“Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The cell phone, for example, is somewhere between the last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both. Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example, Asian societies, including rural areas of China).”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, page 469.
I like this point about agriculture at the end. A few years ago, my father, a retired farmer, showed me a satellite photograph that had been taken of our family farm, and provided by his agronomist consultant, showing which parts of a field needed more fertiliser, had better soil conditions and drainage, and so on. In two generations, the Suffolk farm had gone from a process where it took the whole of late July to late September, with 20 people, to get in the harvest, to just two guys using a massive John Deere combine harvester, some big trucks to carry the grain, and a state-of-the-art grain store with drying, filtering and cleaning equipment. And we just take it for granted that this level of technological change has happened, and is possible. So we should perhaps not be so despondent about the future.
There are all kinds of useful links on the Web to such satellite links of farmland, as well as other categories for business and scientific use. Here is the ResMap site, for instance. The Economist has a short item on the agricultural uses of space technology.
I can’t help but wonder, though, if all these productivity gains aren’t eventually going to mean that work is no longer a widely available vector for income. That’s been predicted many times in the past and never yet happened, but maybe we should be thinking about ways to make everyone a trust fund baby (instead of a dole recipient) somewhere down the road.
Amuses that the final endpoint of capitalism could look a lot like perfect communism.
If productivity keeps increasing & real costs dropping prices will eventually be zero. Likewise, the cost of labour will keep increasing due to the lack of incentive to work. Labour costs will approach infinity. You wouldn’t be able to pay enough to induce someone to provide a service although, no doubt many people will do things for the enjoyment of doing so.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Marxists just picked the wrong horse
But you seem to be making the same Marxist mistake, Bloke – that is, that prices are dictated solely by costs. (Or was that someone else’s mistake? I lost track…)
Reductio ad absurdum arguments are rarely persuasive. Prices don’t drop to zero; wages don’t increase to infinity; no tree grows to the sky. The argument merely displays ignorance of supply and demand forces.
PfP, please explain the difference between a “trust fund baby” and a “dole recipient.”
PfP, please explain the difference between a “trust fund baby” and a “dole recipient.”
I think in the case of a “trust fund baby”, the money has been given to the recipient voluntarily by the person who created the wealth, whereas in the case of a “dole recipient”, the money has been extracted from that person by force.
Note, I am *not* saying that this makes one of these people morally better than the other (although I do think that the existence of one of these things is more damaging to society than the other) – merely that I do see a difference.
But this reductio ad absurdum argument isn’t absurd, is it? Zero cost ‘stuff’ is implicit in nanotech & robotic production. Once you have technology that’s capable of reproducing itself in addition to making other things, manufacturing costs are zero.
Let’s look at data density, transmission & availability
Let’s go back a few decades to when microfiche was SotA. The wonder of being able to keep the equivalent of a filing cabinet’s worth of documents in a box small enough to fit in a pocket. If I’d been bright enough I might have said that eventually I’d be able to walk around with the world’s store of knowledge in my pocket. An RAA argument for it’s day. I do exactly that now via a mobile fone & the internet. Moreover I also carry round about 2Tb of memory. My 6000 hours of high fidelity music & few hundred books haven’t even put a dent in it. I can’t ever remember living anywhere I’d have had space for the equivalent amount of vinyl & paper.
At the cost of a couple days wages.
Remember when a Xerox was the size of a small car? Having seen it mentioned here, I’ll likely get a 3D printer soon. If the spiel lives up to its claims I’ll be able to print, for the cost of the plastic, bits & pieces that’d cost me thousands to have made.
And sorry Alisa, it’s you that’s making the Marxists’ error. That the size of the cake’s finite & must be shared out. The cake’s infinite. There’s enough for all.
Bloke, just to be clear, I didn’t call you a Marxist, I said that you make a Marxist mistake. And yes, the cake is infinite, that’s the whole point: ultimately, prices are not determined by cost.
Michael,
What is the difference between a landed family’s trust fund and a dole recipient’s benefits? I’ll tell you:
One of them is an income derived from a piece of territorial property, assigned by accident of birth, originally acquired by forcefully expropriating the previous owners but now generally regarded as legitimate and which is only paid by people who choose to occupy the estate in question instead of living somewhere else, and the other one is a landed family’s trust fund.
I concur. But. If price is the market clearing point, what happens if the market can’t be cleared? If supply is infinite then demand is effectively zero because there’s no level of demand will put a dent in supply.
No market in ‘stuff’ implies no market in services because usually we trade ‘stuff’ for service & vice versa. But if no-one has to work because ‘stuff’ is free how do you value services? Is composing a symphony more valuable than sweeping a floor if very few people are willing to sweep floors? Valued in what?
Capitalism isn’t an end it’s a means. There’s no reason it & its economic framework has to survive if its irrelevant. And its very success implies it will eventually become irrelevant.
Incidentally, it’s my personal belief that one aspect of the singularity’s already here.
Our governmental structures are built around a information transfer clock speed equivalent to letter post carried by horse. Meanwhile events are running at gigahertz. Our pols are today trying to solve yesterdays problems using last years methods. By the time they’ve even worked out what the problems were they’ll be different problems. & different again tomorrow. It’s like trying to push a swing by looking through a CCTV with a built in time delay. A variable time delay so they can’t even anticipate where the swing’ll be when they push. The world’s simply running much faster than the decision making processes & half the time their actions make things worse.
Better they just stood back & let the swing sort itself out but they won’t.
In one sense, very little: the trust provides an income, or the dole does. But the trust income comes from private property, while the dole income comes from public property, and is disbursed at the state’s discretion. The trust fund baby owns his income, while the dole recipient has nothing but state charity.
So the question is: if it comes to pass that such a surplus of productivity exists that work is no longer generally available, how do we use the wealth we’ve acquired to make everyone independent rather than dependent?
Just to play devil’s advocate for a second, do not the public (at least in some technical way) own the state?
Bloke, with respect, your reductio is absurd. First, Alisa is correct that the cost of production does not determine price. The only correlation between the two is if your a priori estimate of the cost of production is more than your estimate of the price at which you can sell the item, if you’re sensible you won’t make it. But there’s no guarantee that either estimate will be correct. Price is what the market will pay. Period.
Second, the cost of nothing tangible can ever be zero. Even with your posited 3D printer you’ll have costs for the raw materials it uses, the cost of any design program you employed, the costs of operation and maintenance of the printer, and (if you’re intelligently allocating) some portion of the machine’s purchase price. Even with your “data density” example, data storage may get (is getting) progressively cheaper, but it will never be zero because there are physical media involved. At best it’s an asymptotic approach to zero, but it can never reach it.
PfP, if you really want a means “to make everyone independent”, you should check out Robert Heinlein’s posthumously published but very juvenile “For Us, the Living.” He spends quite a lot of time in it attempting to explain how everyone can have an “allowance” from the total wealth of society. Personally, I think it’s a total load of crap (and I think the reason Heinlein never published it is that in his maturity he was embarassed by it), but you might appreciate the effort.
While production may tend asymptotically to zero, distribution and retailing do not, especially where they depend on that infinitely-priced labour.
Water from your tap may be next to free, but water in bottles conveniently located and chilled at a tourist trap is not.
Technological advance will continue as long as (a) capital can be accumulated and is not pre-empted by the Leviathan State and (b) the Greenies are kept out of power.
Neither seems certain to me, not in the currently-rich West anyway.
While it’s an intriguing premise, be careful with the singularity. It’s prediction is premised on a mistake which we have seen in many left-wing predictions (global warming, population growth, oil consumption etc) which is that trends (particularly exponential trends) will continue unchanging into the future.
My own feeling is that things will likely level off. Which is the premise for a book I really must get to writing (need to finish it before the singularity comes (or doesn’t))
If you conceive of “capitalism” as some specific system of exchange or specific set of rules, then I suppose that makes sense. But it seems to me that “capitalism” — when not used primarily as a pejorative — is nothing more than the right to own the product of your labour. (Using the term “product of your labour” very broadly, to include both mental and physical creations.) In that case, there’s no reason for it ever not to exist, but it will look very different if scarcity diminishes.
And scarcity will never diminish, since the only scarcity that really counts is that of labor – both mental and physical.
Well, yes, in the same way the workers in the USSR owned the Soviet economy.