Global Commons in the Global Brain
* Article: Last, C., Global Commons in the Global Brain, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change (2016), doi
URL = https://cadelllast.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/last-c-2016-global-commons-in-the-global-brain.pdf
Abstract
From Cadell Last:
"The next decade (present to ~2020–2025) could be characterized by large-scale labour disruption and further acceleration of income and wealth inequality due to the widespread introduction of general-purpose robotics, machine-learning software/artificial intelligence (AI) and their various interconnections within the emerging infrastructure of the ‘Internet of Things’(IoT). In this paper I argue that such technological changes and their socio-economic consequences signal the emergence of a global metasystem (i.e. control organization beyond markets and nation-states) and may require a qualitatively new level of political organization to guide a process of self- organization. Consequently, this paper proposes and attempts to develop a conceptual framework with the potential to aid an international political transition towards a ‘post-capitalist’ ‘post-nation state’ global world.
This conceptual framework is grounded within socio-technological theory of the ‘Global Brain’(GB), which describes a potential future planetary organizational structure founded on distributed and open-ended intelligence; and the socioeconomic theory of the ‘Commons’, which is a paradigm describing distributed modes of organization founded upon principles of democratic management and open access. In the integration of GB theory and Commons theory this paper ultimately argues that an appropriate international response to the emerging technological revolution should include the creation of networks with both automated and collaborative components that function on ‘Global Commons’(GC) logic (i.e. beyond both state and market logic)."
(https://cadelllast.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/last-c-2016-global-commons-in-the-global-brain.pdf)
Excerpts
The primary features of the technological shift
"The primary features of the technological shift in relation to social, economic, and political processes, which is (likely) to include the following:
A) The transition will blur the lines between the ‘physical’(actual-existential) and the ‘digital’(virtual) worlds challenging the logical and conceptual foundations of primarily or purely physical institutions that are constrained by geography, maintenance costs, and centralized intelligence structures; but also primarily or purely digital networks that are often isolated or disconnected from directly impacting the physical world,
B) will lead to the disruption of fundamental socioeconomic notions and organizing principles of location, production, labour, and property as many organizational forms will communicate and co- ordinate multi-locally/globally and include large-scale automated production components with advanced materials,
C) will change the human relation to public (state) and private (market) spheres of socioeconomic organization and coordination as the state constructs rigid local boundaries based on control of property and labour, whereas the market operates purely on profit-driven monetary logic without consideration for the complex and multi-dimensional spheres of human value unrelated to profit or commodity exchange,
D) will require an open, active, pluralistic, and meta-reflective dialogue between a wide diversity of actors (in all spheres of human life) about the meaning and direction of this emerging world beyond the dominant state and capitalist forms (state-capital nexus), in the hopes of finding a new level of (commons) coherence and integration, and most probably a new type of social contract (focused on a new relation between the individual's rights within the totality of the sociopolitical sphere)."
Piketty's Global State as Global Keynesianism
Cadell Last:
"Piketty's now well-known ‘utopian solution’ would be to erect some idealized form of ‘Global State’ capable of regulating global markets with a progressive global tax (2014, p. 515):
- “To regulate the globalized patrimonial capitalism of the twenty- first century, rethinking the twentieth century fiscal and social model and adapting it to today's world will not be enough. To be sure, appropriate updating of the last century's social-democratic and fiscal-liberal program is essential, which focused on two fundamental institutions that were invented in the twentieth century and must continue to play a central role in the future: the social state and the progressive income tax. But if democracy is to regain control over the globalized financial capitalism of this century, it must also invent new tools, adapted to today's challenges. The ideal tool would be a progressive global tax on capital, coupled with a very high level of international financial transparency. Such a tax would provide a way to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral and to control the worrisome dynamics of global capital concentration. Whatever tools and regulations are actually decided on need to be measured against this ideal.”
Consequently, Piketty's ultimate solution for ‘Capitalism in the 21st Century’ is essentially a form of ‘Global Keynesianism in the 21st Century’, where we re-invent the nature of the social state and the progressive in- come tax, but this time instead of just reinventing these dynamics at the multi-local nation-state level, we reinvent these same dynamics for the higher global whole. Although Piketty admits that such an approach is ‘utopian’ in the sense of being an ‘ideal’ projection and thus unrealistic in the ‘material’ domain, he also suggests that, as the end of the above quote suggests, all attempts to solve the problem of global capitalism should be ‘measured against this ideal’ of what essentially amounts to a ‘Global State’. The philosophical logic here is the relation between ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, where the ‘ideal’(for Piketty) functions as an attractor state or pole for grounding materialist political construction projects. The economic logic here is that, in the same way that the inhumane consequences of free market capitalism (labour instability, socioeconomic inequality, etc.) were reduced by nation-state interventionism in the second half of the 20th century (‘New Deal’), this same dynamic can be erected for global civilization in the 21st century, and ultimately save both capitalism and the state form itself, albeit at a new global level (‘New New Deal’).
From the perspective of the challenges posed by the emerging technological revolution (i.e. of an exponentially emerging self-organized global world founded on automated smart systems and distributed networks), these problems identified by Piketty (i.e. of global capital and its global control problem) simply accelerate the necessity of large-scale political action (~2020–2025) in order to prevent the eruption of fundamental antagonisms which are now clearly stressing the structural foundations of the world as it is."
(https://cadelllast.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/last-c-2016-global-commons-in-the-global-brain.pdf)
Technological Singularity Theory
Cadell Last:
"Contemporary practical (elite) discourse regarding an emerging technological revolution has started to revolve around notions of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’(WEF,2016),but in the general futures literature, discourse about a future technological revolution has, for some time, revolved around notions of ‘Technological Singularity’(TS) (Last, 2015c, Section 3.2). The notion of TS attempts to articulate the notion that technological progress is inherently evolving via an exponential trajectory and will eventually change the human world beyond individual human comprehension and understanding. The metaphor of ‘Singularity’ in ‘TS’ theory is used in specific reference to the astrophysical properties of a black hole's ‘event-horizon’. The ‘event-horizon’ of a black hole represents a break in spatiotemporal continuity rendering it impossible for any external observer to know the internal properties of the object in question (i.e. ‘the impossible beyond’ that is the ‘black hole’). In the same way, in TS literature the ‘Singularity’ represents ‘the impossible beyond’ for human comprehension and understanding (i.e. the ‘external (human) observer’ attempting to discern the (beyond human) future properties of a super-technological world that is a ‘black hole’). In these general futures notions the primary catalyst for future exponential change (the agent-cause of ‘Singularity’) is typically envisioned to be artificial general intelligence (AGI), i.e. a form of ma- chine intelligence that vastly overpowers human intelligence, leading to essentially a ‘post-human’ ‘future’(if such words even make discursive sense at that point).
This general AGI-TS vision, although always presented as human eschatology (i.e. end of human comprehension and understanding of the world, or end of human existence in the world), can take the form of either a utopian and dystopian variant. Both utopian and dystopian variants were explored in the first official introduction of the term ‘Technological Singularity’ in Vernor Vinge's ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’, where he posited that (1993, p. 88):
- “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human race will be ended.”
Thus, the introductory overview of TS ultimately concluded that, in either the utopian or dystopian scenarios, humanity was approaching an eschatological horizon (as transcendence or extinction), which set the general ‘end times’ tone for the literature that followed. The most popular and influential ‘utopian’ ‘transcendence’ variant is inarguably Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near (2005), which argues that humanity will merge with technological intelligence and ‘transcend biology’ for a ‘super-human’ or ‘post-human’ state of being characterized by higher love, knowledge, and organizational form. The most popular and influential ‘dystopian’ ‘extinction’ variant (at least recently) is Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence (2014), which argues that the further development of machine intelligence will lead humanity towards an existential ‘control problem’ where human beings will become eradicated by our own technological creations.
The history of this futures discourse is problematic in many dimensions. Firstly, if this literature is not totally out of touch with our future reality, i.e. AGI is either impossible (an idea with fundamentally problematic presuppositions) or will itself not lead to humanity's phenomenological transcendence/extinction (because the human brain cannot be simulated by a digital supercomputer); then secondly, it is most certainly out of touch with our approach to Singularity –the ‘here to there’ of exponential global technological revolution –in many crucial ways.
The most important reason for this is that the theoretical emphasis in TS literature (i.e. emergence of AGI) almost completely ignores the systemic dynamics of technological revolution in relation to the emerging socio-technological sphere mediated by the totality of the Internet as universal medium. In missing this systemic dynamic the TS literature fails to even confront basic issues of systemic transitions in relation to control, power, and hierarchy, and thus basic issues of systemic transitions in terms of social, economic, and political life. In short, the TS literature to date has jumped far too quickly towards an eschatological horizon (in all honesty a repressed repetition of Christian thinking and Christian notions of historical time emerging in the scientific worldview) without thinking through deeply the systemic implications of technological revolution for the foundations of human life and civilization as a total sphere.
However, in contrast to this briefly introduced and problematic notion of an ‘AGI TS’, the general futures literature has also been characterized by discussions of an emerging collective superintelligence in the form of a ‘Global Brain (GB) Technological Singularity (TS)’, where ‘Global Brain’ refers specifically to the totality of the Internet as universal coordination medium."
(https://cadelllast.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/last-c-2016-global-commons-in-the-global-brain.pdf)