Shapes from the tools

Efficiency and complexity will be points of vulnerability, but that will not stop the manufacturing of some products or services from being complex, nor will it drive people away from the essential value of efficiency. What we see as efficient in a more complex calculation with multiple values, may of course change.

The advent of natural language processing (NLP) has enabled artificial intelligence to explore the world of human culture and learning without guidance. Computers are no longer bound simply by their original instruction set and initial data. From here on knowledge, instruction and design will be stored, processed and developed semi-independently of homo-sapien intelligence.  The more structured the language of a discipline the more amenable it is to NLP. Areas like recipes, law and technical vocabulary are likely to be the easiest to adopt by NLP systems.

This codification of instructions, of craft and practices has already allowed machines to outperform humans in basic motor skills and the co-ordination of technical documents. Whether a jury is ready to listen to the arguments of a robot lawyer without discrimination is another thing. Software artists, authors and musicians are emerging. There is barely a physicist left in the world who’s research is not mediated by a computer[i].

This trend will greatly increase the rate of knowledge production, and should in theory have an even greater impact on dissemination of design and best practice.

This ability to transfer instructions increases the capacity and efficiency of automated algorithmic production. The pressure on logistics, demand for personalisation and increasing minaturisation points to a greater modularisation of the fabrication machines as well as end products.  One way to compete with large manufacturers with a high level of invested capital is to sell small versions of the machines used direct to the consumer. An example can be seen in the way Cinema moved to TV, and then mobile phones united both the production and consumption equipment in one device.

Manufacturers, large and small already offer customisations of products before purchase over the web. In these systems, the consumer is bought closer to the factory through information sharing and individualised delivery, rather than simple mass production. Retail becomes replaced by logistics.

This again produces a neural like configuration in the economy, with nodes of production and consumption dependent on communication and feedback between the elements. The only thing that prevents monopoly domination by the most efficiently tooled manufacturing centres are logistics issues.

This suggests that the degree to which local or domestic fabrication can replace logistics will in a large part be a principle question of political economy, such are the subsidies, explicit and implicit to big business across the world. Germany stands out as nation with an effective insitutional capacity to build and suppor SMEs and a number of countries offer support to small farmers. But by and large existing economic infrastructure is geared towards suppor for mass production and centralised distribution.

If the capacity to localise production is applied in an economy the likelihood is that some successor of the 3D printers, fab labs, or even RNA printers will all bring manufacturing capacity into our homes. This will be predicated on the production of smart materials with the flexibility to be used in many applications.  

More complex production by end consumers will doubtless add to the complexity of waste collection and pollution (e.g. the printing of disposable tooth brushes, let alone mutagenic viruses in the rivers).

It may also be the case that if the focus is on biological of pseudo-biological manufacture (mushroom houses, algaes, bacterial assemblages) that there is an advantage in localised production.

Food processing is an area which already has wide range of domestic devices. It may even be possible, as with the mobile phone, to localise production and processing in one small unit. This might be relevant to artificial meats or bacterial feedstocks.

Another area where minaturisation combines with information transfer to distinct advantage would be in personalised medicine, the precise composition of which would in many cases be specific to variables within the individual’s body including time of day and what they last ate.

The reduced capital cost of machinery may produce a trend in some sectors to return to vertical integration of supply chains (raw material, manufacturing and sale managed in one organisation). It may evenly allow primary producers to add value early in the supply chain and go direct to consumers. We may see a new “artisan” movement that becomes an exercise in sharing instructions for “artisan machines”.   

In the world of Financial data gathering, electronic currency and parallel computing the capacity should in theory exist to allow the movement of every penny in the economy to be charted. Predictive spending and credit could lead to completely different economic pattern with competition between players pushed several steps into the future.

Against this illusion of near certainty in currency flows we have to set the prospective of rapid and ongoing disruption. That is, the pattern of resource use and distribution is changed significantly by a new market entrant. Disruption by technology and fast moving technology companies has become an industry gold standard.  The launch of mass market company backed by good code and massive advertising spend is what most “unicorns” seek.

Disruption will arise not only from innovation, it appears to be principle emerging area of soft competition between multi-national actors, the closure of borders, denial of services, disruption of logistics, often in a way that has been calculated to inflict a “valuable” disruption to the other party and presumably, often planned with the aid of strategic AI looking several steps into the future. The very ability to forecast brings with it the ability to infer causality in the pattern and thereby change it. So while every data point in the economy may be trackable, black swans will appear and the river may burst its banks or meet unexpected dams from a fallen tree or crashed truck.

There may also be disruptions through climate change (droughts with knock on effects), seismic events and social collapse likely to follow from ecological constraint.

Many of these trends point to arrangements where manufacturing will be more distributed, leading to processed commodities and smart materials to have more small customers rather than delivering to large centres. Or more probably, small well tooled producers and consumers meshed together with large centres of primary production and mass manufacture.

Given that economies of scale are a simple fact of maths, as is efficiency, these values will always be pursued almost by definition, by large organisations. In this multi-polar world the size and efficiency of an organisation becomes a point of vulnerability, most multi-national actors will need a State sponsor to protect them in a world where their competitors are increasingly taking on the appearance of instruments of foreign policy and resource acquisition for the host nation.  This was to some extent, always the case with colonial enterprises, and a parallel can be seen the travails of national champions during the era of great power competition in the second half of the 19^th century.  

This dynamic itself suggests that the political economy that arises will necessarily be communist, corporatist or oligarchic, with the government needing business to acquire and distribute resource and large businesses needing government support to do so in the face of competition both at home and overseas.

And all the while in a political economy of rapid innovation, politico-economic powers will be looking for disruptors, those people who can efficiently apply a new idea or technology such that it can significantly change resource flow and market share. This means helping companies to scale novel technology rapidly, which itself becomes perhaps an economic disruption in the re routing of materials and a supply crunch caused by novel demand, or worse, an existential dilemma.

To scale rapidly to global production ignores the precautionary principle, and risks releasing a new uranium or thalidomide. To not scale a solution rapidly in a time of ecological crisis provides crisis through omission rather than action. Ideally, real time experiments in the economy should be monitored in real time, and if we are honest in the research base, seemingly far off, downstream effects of the change might be brought to light in simulations that can investigate everything from impact on local environment to chemical and metabolic change overtime into the future. An obvious case of this can be found in Climate science.  
 

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[i] There is the problem in a post Kantian world where we look out from instruments built by giants that if any of the underlying theory on which our instruments are dependent is wrong we can only built a grand edifice of nonsense. And this is problem that will in future lead us to the question of trust in AI. For if AI is bringing us both the theory and the data, if it is involved in our very perception and construction of the universe, then we have to trust that it is a competent an honest guide. What if the guiding AI of a branch of Science turns out to be the silicon equivalent of a giggling fraudster?

What are the tools of the new economy?

The coming century promises a different productive, economic and ecological pattern. Use of data, synthetic biology, neuroscience, sub-quantum physics, nano-assembly and parrallel computing will be key fields with transformative effects.

Data

We are all familiar with data gathering, cookies in the cache, and the even more useful explosion in data points that ubiquitous mobile phone ownership has created. Software that claims to deduce all sorts; such from mood through the movement, comes preloaded as standard on smart phones.  

Data on consumer choice are sold by Apps and websites that are dependent on advertisers for their revenue.  This data is then refined by machine learning and used to place ads in the app or site, the basic post-modern “free” digital service business model.

This is the tip of the iceberg as far as the use of data to organise an economy, centralised or decentralised, is concerned.  We can follow the life of product from cradle to grave (or cradle to cradle in the parlance of green product design). It may be across a fragmented web that the data on a person could be compiled from cradle to grave.

Groups of webusers have decided that particularly algorithms are safe stores of value, creating non state currencies, Bitcoin and its dynastic progeny. We are a step (somewhat uncertain one) from using machine learning and data organisation alone to manage the products of society’s wealth.

Synthetic Biology

A collapse of microscope size and price reduced the cost of research into DNA, basic chemistry and the brain, leading to a proliferation of projects that have transformed our knowledge base.

Though the basis of genetics was discovered seventy years ago, recent advances have shown how the chemicals in DNA translate into the proteins in our bodies. How changes in diet, environment and experience change our genetics output through methylation and phosphorylation and how viruses and CRISPr can be used to edit, annotate and add genetic material to existing genomes; and explore the brain.  The race to develop vaccines in response to the pandemic is ushering in an era of RNA printing and from that follows customisable protein production.

The Venter Institute’s minimal genome is essentially a chassis for the manufacture of microbial life. A boom similar to that experienced on discovery of the means to control infectious disease and the green revolution combined is possible.

Quantum and sub quantum physics

What advances will flow from the enhanced understanding of gravity bought about by instruments such as LIGO or the super-cool observatory in Antarctica I do not know. Nor what from the advance in sub quantum particle detection, the discovery of the error in the Muon’s charge,  the quest to detect  the massless Majorana fermion, the concept of a continuous field or vibration of bosons, rather than their existence as discrete particles such as protons; and not least the ability to control individual photons.

All these advances suggest a great leap forward in telecommunications, control over action and protein function of a populations of cells, and a revolution in phone billing and energy measurement.

This new understanding will combine with the technological advances above in ways that beyond my technical or imaginative understanding.

Neuroscience

We increasingly understand is that information exchange occurs in all neurons and not just neurons in the brain. The interest in the peripheral nervous system and the memory and learning of the immune system bought about by the pandemic is likely to be the bedrock of a new breed of technologies.

The dendritic information model, a neural net design based on the brain, promises a revolution in human intervention; decision making, memory, current available knowledge, perception, attention and even motor control can be altered, comparable to our ability to alter the basic chemistry of life.  It also provides a useful architecture for computers. This will be a key transformation of the Post-Kantian mind.

Whether implementation of these understandings leads to a revolution in education or a distracting spiral into dementia will be a key determinant of the social progress of different populations in the coming century.

Self-Assembly – nano-fabrication

Along with 3D printers, the construction of very small components can now be performed through chemistry, lasers, and genetic programming. The use of specialist materials, charged particles and die casting on laser etched substrates allows construction allows for construction of micorchips 3 nm or 3 billionth of metre, though only currently in Taiwan.

Traditional nano-fabrication factories cost billions, however the use of biological components in self-assembly promises cheap construction of all manner of micro-electric and biologically active devices. Lovely[i].

Parallel computing

One of the great recent advances in computer architecture has been the construction of neural nets.  Of particular note is Demis Hasabis’ construction of neural nets exclusively through software, recreating elements of the architecture of brain solely through code. This makes the understandings more cheaply transferable than those developed with hardware neural nets.

Looking forward, the architecture of parallel computing provides a new and more powerful substrate on which this software can be run. One advantage of note that parallel has over conventional computing is the ability to calculate alternative paths simultaneously.

Whether done through solid state quantum computers, such as Google’s Sycamore, photon computers, such as China’s in Lu Xiang; or biological computers that grow parallel branches, as first described by Turing, these machines provide the possibility to rapidly calculate non-linear equations.

This is particularly useful for a category of problems including logistics, weather, evolution, chemistry, seismic and indeed the very operation of the human brain.  With large data sets, neural nets have the capacity to recognise patterns that are too complex for the human mind to understand analytically without assistance.

What is also clear is that this new computer architecture accelerates innovation and competition in the preceding spheres, data, biology, “new physics”, neuroscience and nano-fabrication, and indeed, reflexively, artificial intelligence itself.

The economy that emerges has already ripped through the velum bounds of law and stands as a cross border wrestle of super-sized organisations and nimble, rapidly innovating smaller groups.

As said, the emergent behaviour of the economy, the economic pattern that is created by these new forces, may be as different as water is to steam. That the future is unevenly distributed is clear. We face an economy shaped not just by invisible hands, but by invisible codes, chemical and algorithmic. The impact on the economic systems of the preceding century will doubtless be transformative. What forms of social arrangement, echoed or novel emerge, we cannot know, but must try to deduce their rising contours through the mist.

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[i] Lovely 2011 “Tunable metallic-like conductivity in microbial nanowire networks”. Nature Nanotechnology.

What will the post-enlightenment economy look like?

What is the new political-economy of this century to be? One does not have to be of rigidly historical materialist perspective to perceive that different ages have been governed by different patterns of political economy. The political economy of the Bronze Age was different from that of the Iron Age. If only for the fact that swords needed sharpening more often, putting greater cost on armies moving from their home territory, necessitating ploughs made from wood and restricting long distance communication other than by sea.

The Iron Age bought in horse shoes and blades that kept their edge longer (the radical pacifist use of such blades was in carpentry, which may be a lost metaphor in the life of Jesus). Political economy was for millennia, restricted to a relatively anarchic pattern of warfare and freedom.

An understanding of electromagnetism, microbial life and the use of the stored energy of fossil fuels changed the pattern of human organisation. Now we have a diverse array of revolutionary tools bought about by a deeper ability to harness the power of semi-conductors and genetics. What are the likely emergent patterns, one might ask?

After 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet economic model it seemed that the world would be united under one approximately equivalent legal framework based on European legal models, with the idea of private property central to economic development. Fast forward a few decades and we see Francis Fukuyama scribbling away to remove the egg from his face.

For rather than a triumph of the liberal order across the world we face forms of divergent organisation of political economy. In China, the liberal idea of individual human rights makes little inroads into a fusion of traditional Confucian values combined with novel interpretations of Marxist-Communist thought, a mere sprinkling of market dynamics exists within a framework of limited property rights and competing state sponsored actors.

Across much of the West, the liberal order is subverted by a hyper-individualism and international economic order that does much to evade and subvert national laws, States and indeed large corporations. A succession of billion dollar scandals flashes across the pages of news outlets from month to month. 1MDB, Greensill, various Laundromats, Wirecard, Danske, etc….The level of routinised tax evasion in invoice mispricing and offshoring is a not insignificant percentage of global GDP (4-7% of GDP across Africa as much as 9% of the GDP of Mozambique ) , such that we observe not so much the Liberal Order as an illiberal disorder in political economy.

With rapid electronic transfer of unlimited amounts of cash, the situation is more than a little comparable to Atlantic piracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Large cargoes of capital seized on the high seas by actors that were often impossible to identify. The question of political economy then becomes, is the law enforceable? If not does it need to change, and if it does, can it be changed and what will the new law be? The current competing models would seem headed towards a techno-authoritarianism or an anarcho-capitalism. Both characterised by extreme levels of economic and political inequality.

Clearly the current trajectory of both systems has bought us to an ecological crisis. The question then becomes what could change this. One historic example is the compensation of slave owners after the abolition of slavery in Great Britain. Owners of fossil fuels could be compensated; the bond holders and shareholders, of the supply chain.

Compensation for the abolition of slavery was possibly the largest ever transfer of state wealth to private individuals. If we assume broadly that the people who would need to be compensated are already the richest on the planet, then we face the unfortunate conundrum that 1,300 people are said to account for 93% of the world’s wealth and as result, what do you compensate them with?

The most obvious alternative is discipline or punishment, but only China seems willing or able to do so to its nationals. Capitol Hill’s interrogation of the Americas tech giants being something of a wash out with almost no material action since. Similar might be said about the response to companies involved in some of the more outlandish episodes of the financial crises of 2007 in all countries bar Iceland.

The Sackler family may have suffered for the sins of Pharma. But there has been no whiff of a Senate hearing, let alone legislative action on the other great industrial funder of the US lobbey and prime suspect for the ecological crisis, Oil. With wealth comes power, and how do you exert power over those with power save through law, which as mentioned above, is notable for its patchy enforcement against national champions.

Looking out on this, it is hard to see how a market society can change its underlying incentive structure to redirect resource use into less destructive and extractive patterns. Doing so would mean the rearrangement of profit rights, which would face a blizzard of pressure while the planet burned. Centrally directed resource use is more likely to achieve clear goals, as in war, and so it has proved with Chinese capacity to install more wind power in a year than the rest of the world had ever managed. But just as in a market society, that a centrally directed economy can, does not mean it will.

So it would seem that we should expect to move into a new productive system created by the coming of age of variety of technologies, not least, artificial intelligence, in an environment where the legal framework is too slow to adapt to the range of economic opportunities. This might be seen as a complex system changed on some crucial parameter such that the behaviour that emerges is as different as water is to steam.

So let us look at these new tools and guess as to the shape of political economy that will grow out of them in the medium term, assuming no radical departure from the current legal framework.