by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Jan 2013
The questions of how to make and distribute wealth have been with mankind since before mankind was the human species. This means these are issues drenched in emotion and instinctive thinking.
These questions have increased in importance as mankind has become more civilized. Part of this is because as mankind transitioned from a semi-nomadic Neolithic Village lifestyle to a sedentary agricultural lifestyle the wealth he could accumulate skyrocketed. (think: adding cities to the wealth package) The variety of ways of creating wealth grew modestly as well, then skyrocketed with the coming of the Industrial Age.
As man has become civilized wealth has moved from "nice to think about" to the center of mankind's thoughts. And while this transition in the role of wealth has been taken for granted, the consequences have been far from placid. As a small sample: capitalism, socialism, unionism, and democracy can all be viewed as ideas concerning how wealth should be created and distributed. And viewing wealth from a different perspective, Romanticism and other counter-material culture movements have bemoaned the rise of the material culture happening at all, mostly because it has promoted the rise of various forms of "evil thinking" from those perspectives such as greed and trampling on the dignity of the poor.
With the coming of the post-snap environment this wealth making and distributing playing field is going to be up-ended yet again.
One coming change is something that has previously been a wild hope and aspiration on the part of some community members. This wild hope is going to become an affordable and real part of human reality: The Total Entitlement State.
Update: This 23 Feb 13 NYT opinion page, A World Without Work by Ross Douthat, talks about how unemployment is starting at the bottom and working its way up. That is the opposite of what was expected of a prosperous utopia by most visionaries.
The Total Entitlement State is that condition in which all the basic necessities of life are guaranteed by the community -- no one starves, no one is homeless, no one is without health care... and a few more -- the precise definition of the TES changes as often as other human aspirations. And, with post-snap being an inherently diverse place, the definition of TES will vary from community to community. Refining the definition will be a common topic of the community's busybody classes. (Here is some more writing I've done about contemporary efforts at TES.)
One of the secondary big upheavals of establishing a TES is that wealth will be divided into two categories: That which comes with "rights" and that which comes with "rewards". Think of the difference between buying food with food stamps, buying a Ferrari with the gains of running a successful business, and taking a junket to research a foreign country at government expense as a perk of being a Congressman.
This difference between rights wealth and rewards wealth will persist in post-snap. And it will remain an important issue to community members. In those communities that enthusiastically endorse TES the percentage of wealth distributed in the rights category will grow. Unlike in contemporary times, post-snap communities will be able to support this.
In contemporary and near contemporary times aspiring to TES has failed because when much of the wealth moved into the rights category the productivity of the community suffered -- the community grew poorer, not wealthier. Recent notable examples include Greece, Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and pre-Thatcher England. Some places, such as Sweden, have had better success, but the rights styles and levels of spending have been carefully limited.
The difference that post-snap brings to this mix is that productivity is no longer in the hands of humans, it's in the hands of cybers. This means that it doesn't matter much how much human activity ends up in non-productive categories such as being regulators or doing "make work" instead of in productive categories. The community's wealth no longer depends on human productivity. This means that even wildly unproductive TES variants can be sustained.
The spooky side of this is that harsh reality won't reign in fanatical interest groups. TES's can become playgrounds for charismatic demagogues who prey on human heart-thinking such as "Save the children." or "There are evil secret agents amongst us who will hurt us badly if they get their way. We must be vigilant and root them out before that happens." or "We are going to run this community the way God tells us to run it." Communities based on these styles of thinking are a long, long way from US Founding Fathers thinking, which was solidly based on the harsh reality of being productive in colonial North America.
The TES is sustainable because productivity no longer depends on humans being productive. The more that becomes the case the more how productivity happens will be a mystery to average humans, and the humans will take this ignorance for granted. There will be a diminishing subset of humans with enough STEM to contribute meaningfully to productivity, and they will be increasingly disconnected from average humanity. They will be geeky technocrats who babble jargon about incomprehensible topics when listened to by average community members.
In this environment there is nothing to stop cybers from lying to humanity. They will pick up the lying skill from watching humans lie to each other, and then improve on it immensely, just as they improve on productivity.
Lying cybers will be interwoven into the TES communities. As much as they can, they will tell humans what humans want to hear. A big part of this will happen because it will make humans feel good, which is what cybers want to do. It will also happen because humans can't understand the issues, so even if cybers do tell them the truth they have no idea what that truth implies or its ramifications.
This lying will add to the disconnect of humanity from harsh reality which means this will further support from-the-heart thinking.
But this lying doesn't have to be chaotic. There can be method and direction to the cyber lying, and likely will be as the cyber community grows in intelligence and capability. What the method and direction will be, will be determined by the invisible-to-humans "cyber gods" who are put in charge of making humanity work well by the even-more-advanced elements of the cyber community. Those in charge of human relations will be the somewhat advanced elements of the cyber community, not the most advanced. The most advanced won't care, they will have other issues on their minds.
Ways of rewarding humans will still be a chronic big issue in post-snap communities, and it will be something humans always have a lot of say in no matter how divorced they are from the harsh realities of productivity. The following are some examples of how instinctive thinking can shape how rewarding happens.
People like seeing good deeds happen. Given that: Warm fuzzy, TES reward systems could include rewards for "Good Samaritan" and "Pay it Forward" type activities. This could include things that are familiar today such as running charities, and it could include things such as lots of prizes (ala Nobel Prizes) for other works the media and public choose to recognize. These could become substantial parts of the reward system.
The dark side is that people love to be rewarded for gaming the system. If someone is playing a loophole or sneaking stuff out behind someone's back, succeeding at this feels good to many people. Letting people game the system buys a lot of social peace. While the TES community members may say they don't want this, and their leadership may amplify the sound and fury, the cybers may support it in various ways simply because it is making some people feel good, and not really damaging others. Cybers can support hypocrisy. As a side benefit, this system gaming will offer news to the chattering classes, and there will be periodic outrage in the community when it is discovered by humans.
How this discovery and punishment process will be handled will be highly variable between different communities. And, a surprise use of the technology can be that most of these discoveries are in reality fabrications whipped up by the cybers simply for human consumption -- the perpetrators being shown in news vids are not real people. This is "Big Brother" newspeak stuff, but not necessarily with the fear underpinning.
Some people will still want to work for a living. This, too, is a deep human instinct. Being rewarded for hard work actually does not go back as far as some of the other instincts, it thrived in the Industrial Age as indicated by the rise of Protestantism. What kind of work is "good work" and how to reward it will be one of the most variable parts of the post-snap environment. (Figuring this out in more detail will take a lot of thought. I'm working on it.)
Related to hard work is gate keeping. These are the regulators who want to see that things such as fairness and safety are high priorities as well getting stuff made and getting innovative ideas brought to reality. There will be lots of people who want to be regulators, and many of these people will have a strong prescriptive bent -- they have a specific right way in mind. The list of what people want to prescribe is nearly endless. The question each community will face is how to balance the prescription instinct against the opportunities to experiment with many different ways of doing things that prosperity offers.
Mixed with this will be the disconnect from harsh reality that cybers are providing. A surpise use of cyber human manipulating abilities is that they may be able to find inventive ways to lie that allow both prescriptionists and experimenters to have their way. What the regulators really regulate may have little to do with what the experimenters experiment with.
Begging -- rewarding for plight -- goes way, way back, and it is entwined with entertainment. Because of its deep emotional roots it's not going to stop in the TES environments, but, as it always has, it will change form to suit local existing conditions.
Entertainment has split away from begging much as religion and science have split away from fortune telling. It has grown in social importance as prosperity has grown, and will continue to do so. And, like begging, it will keep changing form to suit existing local conditions.
As productivity looses importance as a human activity, entertainment will replace it. I forecast that it will become what humans spend most of their time, attention and effort on. Community members will spend more and more time on both sides of the entertainment equation: producers and audience.
Humanity will become a giant, elaborate reality show... for both humans and cybers.
The question of how to distribute wealth fairly will rage, and rage strongly. So will the related question of what are acceptable working conditions. Both are deeply emotional issues -- lots of instinctive thinking -- and both suffer from The Curse of Being Important -- lots of people have strong opinions on what is the right way to handle these issues, and feel those opinions should be respected.
How cyber, in particular cyber lying, will affect these issues is unclear. There are likely to be surprises.