In case you missed my talk on post-scarcity economics earlier this year at the OpenSouls’ Cognition Hackathon, hosted at BetaWorks in New York City, you can watch it here.
I hope you’'ll do me the favor of looking past the effect of my god-awful public speaking anxiety and severe sleep deprivation that is quite obvious in the beginning of the talk. Haha, I do pull it together after a few minutes I needed to relax into the public talk.
In this talk, I share a brief overview of the ideas surrounding my vision for designing and organizing the economic and financial market systems of humanity’s future.
I highlight the significance of technological innovation to economic growth, and its power to disrupt the status quo institutions and change the underlying systems for how our societies currently operate, as described in Joseph Schumpeter’s work on creative destruction. Lost on all but the rare few within Silicon Valley’s tech and startup culture, this is the true meaning behind Silicon Valley’s well known aphorism “Most Fast and Break Things.” Unfortunately, this motto is typically attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, whose interpretation of the aphorism is an incomplete abstraction regarding merely the product development strategy surrounding minimal viable products. Yes, the full meaning of “Most Fast and Break Things” seems to be lost even on Zuckerberg.
You might be wondering, “how the hell would she know?” Well, because I’ve heard this motto countless times before Facebook ever even existed, since I was a young girl. Well, I’ll let you in one a little secret. I know the full meaning behind the aphorism “Most Fast and Break Things” because I was raised by one of the OG members of the group that defined Silicon Valley’s tech and startup culture, the man who has been a Graduate Venture Mentor in Stanford MS&E Program and taught its Early Venture Foundation course for over 20 years, since 2003.
Additionally, in this talk, I highlight the importance of building decentralized market-based systems for allocating compute (such as in the form of allocations of tokens) in order to redistribute the profit gains from the increased productivity of AI directly back into the hands of individuals in order to mitigate the risk that AI could exacerbate economic inequality without requiring some form of centralized planner to essentially put everyone on a permanent welfare program (UBI) that makes everyone coercively dependent on the government in full for their survival and wellbeing. This non-financialized compute market is designed to be inherently democratic, where individuals can contribute and collaborate their compute with other market participants to be applied to their desired projects/creations/efforts/etc, similar to voting in direct democracies, which for obvious reasons is why this compute market must be non-financialized to avoid corruption of the system. This idea of a compute market, that I call Universal Basic Compute (UBC), is designed to increase human agency and encourage the conditions to allow humans to engage with the world we build as active participants, rather than drastically decreasing human agency from onboarding people onto a massive dependency on government welfare programs through Universal Basic Income (UBI), which I personally believe is dangerous in that it would create an extreme power asymmetry between the government and the people that could result in undesirable outcomes along an authoritarian path.
I also highlight a proposal for a technical solution to automate material resource allocation through information markets consisting of a network of AI agents, each representing a particular market agent, that I refer to as AI Agent Network Market-Mimicry. This market would primarily exist for the allocation of resources for basic goods and production. However, this market must also remain non-financialized in a monetary sense, while retaining the information element that’s exchanged and stored within prices in traditional financial markets. The reason for the non-financialized element of both of these markets, I will explain below. But first, I want to cover one more idea from my talk.
Finally, I end my talk discussing the issues we may face in a post-scarcity and post-labor-demand world. I discuss the potential loss of meaning and purpose in individuals as a consequence of full labor automation, and the possible psychological and health impact this could have on individuals, essentially summarized as skyrocketing mental health statistics. For this, I discuss the potential for a third form of market. In implementing Universal Basic Compute markets, we can enable opportunities for individuals who want to work and contribute to the world. I highlight that there will always be a demand for artisanal goods and craftsmanship for individualized goods as well as art, and how I believe every human has an innate creative need, that more formally corresponds to the self-actualization block at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Enabled by Universal Basic Compute, individuals will have the opportunity to engage in creative pursuits such as craftsmanship and the creation of artisanal goods, which can then be sold (traded) in this third market for some value determined by market demand. With the monetary gains from this, individuals are then able to use that currency to purchase goods from this third, artisanal market for themselves.
Essentially, these three separate markets need to be non-fungible such that they remain separate, in order to protect the purpose, integrity, and effectiveness of these systems individually and the broader whole system containing these market-like systems from corruption, misuse, and abuse by those who attempt to game these systems. These markets have specific purposes in allocating resources:
(1) Compute as votes;
(2) Information for the allocation of more uniform (mass-produced) material goods to meet people’s basic needs and for the allocation of material goods needed for production; and,
(3) A more traditional market for trading specialized artisanal/creative goods.
These three markets need to remain non-fungible to protect the integrity of the democratic nature of the compute market such that compute/”votes” are not sold off by individuals in the name of consumption-driven greed for products in the art market, and because any human interference from trying to game the information market for profit would result in misallocation of resources and the corresponding undesirable consequences that can result from that over time: unstable scales of economic inequality, people left in need of resources to meet their basic needs, both enabling and incentivizing black markets for these basic material needs and essentially undermining the entire purpose of the information market.
I hope you enjoy watching my talk with all my silly little behavioral idiosyncrasies, especially my weird little curtsy at the end, lol. Furthermore, I hope through watching my talk and reading my outline of these ideas here opens your mind to the possibility of new ways of doing things, inspires my vision of a better future for all within you as well, and helps lay the conceptual groundwork for exploring the system we need to build and the work we need to do to get to this better future.
If you’re interested in this space of ideas and work, I invite you to reach out to me about opportunities to collaborate on these ideas and this work, subscribe here, and follow my public-facing X account at @ shylamariea (link in username).
Yours,
SMA, Dark Empress.
The Void
If you wish to inquire regarding my writing for an article in your journal, magazine, or media outlet, or regarding my work more broadly, you can email me at darkempress@the-void.blog.
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