To believe that only technology and the market can bring prosperity is like trying to take the wave out of the sea.
With the excitement of watching the boats rocking on the belief that «Growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats», our leaders and institutions have forgotten that the rising tide is not made of numbers in the balance sheets and screws in the machines. It is made of vitality that is built into each and every human and non-human entity. It is made of and by the Web of Life.
Things don’t exist outside one another.
This is not only the essence of spirituality but also the physical dimension of the world around us. Unfortunately, this interconnectedness has, for far too long, been ignored and replaced by the linear chain of economic and technological rationality. That same analytical rationality tends to focus on controlling the behaviour of the parts rather than on caring for the health of the whole. In that same focus, inputs and outputs are treated as separate columns, with formulas linking them to produce the desired results.
But they are not separate.
Things don’t exist outside one another. Things are not disposable objects that simply go away when we no longer feel we need them. In nature, «away» is part of the cycles that sustain life on Earth.
We are only now becoming aware of it: as we wake from the hubris of economic and technological rationality, we find ourselves facing some troubling prospects. While seeing the tide pull back, it leaves behind very few (very big, still very few) boats rocking. It leaves us witnessing growing environmental degradation and social turmoil.
While focusing on the boats, we have forgotten the externalities that inputs and outputs leave in the living world. Externalities that do not obey balance sheets, market speculation, or bubbles.
In the quest to push the tide growing infinitely, we have forgotten the natural tempo. The one that keeps the web joined and pulsating with life. We have forgotten the power behind the rhythm of breath. The pulsating cycle of impermanence.
While rocking in our small boats and stressing over short-term results, we tend to forget that Earth breathes in its own tempo. It is we who need to adjust, but to keep the tide rising, we keep squeezing the time between Earth’s in-breath and out-breath. While choking the planet, we keep forgetting that we are choking ourselves.
In-breath and out-breath are not two separate movements. They are inseparable parts of the whole.
They are not mere separate inputs and outputs.
They reflect the regenerative nature of life.
In and out are simply the parts of the notion that nothing grows indefinitely.
It is a cyclical expression of life’s regenerative nature.
UpDown. InOut. LifeDeath.
The sound of it is not a mechanical buzz of the machine seeking return on investment, but the teleological melody of vitality propelling towards sense, purpose, and hope.
And that is precisely what is missing in the pursuit of economic and technological rationality behind the AI development. Instead of seeing it as a tool that can help us to maximise our human potential, through sense, purpose, and hope, by pushing the capital-labour split further in favour of capital, it is adding to the already dangerous level of social inequality.
National income is divided between payments to capital and payments to labour. This has been a 30/70 split in favour of labour for some time. However, AI development threatens to push that proportion further toward the side of capital by displacing human labour. This is no longer a dystopian, faraway future scenario. It is already happening. One example is confirmation that Amazon cut 14,000 jobs and plans to replace an additional 30,000 jobs with AI-driven automated processes.
At the same time, the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few threatens to leave a very small number of people owning both capital and labour. This will give immense power to a very few people (those who control both capital and labour), while keeping in their own hands the power to make many people not only economically redundant but also without means to control their destiny through a productive role in society.
This ties directly to the future of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 23: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment. The only way to guarantee that it will be so in the near future is by making AI Open Source by law and default.
The rapid pace of AI development calls for urgent political leadership to regulate its use and control. Letting technology and the market regulate it will have catastrophic consequences, simply because neither has limits or morality. They are, by design, not meant to have them. Therefore, now that we see what kind of boats the tide tends to lift, let’s take care of the tide instead. Let’s take care of the social capital and place sense, purpose, and hope at the heart of the tide.
After all, “we need economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow”, as Tim Lenton nicely puts it. And economies that make us thrive are those that assure technology and the market serve us, not the other way around.
Boris Matijas 