The Breaking Point Page 8

  Would you be worried that space aliens could do your job more cost-effectively than you? Would you be concerned that they might eat your children? Or would you wish to join the welcome party and host a celebration in their honor?

  The implications of, and reactions to, the advent of hard AI covers a similar range of possibilities—almost the whole inventory of science fiction plots from the past half-century could come to life. Rather than trying to rehearse them here, suffice it to say that the implications would be far-reaching and disruptive.

  Likewise, the possibility of artificial life, whether it emerged from the evolution of molecular-level assemblers or through the programming into machines—the downloading of human consciousness—as imagined by Kurzweil, could have astonishingly far-reaching implications. These would include the probable emergence of artificial organisms that could do our physical work and collaborate in problem solving.

  If these artificial organisms were considered robots, they would displace the need for much human work. If they achieved quasi-human status, they might become varieties of slaves. At the very least, this would suggest the emergence of a hard caste system, in which a range of creatures reminiscent of the bar scene in Star Wars jostled for legal status. The puzzles and quandaries this would entail seem certain to perplex the future.

  Death Transcended?

  The ambition among researchers to decipher the most intimate secrets of biology includes a desire to greatly decelerate or even transcend death. The aforementioned Kurzweil not only forecasts that hard AI will be with us within twenty years, but he boldly believes that the exponential progress of information technology will make heretofore unimaginable miracles possible. As reported by Caroline Daniel in an April 2015 Financial Times article, Kurzweil declares that humans will overcome almost all diseases and aging over the next twenty or twenty-five years.10

  This is a notion about which I am optimistic. The revolution in molecular medicine is based not only on the expansion of computational power, as emphasized by Kurzweil, but also on the 400,000-fold improvement in the power of microscopes in the centuries since Robert Hooke first discovered the cell. Hooke, under commission to King Charles II, discovered the cell with a compound microscope with fifty times the resolution of the human eye. Today, the new STEHM microscope allows researchers to see with a resolution of twenty million times human sight. Science now has the ability to see material as small as a single atom—a million times smaller than a human hair. The deepest secrets of life, literally hidden by invisibility since the dawn of time, are now open for inspection.

  Indeed, I am devoting considerable time and effort to help develop therapies that counteract aging, known as “replicative senescence,” by extending the length of telomeres—and thus expanding the range of regenerative medicine. Some animals, such as lobsters, whose cells are amply supplied with telomerase—the enzyme that preserves the length of telomeres across cell divisions—do not die of old age. A lobster could live to be hundreds of years old if it could elude the lobster pot, large fish, octopi, and cannibalistic encounters with other lobsters.

  Unfortunately, in humans, the telomerase enzyme is usually found in profusion only in the telomeres of chromosomes in germ cells and some cancer cells. Although there are complications, the biology of telomere extension suggests that it could be a potent mechanism of extending human health span.

  Google has created its own venture to combat aging, Calico, to which Kurzweil is an advisor. Whether it is Calico, my telomere project, Telometrix, or something entirely different, it would seem to be only a matter of time until the exponential progress of information technology leads to effective regenerative therapies to supersede our inherited biology and counter aging.

  For the sake of this thought experiment, imagine that the highly disruptive innovation of “transcending death” only has the effect of doubling the human health span. Think of people enjoying the equivalent of an additional three quarters of a century of vigorous living in what would be a health state equivalent to being in their forties but protracted for decades. Biotechnological breakthroughs that merely permitted greater numbers to reach a decrepit old age would have very different megapolitical implications than innovations that counteract the aging process itself, reprogramming the body to reverse senescence.

  Dr. Al Sears shrewdly observes that a significant extension of the health span would open the way for expansion of human capital. You would invest more in developing yourself if you could anticipate many more useful decades of life. Today, people tend to “grow up” in their early twenties, after which they more or less attempt to make the best of the person they have become at that point.

  Learn Chinese? Why not? Become an elite athlete? Build a physique like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? With enhanced insights into health and fitness, you could become a fair semblance of a superhero with an extra few decades of vigorous life to work on it. Think of the possibilities. Even if you were not an athlete at twenty-one, you could become one at eighty-one, when the scientific basis for reprogramming your body to grow younger is better understood.

  Creative Destruction through Survival

  You cannot consider the implications of a potentially disruptive innovation like the conquest of aging without recalling that the current corporatist system feasts on the diseases of aging. The pharmaceutical industry, along with the whole sick care establishment, has trillions at stake in the continuation of the current system.

  You know what they say; “Life follows art.” With that in mind, you might find a better template for grasping the impact of a biotechnological breakthrough to overcome aging by watching The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu, the last film completed by the late comic Peter Sellers. In this flick, the wicked Fu Manchu is 168 years old, courtesy of his elixir vitae, a secret antiaging potion known only to Fu.

  If there is another major life extension breakthrough, I would not be surprised if it turned out to be of the Fu Manchu variety: a secret elixir available only to drug dealers and major players in the white slave trade (or maybe some more respectable billionaires), rather than a common tonic administered through systems of socialized medicine. The last thing Social Security could afford would be general progress in life extension. Another century of life would bury the whole gag. Therefore, I would not be surprised if governments sought to suppress therapies that counter senescence.

  Needless to say, pay-as-you-go old age benefits like Social Security could hardly survive the transcendence of death. The prospect of extended lifespans through biotechnological innovation is only one of many factors hinting that saving is destined to make a comeback as the principal expedient for addressing life’s contingencies.

  Retiring Retirement

  In all probability, any appreciable progress toward transcending death would rapidly retire the idea of retirement. It would simultaneously open new categories of problems heretofore unknown in society. Removal of death as a universal social laxative would leave the channels of advancement for young people clogged. (That is only one sense in which the transcendence of death would curtail incentives to procreate.)

  Another logical consequence of dramatic extension of human health span would be an increase in the physical risk-aversion of the rich. Statistics on “life expectancy” are easier to come by than for “life span.” Even so, from what we know, it appears that a twenty-year-old man on the eve of the Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century could have expected to live another 40.1 years. Now imagine the prospect of trebling that life span at a higher level of health. The expected result would be a greater reluctance to undertake the hazards of battle, as persons with revamped biological processes would have four times more to lose than did soldiers with far shorter life spans in the past.

  Extended Life Span, Time Preference, and Capital Formation

  A framework for understanding time horizons in the economy is the concept of time preference. Time preference refers to the relative valuation placed on a good at an earlier date comp
ared to valuation of that good in the future. An individual with high time preference is one that has a strong preference for immediate gratification and a lesser inclination to invest and defer consumption to the future.

  Think of Aesop’s tale of “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” The grasshopper had high time preference. The ant evidenced low time preference through its inclination to save.

  Investopedia gives this capsule background on the concept of time preference: “This theory was initially constructed in 1871 by Carl Menger, an Austrian economist. This theory also stipulates that the consumer’s rate of time preference, and therefore the interest required, will probably rise as the consumer’s savings increase. This means that the consumer is likely to restrict his or her savings to a level at which the rate of time preference equals the rate of interest paid on savings.”11

  An obvious effect of extending the human life span would be to lower time preference, stimulating more future-regarding behavior (more savings and investment). Other things being equal, this implies more capital formation, higher productivity, and higher living standards all around.

  The Austrian economists, who are the connoisseurs of time preference analysis, argue that higher levels of investment lead to what Murray Rothbard described as the “free ride” from the actions of others. They associate civilization with falling time preferences and decivilization with high time preference for immediate gratification over future consumption.

  The basics of life dictate that as long as you live, you must consume. To this extent, at least, everyone has high time preferences at mealtime. As Robert F. Mulligan points out in his paper “Property Rights and Time Preference,” however, the general level of time preference in an economy has far-reaching implications.12 Mulligan says that only once people began placing value on, and recognizing, property rights, could they utilize more productive roundabout methods of production. He also says that artificially imposing higher time preference “creates incentives for collectively undesirable behavior.” In this sense, if humans, like lobsters, did not die of old age, this would increase the payoff for avoiding conflict and lengthening the structure of production.

  Production and Plunder

  Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the distinguished Austrian economist, is more emphatic in describing government efforts to artificially raise time preference as decivilizing forces. He was not referring explicitly to the Fed’s QE and zero interest rate policies (ZIRP), but the logic he spelled out clearly puts those policies in perspective as “de-civilizing.”

  In “Time Preference, Government and the Process of De-Civilization: From Monarchy to Democracy,” Hoppe points out that government political takings, to which I frequently refer to as “plunder,” affect time preference in a systematically different, and more profound, way than crime.13 He explains that such plunder interferes with private property rights, reducing people’s supply of present goods, thus raising their effective time preference rate. People will then associate a permanently higher risk with future production and adjust their expectations downward in regards to the rate of return on future investments. This means that “their expected rate of return on productive, future-oriented action is reduced all around, and accordingly all actual and potential victims become more present-oriented.”

  Furthermore, if these government property rights violations grow extensive enough, humanity will cease building an ever-growing stock of capital and durable consumer goods. They will become increasingly shortsighted, and their distant goals may not only cease but be reversed toward decivilization. Hoppe states that “formerly provident providers will be turned into drunks and daydreamers, adults into children, civilized men into barbarians and producers into criminals.”

  Time Preference and Comparative Advantage

  The idea that shifts in time preference civilize or decivilize societies is closely correlated with the process by which comparative advantage enshrines or destabilizes property rights, thus shifting time preference in a predictable manner.

  Robert Mulligan explains that individuals with comparative disadvantage in production are motivated to use violence against those who have a comparative advantage in creating wealth. He goes on to point out that “in an environment where property rights are insecure, . . . individuals will have short time horizons and high time preference.”

  Thus the extension of human life span—promised by the incorporation of digital information into the production process—implies a civilizing counterbalance to its impact in increasing the “comparative advantage in violence” of unskilled persons, as well as the impact of systemic chaos in raising time preference. If even a few jurisdictions are capable of efficiently protecting their inhabitants from violence, the result could be an unprecedented flourishing of civilization.

  Obviously, there are other pregnant issues associated with the transcendence of death. There is the question of how access to the biotechnologies involved would be priced and shared. If access were less than universal, there would be security issues, larger than those at present, about how those rich enough to afford these life-augmenting therapies could physically protect themselves from others who could not afford them. People would no longer be dying so frequently from what we now know as “natural causes.” But they would presumably still be vulnerable to accident, infection, murder, and other external injury. It is reasonable to foresee that unlike the case during the industrial epoch—when low-skilled persons employed the leverage of violence to make hostages of industrial facilities—in the Information Age it is more likely that entrepreneurs will be targeted as potential hostages.

  Thus the advent of the Information Age poses the prospect of another epidemiological transition in human history. The major cause of death in hunting and gathering societies was external injuries. That may be the case again. The advent of agriculture brought infectious diseases. The Industrial Age saw cardiovascular disease emerge as the major killer. If the chronic diseases of aging and replicative senescence were conquered, the remaining candidates as the major causes of death would be external injuries, infectious disease, and perhaps the cumulative effect of radiation exposures. Such a sweeping change would leave you a lot to think about.

  The Changing Nature of Work and the Eclipse of Economic Equality

  Industrial production standardized products, as well as work. Assembly lines were designed so that whether they were manned by geniuses or unskilled persons of modest ability production quality would be the same. Consequently, the factory system gave rise to narrow income dispersion, or historically low levels of income inequality. Because most people had similar marginal productivity, their incomes were similar.

  By contrast, the characteristics of information technology are very different. They encourage income dispersion. For one thing, unlike products of mass production, such as automobiles or refrigerators, the marginal costs of many digital goods are vanishingly small. This means that unlike industrial products, the capacity constraints on digital goods are immaterial. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it in The Second Machine Age, “A single producer with a website can, in principle, fill the demand from millions or even billions of customers.”14

  The fact that a great amount of value can be created with few employees and without production being rooted in any particular locale has far-reaching megapolitical implications.

  For one thing, it emphatically gives the lie to the Labor Theory of Value. We can now easily see that value is created by the entrepreneurial imagination and not necessarily by sweat and toil. The hordes of industrial workers with whom Marx identified are literally superfluous to many high-value operations.

  The fact that many information products can be delivered digitally also reduces the leverage of violence in redistributing their rewards. For example, disgruntled truck drivers or dockworkers cannot blockade the loading docks to the World Wide Web. Short of shutting down the Internet altogether, bullying can play little part in determining the compensation derived from sale of
digital products.

  Even among computer programmers, however, a probable increase in income inequality in the Information Age can be illustrated. Think of comparing two programmers: one may create an algorithm that is essential in robotics and worth millions, while another, who has worked with the same equipment, hasn’t come up with anything nearly as valuable. Over the past fifteen years, the income gap between top programmers and the great majority of run-of-the-mill programmers has widened further than your typical union organizers could bring themselves to admit. In The Second Machine Age, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee report amazing statistics compiled by the New York Times showing that three-quarters of software developers in the “app economy” made less than thirty thousand dollars, while only 4 percent of them made over a million dollars. Achieving a relative advantage in digital commerce will lead to domination.15

  The digital economy works against economic equality. Not only does it mean that the top performers can earn incomes that are many times higher than those of most people, but it also undermines the egalitarian conceit in other ways. For example, today, due to individualization in information technology, it is obvious that programmers who write codes for products rely on their own skills—others cannot claim credit or take responsibility for success as easily as they may have been able to in the past. This also suggests why labor unions play little or no role in the leading companies in the digital economy, apart from a few “old economy” shuttle bus drivers who ferry high-tech Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook workers around San Francisco and its environs.