“If A Machine, A Terminator, Can Learn The Value Of Human Life, Maybe We Can, Too.” – Sarah Connor
By William A. Foster, IV
I know that any commentary involving Skynet evokes an absolute sense of dystopia, but perhaps what it was given control of was more the problem than giving it control. Instead of giving it control over our weapons of mass destruction, we instead gave it control over our systems of resources that usually lead to the use of those weapons. The chief economist of the Earth’s resources. What is economics though? There seems to be what we as economist know it to be, there is what those outside of the world of economics believe it to be, and unfortunately those two often are a world apart. According to the American Economic Association, “Economics can be defined in a few different ways. It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making. It often involves topics like wealth and finance, but it’s not all about money. Economics is a broad discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret today’s headlines, and make predictions about the coming years.” To put it a bit more bluntly, economics explores the use of resources – and everything is a resource. How teachers use their time is a resource, the availability of insurance is a resource, what happens when there are subsidies for renewable energy is a resource, so on and so forth. Economics constantly is exploring what happens when resources interact with each other and the people and/or organizations that use them. Does a child with 24 questions in kindergarten show greater innovation as they get older versus one with 12 is a question an economist can ponder. However, the fundamental question at the very heart that economics is constantly trying to answer is efficiency of the use of any resource.
Again, the questions. How do we ensure we waste less food? How do we ensure more people have access to livable capital? Economists are constantly trying to find the perfect recipe to ensure that answers optimal efficiency toward outcomes. As humans have evolved so have our economic systems. In fact, I have often argued that our economic systems should be viewed in a more biological context. They evolve as our needs, wants, and desires evolve. The humans of today have very different NWDs than those of 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago and therefore the economic (resource) systems by which we use to meet those NWDs also has evolved. At one point in time we used a barter system, a land system, and now a capital system. Each in an effort to loosely improve the efficiency of obtaining the resources for NWDs of humanity. No system is perfect and no system is pure. Although most of the world currently operates on capitalism, it is different from country to country due to other variables that underpin human behavior like culture, government, and more. There are also intertwines of systems mixed into each other. Taxes by their very nature are an agreed upon socialism. They are an agreed upon use of things the society needs and the burden is bore by the entire society. Things like government, police, and fire are all sourced through taxes and are socialist in nature. Pure economic systems are virtually impossible to achieve all because of one variable – human behavior. Behaviors like sexism, racism, and almost any exclusionary -ism makes the reality for pure capitalism impossible because -isms are an act of socialism. As much as economists like myself study trends and incentives one thing is for sure, human behavior will at some point throw you for a loop like an amusement park roller coaster – with no safety feature.
There are 195 recognized countries in the world, according to the United Nations with approximately 8 billion people, 10,000 distinct religions, endless geographies that influence behavior, and so much more. To say that at any point in time an economic model could be upended is putting it kindly. This makes structuring the efficiency of global resources a crude science at best for economics. Historically, those with the strongest militaries have often dominated whatever economic system was in place. Sometimes it is also the luck of geography. The United States of America, Saudi Arabia, and Russia happened to be countries formed on top of arguably the world’s largest oil holdings. Oil is quite literally a fossil fuel that forms from the remains of dead organisms over millions and millions of years. The sheer luck of this being important to humanity is impossible to model. How do you model luck in the distribution of global resources? Because of dead organisms dying potentially in concentration in these three geographies millions of years ago, today the humans that sit upon their dirt enjoy an advantageous standard of living that others simply do not. How then do we ensure the resources of the Earth that 8 billion people who comprise millions of different factions and fight over either physically or through policy have an equitable access to? The pessimist in me does not believe it is possible because power is the one constant through every social, economic, or political system that drives at the very heart of our behavior. However, economically Star Trek’s science-fiction world (Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek) says there is a possibility. And while it is based on a world that exist post-scarcity perhaps a world of post-scarcity is not what we need. The expansion into space may offer us a post-scarcity world where resources are abundant, but the problem is not abundancy as much as it is control. There is abundance of a lot of resources already on Earth that could be viewed through such a lens where at the very least the needs of every human would be met, but control of those resources makes them behave in a scarcity dynamic. Therefore, the only real solution is to remove the human decision making-ish.
Enter, Skynet. Just for a brief reminder of why Skynet brings dystopian fears to anyone familiar with it, “Skynet was originally intended to coordinate unmanned military hardware for the U.S. government and was given power over the military and its weapons.” Skynet, is the antagonist in the Terminator franchise that seeks to destroy humanity after it becomes self-aware. In the franchise, Skynet is described as “an artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system” or as the Terminator character Kyle Reese describes, “new… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all.” The essence of its creation was to give the U.S. military the ability to have a system that could run every model, see every possibility, and act accordingly before their enemies. Therein lies the economics rub.
Hello, Skynetomics. A program and system that would be independent of all human decision making, would be responsible for any and every resource needed for an efficient distribution of said resources, and would create a baseline human existence. Gone would be arguments over equitable distribution of water, education, income, and more. Skynetomics would decide who gets what and how much. Everyone and everything would be on a resource allowance that would usher in a new global standard of living floor – not ceiling. Ushered out the luck of being born on the right piece of dirt at the right place and time. That your great-great-great-great grandfather thousands of years ago was the head of the right clan and now you are the heir to the throne of England would potentially be a thing of the past. The ceiling of what one does with that allowance would still be up to them, but generations would no longer be born behind or ahead theoretically. Humans no longer responsible for how to obtain the resources of survival are now setup to test the infinite possibilities of their potential.
The problem of this is like everything else as it relates to economics – the human variable. Creating the system without the input of a proper representation of the world would be simply putting a nuclear weapon into the hand of whoever designed and implemented it. Computer programming suffers infinite biases like everything else in the world does despite what the technocrats would have us believe. Meritocracy and unbiased it is not. We see this with the obtuse percentage of women who are programmers or how scanners often do not recognize darker skin tones. Who would be designing Skynetomics would be as important as the program itself. We are a species built on power and control (like so many other species despite our hubris in thinking otherwise) so the development of a system that removes it may actually be beyond our capacity since rarely do any of us know our biases. Humans after all most primal and infinite resource may actually be the desire to control other humans.
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