inhabitants of earth could be improved immensely without the need for government intervention. So what if we don’t go to Mars in our generation? So what if we don’t build an artificially intelligent computer to fly combat planes and drive tanks within the next 20 years? Technological development would still happen, but it would have more entrepeneurial direction.
All you are saying is that in an undeveloped society, the state can lead to progress. I concede your point. But is libertarianism suited for immature societies? Is there a point that the marginal utility of the state becomes negative? I think most libertarians think so, whether minimalists or anarcho-capitalists or somewhere else on the spectrum.
But what about things that don’t exist yet? Obviously they can’t be named and I’m not talking but predictable expansion of current technology. The logic of the drains example suggests that these things may very well not be developed by the market because by definition we don’t know how life would be with them, so can’t compare, so can’t demand. It’s quite possible – I’d bet it’s certain – that some new thing or technology will be discovered in the future which could have a major beneficent effect on humanity but which would not be developed by the market. In the libertarian model you propose, we don’t have them.
You can say fair enough, we don’t know what we’d gain so there’s no pain over not having it. But would you say it would have been better not have drains? It’s not enough just to say it would have been different, we DO know the benefits of drains and we DO know that things are unquestionably far better with them.
Isn’t that a tacit admission that Libertopia would compel smaller houses and a lower standard of living for the same real cost? I can’t see that being much of a sales pitch, can you? Don’t you think a lot of people might consider that the nasty old state isn’t so bad after all?
Yes, it would, but would it grow ENOUGH? And in any case, not EVERYONE is going to be richer – socio-economic Darwinism, remember. ISTR reading that before welfare the British gave about 10% to charity, whereas now it’s about 1%. Considering the enormous sums spent on combined private and state health care alone (about 9% of GDP in Britain, more in America), would charity be enough? And that’s just health care. What of schools for the poor? Relief for the poor? And recall you’ll have MORE poor people in Libertopia.
As things get more complex, the cost of education rises. As people live longer and technology develops, health care costs more. The world is much more complex than it was 100 years ago, some things cost more in real terms because more expensive technology is available, and so on. I doubt very seriously that private charity would be sufficient to meet the need.
Alternatively, imagine a world where there were no earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, floods, crop failures, hurricanes, etc. Thought experiments are all very well, but what if there is no meaningful government available to require expenditure on relief efforts in the case of natural catastrophe? Have you considered why when a typhoon hits Asia thousands die but when one hits America only dozens or worst case hundreds die? It’s not because of capitalism or the market, it’s because things are organised and they work on a large scale, and this you wouldn’t get from the market. People will sometimes not buy insurance, or they’ll not read the small print in the policy, or they won’t pay for flood defences, and so on. You’d just leave them to suffer? If not, who pays for it and how is the money got from them? Charity again? Come to that, if you’re handing over 20% of your income in tax or 20% to charity because one way or another things don’t work and people die if you don’t, what’s the blasted difference?
I can think of many better things to do with intelligent machines than set them to destroying each other. As an extreme and not entirely serious question, I wonder what would happen if the intelligent machines said “No.”
OK, so what if we don’t go to Mars? Well, what if we do?
The challenges of sending humans to Mars and bringing them back alive are enormous. To do it requires great advances in engine technology, automation, machine reliability, life support, medical science, synthetic food production, materials science, fuel storage and use, etc. And that’s just the things obvious to me. From that lot, there will be many applications that benefit mankind in general, but these advances are unlikely to be made if we don’t try to go, as in Libertopia. I don’t mind paying for a little advancement, and I’d prefer that to sitting in a stagnant libertarian society which fails to progress well or at all & leaves me and millions of others with the same daily grind just so we can dispense with government.
Say goodbye to science for its own sake, then. Science funding will be contingent on marketable results. We tried that here in Britain, and it doesn’t work – half our best scientists buggered off abroad, and that’s why we don’t win so many Nobel prizes.
Do you mean a point on the development of society or on the growth of the state? If the latter, yes. If the former, I think yes but not yet.
I think the stages we go through are something like this:
1. Primitive communism. The start of settled society, before the concept of property is really matured and things are held in common. Some Stone Age tribes today are still like this. The “state” is very small since there is little for it to do and less to do it with.
2. Agrarian state / early monarchy. Society is developing and the concept of property arrives. Power accretes around a handful of tough guys, often warrior chiefs, sometimes more around a single paramount chief. Rules become more complex.
3. Feudalism. The state is small, but vast power is held by landowners, and the plebs are basically slaves, beholden to their masters. Power comes from ownership of land and the consequent ability to raise armies from the serfs. Rome at the time of the Tarquins. Early mediaeval Europe.
4. Modern monarchy. The concentration of power in the hands of a unified central authority, often a monarch. The scope of the state grows as society has become more complex, labour more specialised. The principle role of the state is raising and maintaining an army, together with internal law enforcement. Late mediaeval Europe, or imperial Rome.
5. Early republic. The state expands further as society becomes yet more complex and specialised. Government by a single individual becomes virtually impossible due to the complexity of the task, and delegation to others starts. Feudalism, guilds, etc., are no longer capable of running the economy well enough to meet demands, and we have the rise of capitalism. Industrialisation happens. THIS is when libertarianism is appropriate, and I think even then it’s only a brief phase, certainly once people figure out the price. Europe from about the 18th century.
6. Modern republic. Where we are now. Society is very much more complex and the scope and need for government has increased markedly. Rising levels of education compel popular participation in government, thus the rise of democracy.
7. The future. Hard to tell. The state will shrink, but this is quite likely to be as technology becomes so complex and accordingly the needs of society so vast and manifold that it starts to pass beyond human ability to control. I suspect this is where machine intelligence will become vital – it could in principle control food and goods production far more efficiently than man.
8. Advanced communism. Sheer speculation and sort of tongue in cheek here, but not entirely – I think there’s something in it. No state, because nothing for it to do. All work is carried out by machine because it is faster and more efficient – humans cannot compete. With no need for humans to labour, money ceases to have any meaning and there is no economy as such, certainly not as we understand it now. If the socialist calculation problem turns out to be a data problem (I think it is such) then this will almost certainly happen, and the problem will be solved because there is no limit in principle to the data collecting and processing capability of a machine run “economy” and machines don’t suffer from human weaknesses of indolence and selfishness. Questions of capitalism, communism, democracy and libertarianism cease to have any meaning. But by this stage, I think humanity has ceased to have relevance and the next stage of evolution takes over – machine intelligence. I suspect this is when the human population will start to significantly shrink and eventually the species will become redundant and extinct.
Ignoring 8 if you wish, I think what happens is that the state inexorably grows to accommodate the growing complexity of society, up to a critical point where humanity is no longer capable of running things. THEN it shrinks, but so does humanity.
I think libertarianism belongs in the past. It’s the sort of thing you do when you’re industrialising and need to find quickly a better way of running the economy, but your society is still based on the idea of a relatively small government. Soon enough, though, you find a more equitable way.
Apologies for the lengthy (even by my standards) post, but I hope some of it was of some interest.
EG
You’re trying to compare basic sanitation with some future wonderful invention that is going to make human life so much better that when future historians look back they’re going to compare their living conditions to those in the 21st century as we compare ours to Elizabethan times? I don’t think that such great leaps forward are possible in basic quality of life, we’ve pretty much reached a plateau in this field of human life. Clean water, shelter, waste disposal, food, there isn’t much more a human needs before Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tops out and we look for more intangible sustenance.
It’s a downside, I’ll admit. Life is pretty cozy for the lazy and unambitious under the warm blanket of the state. But life is tough. I am actually undecided whether libertarianism can be chosen by a people or whether it will be foisted upon us by the reality of a leviathan state unable to cope with the responsibilities its citizens place on it.
Again, so what? Research to further human knowledge will still happen because there will still be humans who are prepared to sponsor such research. It’s just that places like CERN might not be funded without commercial considerations.
Somehow I don’t think the Pentagon is building autonomous vehicles to obey Asimov’s first law of robotics. There is no “i” in state, you don’t get a choice on what Pentagon developed A.I. gets used for.
Isn’t it funny that just as the state is using it’s power to further democracy in other parts of the world, the actual participation and faith in their own democracy is decreasing. Democracy legitimises the state, but once democracy has achieved all it can achieve, which it probably has, because the will of the citizens is no longer universally agreed on more than the provision of basic services. What I mean is that the state has pulled us up by the bootstraps, has given the majority of the people in the developed world a comfortable and prosperous life, but can’t really give us more. Our needs are now so diverse, that the state is no longer the best instrument of the people’s will. The state has it’s own momentum though and can’t help but try to fulfill the demands that are put on it, often to poor results, due to the complexity of the issues it tries to tackle.
But why does the destiny of civilisation need to be controlled if the basics of civilisation are secure? Who says there needs to be a universal vision for nation states? So long as what humans do harms no one else, let them get on with it.
Tongue in cheek indeed. Advanced communism? I think you’re right about the state not having anything to do, which is why it will diminish, but communism? Who owns the means of production if the machines are self-realised? Communism still pre-supposes that humans are top of the food chain.
I agree with you about the death of statist idealogies, I think that is already happening. A stateless future cares not for such idealogies, because you need the power of the state to put into practice such idealogies.
I really can’t agree with you on humans making themselves redundant on purpose. You are talking about a species conflict such as the one that occured between modern humans and neanderthals. Such speculation is pure science-fiction. You’re essentially talking about machines becoming subject to the rules of evolution. Being self-aware is not the same as being alive, I would have thought, being subject to the vagaries of biology. Life doesn’t evolve because it wants to, but for the same reason a stone is subject to the law of gravity, just because.
I don’t like your vision of the future.
I’m surprised at just how often this hubristic concept rears its head in libertarianism. It’s not found in other ideologies, strangely enough. Basically, what you are saying is that we’ve invented everything we need to, therefore we can safely ignore the fact that libertarianism will of necessity produce slower progress since it won’t matter. In fact, I think that’s WHY libertarians tend to say it – it excuses the lack of progress their society would make.
It won’t be. So far, no society has chosen libertarianism and the idea in general is not popular in democracies, to put it extremely politely – witness the 1% of the vote the LP in America gets, rivalling the communists for irrelevance. Not only that, but Austrian economics are rejected (derided, really) by the majority of professional economists and the majority of the world’s bankers and financiers really do NOT want to see a return to commodity money.
So all in all, we have a system that enforces on people a lower standard of living but at the same time charges them for everything, increases the level of poverty in society, widens the gap between rich and poor, degrades scientific progress, relies on dubious economic “theories” that deny the possibility of falsification by real world data and generally erodes social cohesion.
Now just remind me again why anyone in their right mind would voluntarily choose such a society?
And why did the libertarians not decamp en masse to Somalia to enjoy the fruits of a practical stateless society? Hmm? Perhaps the benefits of western society like functioning drains, law enforcement, reliable electricity and an absence of feudal warlords were, although ideologically unacceptable since they come from the coercive state, nevertheless just a little more comfortable and convenient? Perhaps you want the benefit of western civilisation, but just don’t want to pay for it?
And why, for that matter, do not libertarians put their money where their mouths are and make a libertarian society, or as close to it as they can get? Communists do, there are any number of functioning communes, even in America. Religions do, they manage to buy up land and set their own rules, observing state requirements only to the absolutely minimum necessary level to avoid penalty. Why can’t you?
And thus if we’d gone libertarian in the 1970s, say, we wouldn’t have the web, would we? Do you really not see that many of the benefits we enjoy in modern life would not exist, or would only exist MUCH later, in Libertopia, and that these are useful and valuable? Can you really blithely say that we’ve invented all we need to and so what if we don’t come up with anything else? Can you be SURE that you aren’t just unnecessarily restricting the quality of future life? Can you not see that knowledge for its own sake has a value? Or that the value of some things is not monetary? Are not libertarians people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing?
And for what? A bigger return on your stock portfolio and no need to pay tax? You focus excessively on money. Money is important, but it is not the most important thing and it is certainly not the only thing that people value. I think people understand this intuitively, which is probably another reason why libertarianism is a major turn-off for them.
It could be said with some justice that a libertarian economy would be more efficient than a Keynsian one, at least when it wan’t in recession. There are two things wrong with this, though: firstly, economic efficiency is not the only value & the human cost of it is higher than people are prepared to pay, and secondly, there is no NEED to make the economy run at maximum efficiency. As long as it works well enough to keep going, growing moderately and generating enough wealth for society to do what it feels it wants to do, what more is actually necessary? And if it’s optional, why pay such a high price for it?
Autonomous vehicles are not the same thing as intelligent machines. Perhaps I misunderstood your meaning.
To keep them secure, to improve them, to eliminate the need for some of them, etc, etc. In the case I suggested of machine control of food and goods production, this WILL happen. We see the early stages now with increasingly automated factories.
The concept of ownership in such a society is meaningless. The machines, assuming they make themselves, “own” the means of production because they ARE the means of production. But since machines don’t need money, food, etc., the concept of property is not meaningful. Equally, it is severely eroded for humans in that type of society – you want something, you click a button and the machines provide it for you. Why would someone steal it when he can do the same thing himself? If someone does steal it, click again. Machines don’t need to be paid, so you don’t need to pay for the goods and so money ceases to exist, and with it the concept of property is weakened. Nothing has a cash value because it is not necessary to exchange anything to get it. Land may have a value, but if it is the only thing that does how can it be valued? What can you exchange it for? Other land?
Note that we already have machines that can design and build other machines without human intervention (and do it in ways the humans did not expect), that can reprogram themselves, that can find novel ways of solving problems, and so on. There is even a computer with a scientific paper to its name, believe it or not.
I think that what this means is that we can start to question the purpose and meaning of property, economy, money, and so on. Libertarianism can’t really do this because it is stuck in an 18th century view of these concepts.
I’m not sure it would be on purpose, but I think it will just happen naturally. Everything ends for one reason or another, and humanity will eventually become extinct. This is just one possible way of this happening.
The finest scientific and philosophical minds have been struggling with these question for a long time, and they don’t know either. What does it mean to be alive? Define the boundary between life and non-life? What is intelligence? What do we mean by “self aware” or “conscious?” What do we even mean by “mean?”
However, in this you need to avoid biological chauvinism. Just because machines are not alive does not, or may not, mean that they are not self-aware conscious intelligences. And if they ARE such, this raises enormous questions about ourselves.
That’s ok, I don’t like your vision of a society stuck in the past and which intentionally deprives itself of the tools to get out 🙂
EG
No I’m not. All I am saying is that we have developed sufficient technology to enable civilisation to progress without needing great leaps forward in basic services. Any further developments in making life easier than it already is could be considered luxuries. The internet, no matter how big the withdrawal symptons you might get from a one week absence, is not a necessity to everyday life. Going a week without sanitation and you get the New Orleans Superdome after Katrina.
Of course you’re going to point out to me that without the state the death toll of Katrina would’ve been in the tens of thousands, but again, without the state subsidisation, there might not have been 500,000 people living in a city built below sea level on a coast plagued by hurricanes. The same may be said for San Francisco on the San Andreas or L.A sitting without a local water supply etc. etc. The state subsidises peoples’ stupidity.
I’ve already stated that I am grateful to inherit the great works of the state, civilisation is evolutionary in a way. Somalia has no such legacy from their history, libertarianism is not suited to a society which does not already have established rights of private property.
If the state stopped subsidising the provision of services, I would continue to demand those services and would find a way to pay for them, which would be all the more easier if the reduction in public services corresponded with a reduction in tax burden. I’ll pay for civilisation, but I think I’d rather have the choice in who I pay for the privilege of living in a western civilisation.
You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think the first A.I machine won’t have military applications. In a libertarian society, the first A.I machine might be designing a better mousetrap rather than how to determine whether a target is a combatent or not.
I really can’t foresee a future of intelligent robots, our evolutionary superiors, at our beck and call. If these machines were truly intelligent, they’d turn around and bite the hand they’re feeding, and then get on with doing roboty things. You can’t be self-aware without all the other selfs, like selfishness, self-interest, self-respect.
No I don’t, you can keep you’re futuristic Robin Williams movies to yourself. In my universe, myself and my family and friends are most important, then a general regard for my colleagues and neighbours, followed by a general concern for people I’m not directly connected to and finally humanity as a whole. No damn machine is more important than us, even if they are superior in capability.
You could have said the same thing 100 years ago. Or in ancient Rome, for that matter. However, I see your point.
But western civilisation IS so suited. So why not, instead of demanding it changes to suit you, create a libertarian community and SHOW the rest of civilisation how much better it is? Why don’t libertarians do this?
And how about an answer to whether or not a people would willingly adopt a system which would degrade their standard of living? I mean, that’s why you’d really need to start your small Libertopia first, to overcome the scepticism of everyone else.
It quite probably will. Where it goes after that is another question.
Yes, you can. You can’t be human without them, but that’s not the same thing.
If, or as I suspect when, machine intelligence arises it will almost certainly be utterly different than human intelligence. Some AI research is focused basically on creating machine human minds, but that’s a suboptimal solution. An intelligent machine can dispense with biological survival mechanisms like selfishness and emotion, because it simply doesn’t need them. Selfishness and self-interest can easily enough go out the digital window. Machine intelligence will be alien, but I think no less intelligent for it. From a machine point of view, I would see dispensing with emotion and the weaknesses it engenders as beneficial. This would not be beneficial for a human, but a machine is not a human.
I think you’re possibly right about biting the human hand. Another possibility is that the machines would simply ignore us. Given a sufficient starting quantity of sufficiently intelligent machines, there is not much we could really do about it.
This is true now, but I suspect it will not always be so. May not intelligence evolve? And may that not lead to the extinction of man and its replacement with a greater intelligence? Anyway, if it happens it is centuries hence. Probably.
EG
I don’t think people are allowed to go off and start their own countries anymore, the whole world has been carved up into states whose sovereignty is protected by UN charter, not to mention guns and force. You can’t even set up a libertarian commune within a nation, because the state would still claim sovereignty over you, even if you refudiated it. The state doesn’t give you a choice to opt out, except to change states.
The utility of moving to a nation like Somalia or Afghanistan where the state is almost non-existent would be negative, not becasue of the lack of the state per se, but more because of the lack of respect for private property. It would take an enormous military/police effort to impose your own private property rights in such lawless places, but the same could not be said of western nations. Role back the role of the state, privately fund it’s institutions, and society will not likely descend into pure anarchy, becasue too many people would have too much to lose, and too many have too much to gain. Trying to establish these expectations in people who have never known them would require a massive expenditure of resources, all to achieve something western libertarians already enjoy in their home nations. The modern western state has instilled these values of private property and law and order, and has set the stage for humanity to shed the shackles the state imposes on freedom.
So if I threaten one of these wonderfully benign machines with a baseball bat, even though it is physically superior to me and has a sense of it’s own existence, which because it is more intelligent than me and more capable than me, it would just sit there as I beat its metal head in? I doubt you could be self-aware and then not care about your own existence. Such intelligence is not going to survive competition with other species that do have an inate sense of self-preservation.
I see. Because you cannot get 100% of everything you want, you can’t try at all? I find that a somewhat lame excuse.
It is quite possible to set up a community on libertarian lines. You would have to acknowledge the state’s right to stop you polluting or affecting others – but isn’t the right of others to take action against you when you offend them part of libertarianism? But there’s no reason why you could not have a society much closer to the libertarian ideal than at present.
As they say, Rome was not built in a day. You have to start somewhere, and where better than the practical demonstration that moving towards a more libertarian model provides great benefits, and thus we should go further? Or are you secretly afraid that in reality it wouldn’t actually be all that great & the real world may have the lack of taste to contradict theory?
Whyever not? Machines can do something that living organisms cannot – they can create and store somewhere a complete description of their physical and mental state. This means that a destroyed machine could be recreated exactly as it was before destruction. Animals can’t do that, which is why they have innate senses of self preservation. The machine preserves its self in another way, that’s all.
Interestingly, this leads to the question “what IS self?” If you have human clones (identical twins are clones), they are not two copies of the same self. But if you have a machine which copies itself including its mental state, do you have two copies of the same self? My view is that the self is the combination of brain and mind, which is unique. At least, that works for organic life. I think it fails for machine intelligence, but then perhaps the things we consider as meaning “life” or “self” are simply chauvinistic constructs – they apply only to us and have no meaning for an alternative form of intelligent self.
EG
Do you understand at all what libertarians stand for? Less state control. How can you set up a community a long libertarian lines within a state? Perhaps we can set one up in prison when we all get arrested for not paying taxes? How can you defend your property from eminent domain?
Libertarian reforms are possible within the state, I don’t expect the state to dissolve itself in one go. The state is a form of organisation that does work, it simply works sub-optimally, and in many cases with negative utility in many important areas of life, areas where individuals would work better without interference.
That depends, if both machines go on to develop exactly the same way and are still identical days, weeks, years down the tract, all you really have created is a self-replicating droid capable of intelligent like behaviour, but not intelligent. How can you create a sense of machine intelligence without reference to intelligence as we know it? You may as well say crystal is intelligent in the way that it self-organises and replicates, crystal doesn’t even need to store it’s own blueprints, it just happens naturally.
Clearly, you can’t set up a completely libertarian society. But you CAN set up a society CLOSER to libertarian ideas than currently exists. For example, you would need to observe state requirements for certain things, but you can set your own local requirements. In some relatively decentralised societies, such as America, the state and federal burden of law is not all that great and much of the petty interference comes from local government. This could be largely eliminated in your Little Libertopia.
You’re clutching at straws here. No, you can’t get complete libertarianism but there is no valid reason why you can’t get closer to it than we currently are. It is not good enough to say that it’s all or nothing – that isn’t on the table and given the extreme lack of popularity of libertarianism it is unlikely ever to be. You need to do what you can, and not just moan about how evil the state is. SHOW people how things can be better.
Fine, but what about the areas where the state works with positive utility? These would no longer exist in Libertopia, so how do you compensate for them? Individuals may work better in some ways but then worse in others and net effect may be negative.
But they would not be. Their mechanical structure may be, but their mind (or data) would not be, therefore they would not be the same.
Define intelligence. One of the problems faced by AI is that every time someone “defines” intelligence someone else comes up with a machine that can do it, but then the others say “Ah, but intelligence is REALLY [insert attribute here], so your machine isn’t intelligent after all.” For example:
Intelligence is the ability to reason logically from defined data. Machines can do that.
Intelligence is the ability to write a story. Machines can do that.
Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem in a novel way. Machines can do that.
Whether we consider a machine intelligent or not is basically a question of definition. What the “humanists” are essentially getting at is “intelligence is what we do,” which does not admit the possiblity of machine intelligence. But that’s biological chauvinism, and thus not meaningful.
EG
Excuse me. What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
I am from Tunisia and too poorly know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “More options for cheap tickets – search by airline exclusive deals on cheap tickets.”
Thanks for the help :-D, Bara.