A response to Venkatesh Rao’s essay Cognitive Mercantilism on Contraptions.
I did like the essay. The point that the democratisation of access to - and agency with - intelligence is a good one. My problem is the mental model of a person which runs through the thesis.
Every human motive in it is a desire to consume. Britons work 300 days a year instead of 250 to buy tea and calico. People in slums skip meals to buy a TV. People who “appear stupid” just aren’t motivated to think “given the poor returns available to them”, so raise the returns and they’ll think harder. The politics he sees coming is a fair share of “cognitive consumption opportunities”. Even the AIs get emancipated by becoming consumers. It’s homo-economicus all the way through, and that’s the bit that riles me. There’s not even a nod towards there being more to us.
I’m currently reading Susan Neiman’s Call It Evil and her chapters on socio-economics are very erudite and well-reasoned. One of her arguments is that a massive problem with our era is the thoughtless belief that self-interest is the only thing that moves us, because it makes justice and values look quaint and archaic.
A few notes from the book which are germane here:
- Adam ‘Invisible Hand’ Smith also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments and thought a sense of duty was what kept society from crumbling. Economists only made him the patron saint of self-interest around 1970.
- Until the 20th century, “they did it because it was right” counted as an explanation. Then self-interest became the definition of rational, and altruism became a problem to explain away.
- The longer people study economics, the more selfish they become: they give less to charity and view greed more favourably. ie the mental-model doesn’t describe us, it trains us.
This matters because if we only see people as ‘wanters’, the answer to “what are humans for once machines can think?” is “consuming”. But people also want to be useful, to be respected, to make things, to look after each other, to belong somewhere. A lot of what’s going wrong politically isn’t people lacking their share of stuff. It’s people feeling they don’t count.
(Neiman’s answer is social rights: things you’re owed as a citizen rather than things you buy - eg “why is the right to own a bank seen as more sacrosanct than the right to healthcare?”. Rao comes close once, with a line about “the institutional rights necessary to participate”, then goes back to subscriptions.)
I’m all in on abundance. What scares me is a world designed around a model which treats everyone as a customer (and not as a person, a citizen, part of human-kind, etc)… we’ve seen what engagement-optimising does to customers, and that but at AI speed? No thanks.
AI lets us be humans again. And it feels like he’s forgotten what that means.