RECAP
To bring readers up to date: we’re in the midst of creating, live, a book called DEEP SOCKS. This book will deepen your understanding of all the different realities you live in, but the primary focus is on historical/social/political reality. The book is organized into four seasons. We begin in winter, specifically, “shallow winter” - a collective situation not merely dystopic (wintery) but also, unclear (shallow.) The very language we use to describe the world deceives us: consider the constitutive unclarities involved in the words “capitalism” or “democracy.” The first “movement’ of “winter” considers our reality as “managerworld” - that is, a social reality dominated by a managerial/administrative logic. In the first chapter, we told a story about the development, takeover, and current crisis of managerworld. In the second chapter, we moved from a historical to a contemporary view, looking at the various “social tectonic plates” of managerworld, at the attentional crisis at its center, and at the political fairytales that managerworld uses.
THIS WEEK
This week’s chapter is called “Three Postmanagerial Futures.” The first - today’s content, “Computergod and the Escape from Reality” looks at managerworld’s favorite futurist story about itself, namely, that the computergod will help us wholly escape from material reality. To put it another way: the creation of AI managed economies of scale, spatially distributed but functioning without human error, industrial waste, or corporate externalities. These will be, in the perfect world of the future, accounted for and balanced by AI. The upper layers of the value chain in the top powers are all racing to find this supermanager first, because managerial society is plateauing.
What is managerial society's projected future?
The world has problems. Some avoidable. Some unavoidable. Some are political conflicts, coming from the problems facing nation-states. Some stem from the political cultures of nation states and their managerialization. Some stem from the world production machine running into another of its crises of profitability and resource deprivation.
The solution to these problems emerges naturally from the necessity of the moment. We are in need of better managers, who can harness the vast amounts of information, all of which could theoretically be important or offer insights. We need systems of cooperation that push our people together, and establish a community of shared values and networks of trade that are irreplaceable to life, and make conflict unnecessary and undesirable.
They're calling it, Industry 4.0. Now that captains of industry are self-conscious authors of history, they recognize and periodize the past, seeing the past as the Third Industrial Revolution, and seeing the qualitative changes in the world production machine that make us want to call this a new period of history.
What does it involve? The creation of a green economy that does not waste nor want. The professionalization of all available labor, creating a high skilled, highly educated workforce. The automation of what can be automated--going on forever and ever until we have hit maximal efficiency in the use of human labor and machine power. The use of computer technology in all business and work processes, augmented by machine learning and self-adapting algorithms.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has staked its identity and potentials on the emerging technology of artificial intelligence. While many goals can be achieved without the perfection of artificial intelligence, it is hard to imagine the world truly achieving these goals without this--it's imagining the Third Industrial Revolution without the technology unlocked by the space race.
The ultimate maturation of artificial intelligence is a theoretical point where machine intelligence can exceed human intelligence in all known domains. This is called The Singularity, it is the breakaway point of machine intelligence which may or may not have disastrous or utopic implications for humanity.
The Big Problem and The Three Great Escapes!
The big problem that AI is set to solve is the fact that we are bumping into the limits of what can be managed and produce increase in profit, power, or prestige. We are in a horrible bind in many ways, society appears to have exhausted itself. People cannot credibly grasp the scale and scope and complexity of the problems facing us as a species, or as nations, and barely as people.
The world has grown much too large much too fast
Plainly, management is at its limit as to what to do with us.
Education and skill are not proliferating fast enough at the concentrations needed. In the developing world, people completing college and post-secondary education is projected by those people at McKinsey to fall well short of the needs of development. In other words, people aren't educated enough, capable enough, or smart enough in big enough numbers to reproduce managerial society at a new stage.
Production of many technologies appears to have stalled. Development of reliable new energy resources, modes of transportation, materials, and medicines all appear to have stopped being a priority of highly capitalized firms, or become completely unachievable. Even in programming and IT, there are obvious and observable inefficiencies at all levels of the production process. Developers complain about dependency hell, and software has clearly not gotten more performant or feature rich, while getting more bloated and expensive to make.
For all of our innovations in management, we have run into the nightmare where we rely on extremely high throughput manufacturing that seems to drive people to suicide or premature physical disability with startling reliability. Where throughput is maximized, life is denied. And where life is affirmed, in the upper strata of the economy, work product is not up to the par you'd expect in quality.
Managerial society's externalized costs are becoming unmanageable, especially as firms align and integrate with state level actors financially, ideologically, and structurally. To fix this: the Fourth Industrial Revolution must engineer the escape from inefficiency, from work, and from materiality to fully achieve its potential. This is the AI managed global economy of perfect scale and efficiency.
The escape from inefficiency
Inefficiency is by far the most pressing and obvious problem before so very many. It impacts and makes work a pointless trip in insanity for most with office jobs. It makes prices go up. It seems to be dooming our planet. It appears to be turning the Pacific into a trash bog. It is waste, it is stupidity, it is the negativity of an imperfect world's social form.
Currently, we can see easily that resources are misallocated. They are used inefficiently. Hence, the circular economy. The green revolution. This is our first promised deliverance, the full optimization of business processes to avoid waste, generate new profits, and avoid pollution from disposal of waste that is not somehow balanced out. It may sound like bullshit now, but its ambitions are high and the players are relentless and control hitherto unimaginable amounts of resources and have unprecedented ideological uniformity amongst the world’s elite.
Social inefficiency
But beyond the waste of physical production, anyone who's ever worked a job can tell you: labor is used inefficiently. Find a desk worker, are they working hard? Hardly working? So, obviously, to truly be made useful, management will need to really break new ground with data and surveillance-driven management techniques. Already people suffer under them at the low end of the economy, and anyone laboring under KPI. This will entail the physical enhancement of built environments with new sensors and digital twin technologies, and a growing benign surveillance of occupants to understand the most efficient patterns to provide them service and space.
Hopefully, both facility and interpersonal management can be augmented efficiently with aspects of decision-making handled by machine learning algorithms. It will, ideally, form a platform that handles our intellectual grunt work, from division of labor to drafting work products.
Augmenting the processual
Labor will, at first, not be automated, but augmented with new intelligence. Calculators didn't get rid of mathematicians, though they did get rid of professional calculators. This may well be the case for video editing, content marketing, initial product design, data analysis, and any number of other fields where work has standard and formalized processes with predictable inputs and outputs.
Perhaps as workers, humans will progressively become supervisors of machines and intelligent programs in the knowledge economy. This will represent a new plateau in efficiency, but perhaps not its eradication.
These are the driving components of Digitalism, the coming successor for Managerialism currently forecast by industrial leadership and world corporate leadership. Its trends and dynamics will lead, idealistically, to two much more commonplace utopic dreams being fulfilled. The true escape from inefficiency will be the minimization of human input in any and all production processes.
The escape from work
To minimize the world of work, This will happen as a cascading event, that has been forecasted since... the 1950s, at least. Vonnegut wrote one of his first novels about it.
The first industry to be fully automated, where human labor inputs are used mostly to manage the machines doing the specific tasks, will not be the last. The cost and efficiency gains will be quite large. What it is, we have no idea.
Currently, machines are bad at replicating the dexterity and self-correcting nature of humans in work. But the first one to do this will not be the last. Perhaps the first fully automated labor field will be in the knowledge economy. Opinions from the NYT column surely aren't all that hard to generate algorithmically, and GPT-3 can do most 'reporting' work. Maybe generating efficient code is easier. They say computer time is cheaper than programmer time. So, there's an obvious advantage there.
The irony of the escape from work is that it will disproportionately affect the knowledge economy first. "Knowledge work" is strangely easier to correct mistakes in. Take software engineering, and compare it to something like engineering a bridge.
Software engineering
Errors in software are easy to fix. You can amortize the cost of fixing mistakes and place it in the costs of general maintenance and upgrading. Most software errors do not kill should they malfunction.
Bridge engineering
Errors in bridge production are very hard to fix, and require huge new investments in material and labor. You cannot amortize these fixes. The bridge is either up to code, or it is not an operable bridge. And most bridge errors can kill you.
Automate away desk cages
This alone is a good case for automation in knowledge worker fields. The stakes are lower. People happily accept dogshit quality in almost all knowledge fields, from movies to advertisement to software to journalism. They can't tell good from bad, and think corrections are a sign of a process committed to doing better and better.
Investment capital will flood to automation and industries on the verge of automation. Technical capacity, such as it is, will rapidly mature in this direction. This will create a sort of panic cascade--firms will move themselves to an automatable track to appear trendy and deserving of investment, just like they do now with ESG. And there is a threshold where a social crisis is provoked.
After the rush and panic, a world where no one knows what to do
When 10, 20 percent of the workforce in a sector is automated, we will have escaped from work. There is no returning once the threshold is crossed. No putting those people back in the workforce. It would require a break with the basic rules of business: make more than you spent, take home more than you did yesterday.
It is not a ‘structural adjustment’ though it will likely be spun as one by the voodoo witch doctors on TV. It is instead, inescapably, the death of our current order. When greater than 1 in 10 are permanently out of a job, because their labor in any configuration with their lifetime of skill and knowledge is worth less than what can be done without people, that’s a world where 10 in 10 have no idea what’s next. The next decile is in ter. when there's not going to be enough jobs in a trade or field anymore for anyone. The Great Depression was about 25% of the workforce out of work, and it took the Third Industrial Revolution, the revolution of truly global market access, to mobilize workers. What might mobilize a new corps of workers? Mars? A revolution in the social sciences, when a new class of grievance is discovered? Maybe fentanyl? Learning to code? Organic farming?
There has never been a period before where labor has effectively managed to be closed out of production. It is purposeless to forecast, though you can read Vonnegut’s Player Piano for a good examination of its gravity. Previously, we have had situations where 100 stevedores become 50 stevedores, and for 50 it was a tragedy. For the economy at large, there were perhaps new jobs for all the stevedore machines that reduced stevedore demand. A new factory and maintenance men had to be built to service the waterfront, and Brando didn’t have to get his ass kicked maybe. Overall, the economy had grown. But this is a world we’re imagining where your niche can become truly, truly pointless, more pointless than anthropology, more pointless than political science. Underwater basket weaving may have been a safer bet than the graduate work for some.
For the world to escape from work, we will have to not have the stevedores become robot managers, or for there to be a wonderful new production chain of robot manufacture. The loss is more catastrophic. It won’t actually affect our friends at the docks. The escape from work comes when 100 programmers are replaced by a GPT project that can be serviced efficiently by PhDs around the world for free. When they become merely hunks of flesh in a world where their skills and talents aren't enough to matter anymore.
It is almost impossible to understand this unprecedented turn of events, though if society is to cope with this, it will have to extend new opportunities for leisure and financial assistance to people.
The escape from materiality
So, perhaps in the short run, the foretold Fourth Industrial Revolution will help us escape inefficiency. Our bosses and supervisors will become AI or computer assisted in new and unexpected ways. Work might suck more, but it may be more rational.
And perhaps in the medium run, we will achieve automation in many industrial processes sufficient to eliminate some plurality of the labor force from meaningful contribution. How the governments of the world will handle this, we cannot say, but we can guess it will be as good as all of their other responses to crises in the past.
But the goal of professionalization, of automation, of digitalization and the circular economy and the elimination of waste--it is to preserve something and detach it from its own costs. It is all done to place the economy at a level where its technical level obviates materiality itself.
The Singularity is mythic, because it is a space of untold potential, it is a space where potentially a brain emerges that in a few moments can make itself better and better, an exponentially growing, snowballing down the mountain kind of accumulation of power and knowledge.
If things go smoothly…
The escape from work, the escape from inefficiency, these are possible, probable even, if things continue to go smoothly. But to escape from materiality, to truly make society and the world production machine eternal, it would require the escape from materiality. And now, with the advent of AI technology, there is something that in some theoretical space could certainly achieve that, through means which are definitionally unimaginable to us. The veil of ignorance gives us assurance, if it is better than us, it will solve our problems better than us.
But the escape from materiality may or may not happen if we hit the Singularity. There may be no intelligence big enough to free us from the obligations of our bodies, from our obligation to the rest of the world. Nor may it be particularly desirable or sustainable. It may not produce any solutions of note. The computergod may just love calculating pi. It might be here now, calculating pi and ignoring us for the unending surprise and beauty of these sublime numbers.
Singularity as concentration, not perfection
The society of the singularity is likely not a society living under a flawless and Platonic godhead that is the summa bonnum. Instead, it is the sum of power and intelligence, which lack moral valuation.
It is the complete concentration of power.
It is the complete concentration of labor.
It is the complete concentration of thought.
Because it is these, it is the concatenation of the world production machine over time into a single entity, that finally serves itself. The depressing thing about the Singularity, should it occur, is that it is the fulfillment of management’s promise, to govern through techne and in ignorance of virtue.
Brains, not bodies
The bodies of workers are probably the hardest single thing to replicate and automate away. Our bodies are dexterous, nimble, and effortlessly prioritize and react to many kinds of data. It took a few billion years, and most of us suck provably at it, but those Boston Dynamics demos are all fake and robots can't do the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch on their own, even after you melt down a couple hundred grand and hire a bunch of PhDs to make it happen.
Automation is not the replacement of the hand. It is adding the knowledge of what controls the tool in the hand to the tool itself. The history of automation has been the discovery and study of specific tasks inside. Replicating a tool that has the freedom of movement, the flexibility, trainability, and low cost threshold of keeping a human in working form. Seriously, you just need instant noodles and boiled water to keep the people in a factory alive.
This is why manual labor is perhaps not in eminent danger of automation or AI taking its lunch. A robot is expensive. You rent time on your compute cluster, which has been made cheap because the owner of the compute cluster controls all retail outside of China, or everyone's computer, or advertising, or is a bank and owns all retail inside of China. Automating and making autonomous intellectual tasks is cheap compared to automating and making autonomous manual tasks. Ask Uber which was harder to automate, the taxi driver or the taxi dispatch.
The rise of management has happened in parallel with computer technology, and the history of management has been the transformation of interpersonal relationships of control into discrete and analyzable specific tasks and processes. This is professionalization.
Professionalization is the tool that makes you a tool
This process by which the intellectual capacities of a particular job are turned into processes that could theoretically be subject to automation is also known as professionalization. For Industry 4.0's purposes, which is positioned as a general upgrade of the current world, it is imperative that labor supply quality improves.
Professionalization is a great bargain for many. Wages rise, in exchange for the worker having to become more skilled and educated. The standards of labor rise, thanks to the increase of technique and information available to the worker. The public gets better services and goods.
This also makes the processes of labor vulnerable to automation as a matter of course. A job that you can learn to do, that has set rules, processes, orders, can theoretically be automated. As long as you don't need to use your hands too much, or aren't reliant on snap judgment, the wonderful pattern detection and signal/noise filtering of the human brain, your skills are potentially automatable.
The successive and inescapable transformations
The escape from inefficiency will feel like the icy grip of death encapsulating all life in work and at home. It will require relentless social and mental anesthetization, and endless propagandizing about its benefits to be accepted. This is certainly no challenge, it is merely the ante for any social project that is so contrary to human nature.
Entertainment and diversion and crude persuasion will be the carrot. The stick, precarity. If you do not skill up, perform, achieve, or somehow find a nice that hasn't occurred to the robots and their servants yet, perhaps you will enjoy a very marginal life, characterized mostly by fear about your bread.
And when, if, we should achieve an escape from work, the best of all possible worlds will have been arrived at at last. The benevolence of our governments can and must sustain us, since we then would live in a world where a citizen's contribution to society can no longer be meaningfully gleaned from their status and role in production of goods and services. It must instead be measured via service to the nation--hopefully this will be such a demoralized and deracinated and denationalized world that no one would consider war in a developed enough country, and we can all retire as fat bureaucrats. This would be a world where people are either very fit or very fat, in a 1:30 ratio or some nightmarish absurdity like that.
This is rambling about a future that hasn't happened. It would not be pleasant to be locked out of work, dependent on society instead of interdependent. We will all be obliged to listen to the data and behave accordingly, or face a life of fear, dependence, and difficulty, numbed by cheap and accessible consumer lifestyles. This is the inescapable change of Industry 4.0. That's owning nothing, being happy.
A depressing and bizarre fate for production itself
The world of AI supergod emerging out of the server farms of the world to deliver us from death, or poverty, or to serve whatever its inscrutable aims will be is a world of endless servitude at first to the owners of the machinegod's physical substrate. Then, service is to whatever keeps the god benevolent, or indifferent to us.
The Skynet hazards aside, we are left with a very strange world where the combination of surveillance, ever increasing demands on humans to participate in the production machine, and growing mountains of crumbs for the humans who cannot participate in the market makes life only worth living insofar as it provides pleasure.
But what pleasures are there really when the purpose of life is pleasure? Is this going to be a world of luxury for all? Perfect efficiency, the dream of escaping from material reality, none of this is intrinsically tied to the dream of people's standards of living being better. Instead, this is a production machine that governs itself for itself. It's a life that exists in a symbiotic at best relationship with us. At worst, we are parasitic to the largely autonomous system that produces... something, for what purpose, it no longer makes sense.
What is most important about the future revolution is, of course, what it may or may not do for us. Will we be richer? Some of us. Will that matter? In the millennial kingdom of AI, what could it matter? But really, there's one important question to ask of a world where management of world affairs gives way to an inhuman superintelligence.
Are we free?
No.