{"id":11312,"date":"2016-07-21T10:48:28","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T05:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=11312"},"modified":"2021-01-31T12:12:52","modified_gmt":"2021-01-31T06:42:52","slug":"prosperitys-moral-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2016\/07\/21\/prosperitys-moral-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Prosperity’s moral code"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago, TechCrunch had a post<\/a> debating the role of capitalism in a world that includes AI, where jobs are disappearing at a rate faster than new jobs coming in. \u00a0Capitalism has always been played as a finite game, focused on profit for a set of people, largely irrespective of the costs to others or society at large. As I wrote in “A shift in the world order<\/a>“, its only real foe in the recent past has been the nation state, and its executive arm – the government. A foe increasingly struggling to even defend its own relevance, I’d say. As the dominant system of the world, we will then automatically (whether rightfully, is debatable) begin questioning capitalism’s morality codes. More than what we are doing currently, because the impact will not just be higher, it will also start affecting more people.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, I had written<\/a> on\u00a0how if it intends to survive, capitalism needs to expand its scope, and play an infinite game<\/a> – whose purpose is to continue the flow of the game, and bring in new players. Something similar to what Douglas Rushkoff calls digital distributism (read<\/a>) a model that aims for\u00a0the circulation of money rather than the extraction of money<\/em>. An evolution that capitalism needs to go through, or it runs the risk of imploding. This, of course, is not really in line with the way an earlier generation of corporations, or Silicon Valley operates. \u00a0As\u00a0Maciej Ceg\u0142owski writes in “The Moral Economy of Tech<\/a>“,\u00a0treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale for being selfish.\u00a0We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we’re hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I read a very interesting take in this context, attributed to\u00a0Buckminster Fuller (via a GigaOm post<\/a> on a similar topic) “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

But it does post an interesting question – why should the ‘one in ten thousand’ victors (of capitalism) not continue to use their resources to maximise profit for themselves? On the flip side, why should the embittered rest not retaliate and use whatever means available to combat this? In such a situation, where does the moral right lie? And barring scale, how really different is it from where we are now?<\/p>\n

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A few months ago, TechCrunch had a post debating the role of capitalism in a world that includes AI, where jobs are disappearing at a rate faster than new jobs coming in. \u00a0Capitalism has always been played as a finite game, focused on profit for a set of people, largely irrespective of the costs to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1479,98,6026,6056,6025],"tags":[789,5146,613,402,1739,5029],"class_list":["post-11312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughtstream","category-future","category-ideas-future","category-society-culture","category-work-culture","tag-capitalism","tag-digital-distributism","tag-government","tag-money","tag-morality","tag-privilege"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11312"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15550,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11312\/revisions\/15550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}