A TALE OF TWO TRANSHUMAN NATIONS (PART 2)


(Author’s note: What follows is not a review of Zoltan Istvan’s novel ‘The Transhuman Wager, but rather some thoughts inspired by its plot and the issues it raises. My intended audience are people who have read the book, so I do not intend to give a synopsis of its plot, nor will I shy away from spoilers. This essay was originally published on my blog.)


let’s move on to talking about Istvan’s and Brain’s visions of a Transhumanist nation. In each story, we have the emergence of a futuristic nation where technological progress and innovation is proceeding at an astonishing rate. This is brought about chiefly by the nation's citizens, who are depicted as highly motivated people who have built a society that grants them an unfettered chance to become all they can be. Where the stories differ is in how they think society should be organised.


I think these differences are best summed up by the author's description of their imaginary transhuman nations. Marshall Brain's nation goes by the name of the 'Australia Project' and he describes life there as being like "living on a gigantic luxury cruise ship. The trip is already paid for, and you are free to do whatever you want with your time". Istvan describes Transhumania as being comparable to "an aggressive, expanding technology company racing to bring an incredible invention to market".


PROPERTY IS THEFT


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In the case of the Australia Project, three technological capabilities make it possible. Firstly, there are all those robots making it possible to automate just about any job you can name. Secondly, there are efficient renewable energy technologies providing abundant power. Lastly, we are told that everything in the Australia Project is completely recyclable. We are not told what technology makes this possible, but I would assume it to be atomically-precise manufacturing (or molecular nanotechnology as it used to be known).


Put together, these technological capabilities can potentially enable an economy where everything is 'free'. But in order to ensure this is the case, the rules that govern that civilization have to be designed to facilitate such an outcome. So how does the Australia Project do that?


It does so by understanding that those key technological capabilities give cause to seriously re-examine a saying from the 60s (I think) which, at first, sounds oxymoronic and absurd: "Property is theft". How can that be? Obviously you cannot steal something that is your own private property. Whoever came up with that phrase is obviously an agent of communism seeking State authority to steal the fruits of entrepreneur's hard work.


The phrase begins to make a little more sense when you stop to consider what generally happens to the stuff we own. Individually, the stuff we own spends most of its time not being used. DIY tools like power drills and recreational equipment like barbeques spend the great majority of their lives stored in a shed or garage. A dress or a shirt you buy will be worn on occasion, but mostly hangs unused in a wardrobe. You drive your car from home to some destination and back again, and the rest of the time it is parked someplace, not doing anything except taking up space. In fact, you can take any particular private possession and you can all but guarantee that it mostly goes unused. The only exceptions I can think of are houses and cell phones. But most people do not own their homes because they either have a mortgage to pay off or they are renting, and few people own their cell phones either, preferring renewable contracts to buying such gadgets outright.


So, generally speaking we do not use the stuff that we own. And because it is our private property, that excludes others from using it as well. If I walk past a car that is just sat there not being used, I cannot get into that car and use it to get to where I want to go. That would be stealing. Ok, it is not necessarily the case that something being somebody's private property prevents others from using it. The owner might be inclined to let trusted people borrow stuff from time to time, provided she can be confident it will be returned when she needs it.


ACCESS OVER OWNERSHIP


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And that brings us to what is really useful, which is not to own stuff but rather to have access to stuff as and when we need it. A lot of people today find it rather inconvenient to clutter their homes with music and movies stored on physical media. They prefer to subscribe to services like Spotify or Netflix which stream music and movies over a fast Internet connection. In 'Manna', the combination of renewable energy, automation of jobs and complete recyclability makes it possible to extend the principle of access over ownership to the world of material things. It makes it possible to apply the open-source movement to the real world. Open-source software is software that is free to be used, changed and shared (in modified or unmodified forms) by anyone. 


In the Australia Project, each citizen is a shareholder in a corporation called 4GC inc. The story briefly tells us that the Project's founder, Eric Garcier, sold shares in 4GC inc for $1000 each to a billion people and that provided him with the funding to buy 1. 5 million square miles of land in the Australian outback. Each person who bought shares in 4GC inc gets an equal share of the resources owned by the corporation. There are rules preventing any one person more than one share of stock. The robots, supplied with power from renewable energies, work for free turning material resources into whatever people want. Whatever you ask for is yours until you die or you decide to return it and then, thanks to complete recyclability, the resources used in its production are made available for others. 


Something else is needed to prevent some from taking too many resources and I will get to that later. For now, the important thing to note is that, in the Australia Project, nobody is paid to work and nobody is made to work. Your time is your own and how you spend it is pretty much up to you. If all you want to do is lay on a sun lounger drinking a tall glass of lemonade all day long, the robots provide you with a sun lounger and a tall glass of lemonade and you are left to indulge your own idea of a perfect day. If you feel like doing something a bit more productive, the robots will turn resources into whatever equipment you need to realise your vision. What you end up producing may have a very limited market, or just maybe it will be a runaway success. The robots don't care. They will just turn out as many copies as necessary to meet demand. Of course, as per the open-source model, whatever you produce can be freely used and modified by everybody else. 


WORK DAMN YOU, WORK


Things are rather different where Transhumania is concerned. There, you most certainly are made to work. Each person is somebody selected by Jethro for being the best at some profession he deems useful. Each resident of Transhumania has goals assigned to them, and woe betide them should they fail to meet their targets. As the story informs us, "if you were hired for a position, and you failed to meet the goals assigned to you... then you would be forced off Transhumania at once". 


We are introduced to Manna's transhuman nation at a very different stage in its development compared to Wager. It is complete and fully functioning. If you have built a cruise ship, fitted it with facilities that enable people to relax and pursue activities and you have trained staff to provide services that facilitate relaxation and enjoyment, it would be a bit odd to deny people the right to take things easy. Can you imagine Captain Jethro walking around the deck of a cruise ship, yelling "I will have no layabouts!"?


But what if that cruise ship was in the process of being built, and everybody on site is a worker assigned certain goals which they are required to meet in order to ensure the project is completed? In that case, Jethro, as the boss in charge of this construction job, would be well within his rights to kick out anyone he finds lounging around. We are introduced to Transhumania at a time when before it exists, except as an idea in Jethro's head. We follow the realisation of his dream, from securing the capital needed to pay for such a project, to the hiring of people needed to convert massive oil platforms into a floating city containing all the research facilities needed to pursue transhumanian goals. Everybody hired to build Transhumania are expected to do their jobs and complete goals assigned to them. How else could it be built?


NOT A HOLIDAY RESORT


The other thing to bare in mind is that Transhumania is never intended to be analogous to a luxury cruise ship. It is, instead, an incredibly well appointed research facility for the development of transhuman science, technology, philosophy etc. Where the Australia Project is concerned, all the technological capabilities that make it possible- renewable energy, robot labour, and atomically-precise assembly and disassembly- already exist. But on Transhumania the ten thousand or so hired professionals have to work to create all those technologies.


Transhumania does not just rely on the proverbial stick to motivate its workers, it has some carrots to offer as well. Seeing as it is run like 'an aggressive..company' it is perhaps not surprising that Transhumania offers the typical motivational scheme of such organisations: Big money bonuses. Not only is every researcher paid 'exceptional wages', they are also each given "a tax-free million dollar signing bonus". This all makes common sense. After all, everybody knows that if you want to extract top performances from the brightest and best, you have got to pay them handsomely. 


ARE HIGH WAGES EFFECTIVE?


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Well, so 'everybody knows' but is it really true? The question 'do greater monetary rewards lead to better performance?' has been put to the test and the results are pretty eye-opening. One such experiment was funded by the Federal Reserve Bank and conducted at MIT. A whole group of students were given a set of challenges to complete, such as memorizing strings of digits and solving word puzzles. In order to incentivise their performance, there were three levels of reward: A small monetary reward for those who did pretty well, a medium reward for average performers, and a large reward for those who did really well.


So what happened? Did a larger reward lead to better performance? No, it actually lead to poorer performance. Now, one might argue that what was offered as a large cash reward was simply not large enough. It was only $50, which is perhaps not much money to an MIT student. The experiment was repeated, this time in rural India where the equivalent of $50 really is a lot of money. In the Indian experiment, poor performers received a reward equal to two week's salary; medium performers received a month's salary, and the top performers were rewarded with a prize equal to two month's salary.


The findings of this study were that people who received a medium reward did no better than those who received the small reward. And those offered high rewards? Once again, they did worst of all.


In fact, this experiment has been replicated many times by economists, psychologists and to a certain extent sociologists, always with the same results. So long as a task requires only mechanical skill, where you only have to follow a set of rules in order to complete the task, performance-related pay works as you might expect. The better the pay, the more incentivised people are to do well. But once the job requires even rudimentary creative thinking, higher rewards lead to poorer performance. Edward Deci, who in 1969 was a Carnegie Mellon psychology grad student who conducted such experiments, explained "when money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity".


It should be pointed out that these experiments are not simply saying that money is a de-motivator and that if you pay people to do a creative job they will automatically lose interest in that work. Rather, it is telling us that too much money is a de-motivator. How much is too much? If you do not pay people enough, nobody is motivated. If you pay enough to enable people to stop having money anxiety, they will stop thinking about money and focus on their work. Once the monetary reward is sufficient to take the issue of money off the table, that is the point when offering yet more money de-motivates people.


WHAT MOTIVATES PEOPLE?


As well as showing us what does not lead to better performance, these experiments also shed light on what does. There are three factors that encourage people to do well:


Autonomy


Mastery


Purpose.


In other words, we work best when we have a sense of control over our own lives; when we feel that we are improving in our ability to perform tasks that matter to us and, finally, that what we are doing makes a genuine contribution to the world.


In the Australia Project, the kind of work for which performance-related pay works is done by robots. Remember, that kind of work is algorithmic, where you have a set of rules that you only need follow in order to successfully complete the task. Robots are particularly good at carrying out algorithms and since they work for free, performance-related pay incentives are completely unnecessary.


As for the residents, as shareholders of 4GC inc they have equal ownership of the Australia Project's resources, and free access to whatever technologies and services are produced, as per the open-source rules under which this civilization operates. This takes the issue of money off the table, and as they are free to pursue their own interests and to contribute to projects they consider worthwhile, there is much scope to develop both mastery and purpose.


PREVENTING HOARDING


I have been using the word 'free' when talking about resident's access to Australia Project's products and services. But it is more accurate to say the resources that make such products and services possible are pre-paid for. As stockholders, the residents are co-owners of 4GC inc who have equal ownership of the labour power of the robots, the energy from renewables and the material resources contained within the territory. Whenever the idea of 'freely' using and sharing resources is put forward, an objection is always made that people would just excessively hoard or use up those resources. For example, if I were a particularly greedy and egocentric person, what would stop me from ordering the robots to manufacture a million life-size gold statues of myself to be put on display all over the place? This vanity project of mine would use up the entire reserves of gold, leaving none for anybody else.


In the Australia Project, this kind of excessive overuse is prevented by a currency system in the form of credits. You cannot earn credits. They are not awarded as wages or profit. Rather, every resident receives a thousand credits per week and a certain amount of credits are debited from a person's account every time the robots are asked to make something. Not only does this credit system prevent excessive greed, it also helps keep track of how resources are being used and allocated.


Today, businesses typically have inventory systems and stock control that keep track of resource use, thereby allowing the company to order enough inventory to ensure they are neither under nor overstocked. In principle, there is nothing to prevent such inventory systems from being scaled up to work on a national or even global scale. Given suitably sophisticated sensor networks, communications networks, and artificial intelligence networks with the requisite expertise, we could keep track of the inventory of the Earth and base our decision to use that capital not on the question 'do we have the money?' but rather 'do we have the resources?'. The Internet would have evolved into a kind of global nervous system, monitoring the biosphere and geosphere and ensuring the stuff we produce is sustainable and allocated fairly. And, no, this would not be a centralised distribution scheme ala communist states, any more than the Web is a centralised broadcasting service for communist propaganda. This would still be a world where money exists, in the sense of the economic calculations underlying all that inventory tracking, resource allocation and stock control. In time we may dispense completely with any physical representation of money and instead become integrated with the global brain to the extent where we just intuit misallocation of resources, perhaps in the form of anxiety or some negative emotion that we naturally seek to correct. 


There is a way to realise projects that will require more than a thousand credits-worth of materials. Residents can opt to collaborate on projects, which includes pooling their credits as well as their expertise. The story gives an example in the form of space elevators:


"Millions of people... were willing to contribute their credits to make it possible. With the credits available, the robots allocated the resources for research and design. Scientists, engineers and designers interested in the project worked on it simply to have a part in it and make it a reality. Then the robots built the space elevators to meet the demand".


Where the Australia Project is concerned, credits are not tied up with status and achievement as is the case with money today. No one person has more of them than everybody else. Success in the Australia Project comes from the extent to which your contributions add to and refine the solutions to problems that people care about. 


SPEND YOUR MILLION ON...WHAT?


In contrast, Transhumania uses money as a performance-related incentive, in the form of extremely good wages and also a million dollar signing bonus. OK, but what do those researchers spend their money on?


As well as offering state-of-the-art research facilities and 'hassle-free lives away from bossy governments', Transhumania also boasts exceptional recreational facilities. It may not be intended to be analogous to a luxury cruise ship, but boy is it like one. It has shopping centres, art galleries and fitness centres. It has a great many restaurants and cafes. In fact the story tells us that it provides for every need and want you can think of, pretty much.


Probably, then, the residents of Transhumania spend their wages on all the fine recreational facilities and stuff available in the shops. But isn't that a bit pointless? Wouldn't it just be simpler to invest money used as wages and bonuses in Transhumania itself, and grant free access to its facilities to its residents as a carrot to incentivise performance?


We are also told that "Jethro made it easier to own than to rent, and most people opted to buy upon arriving. It replenished the cash Transhumania needed for actual research and city operations". It does? How? I can see how somebody buying property could inject money into Transhumania's reserves, but doesn't the nation have to give the money back in the form of high wages and million dollar sign-up bonuses? Aside from the fact that money just does not provide an incentive once the issue of money is taken off the table, it seems to me that money on Transhumania is just circulating as people are paid wages which they spend, providing profits which used to pay wages. 


Ok, that is just how capitalist economies work. But while such a system seems to make sense on a large scale, to the extent to which few can coherently explain how the complex systems of supply and demand might be organised differently and still work, scale the system way down and money comes across as being an absurd convention which solves everything while not doing anything. There is a short story that has its origins in the Great Depression, and it asks readers to imagine a small town where times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.


Into this town comes a stranger, who considers staying a night in the local motel. He places a $100 bill on the desk and says he wants to inspect the rooms and pick one. As he goes upstairs, the motel owner takes the money and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer is in debt to his supplier, the coop, and he heads off to hand over the $100 in payment of that debt. The guy at the coop takes the $100 and uses it to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit. She then rushes to the motel in order to pay her room bill. The Motel owner places the $100 bill on the counter. At that point, the traveller comes down, says none of the rooms are satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves.


During this sequence of events, nobody produced anything and nobody earned anything. And yet the town is now out of debt and everybody is looking to the future with more optimism. Transhumania's economy almost seems like that small town. It is an autarkic state operating in isolation to the world's nations and its economies. It's Galt's island rather than Galt's Gulch, where unnecessary wages are just pointlessly circulated to pay off pointless debts.


HOW I WOULD RUN TRANSHUMANIA


How about this? Prospective new entrants to Transhumania are told, "you have been selected for your potential to contribute to our mission. As you can see, we offer not only the best research facilities but also superb recreational opportunities. You may freely partake of these facilities. All we ask in return is that you voluntarily use your skills to complete certain goals we will assign to you. The products and services that are derived from completion of said goals will be used to invest in Transhumania's research and recreational facilities, which we are sure will provide you with a terrific and stimulating environment free of money worries. Be aware, however, that failure to meet your targets or interfering with other residents' ability to meet targets will result in instant dismissal".


In fact, one character in the story confirms that performance-related monetary incentives have little to no value, saying "forget the money. The laboratory facilities are like nothing on this continent. And everyone's so goddamn smart and interesting". 


I am not suggesting that Transhumania should abandon the use of money altogether. Money will always be necessary as it is the calculations which govern resource use and allocation, and  which determine the relative value of goods and services we fashion from those resources. Yes, it can be corrupted and turned into currencies that result in misallocation of capital but that is no reason to abandon money and go back to barter. What I am saying is that Transhumania could put money to much better use than performance-related incentives. It should invest money earned from problem solving into providing free access to its incredible facilities. I really have no idea why Transhumania is not run more like the Australia Project. I guess it comes down to Jethro's opposition to 'freebies'.


JETHRO'S RULES. GOOD FOR TRANSHUMANIA, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WORLD?


I can appreciate why it would be necessary to insist that only workers who make a positive contribution to the development of transhuman techs etc be permitted to remain on Transhumania while it is an offshore research facility whose purpose is to develop those very techs etc. What I do not understand is why that policy remains in place after those technologies are developed. Toward the end of the story, there is the following exchange between Jethro and his nemesis, Belinas:


Belinas: "Do you really think the whole world could live on Transhumania and be prosperous, and ponder incredible calculus equations, and work 20 hour days, and strive to be omnipotenders with no fear of anything?".


Jethro: "I believe in giving them the choice. I believe in trying to teach them so they can contribute. Then kicking them out if they fail. Otherwise, if they don't belong, people will sink the ship with their cumbersome weight".


Really? We are not talking about some primitive pre-tech civilization here, where each person must labour to produce for basic needs or everybody will find themselves in a desperate situation. We are talking about Transhumania, which at this stage in the story has developed technologies that could allow for a high standard of living with very little labour.


Along with the military robots Transhumania also has Medibot, "with nine intricate fingers on each hand...designed to perform delicate medical surgery", Buildbot, "able to perform everything from aircraft construction to tiny computer chip repair", and Strongbot, "designed for lifting and handling awkward and heavy objects with sheer accuracy". I am not sure if those machines are strictly speaking robots. The story tells us, "each machine (is) designed to always remain under strict control of... a human engineer", which sounds to me more like a teleoperated machine rather than an autonomous one. Or maybe they can operate on their own volition but are designed to remain subordinate to human directives? Even if the former is true and they are teleoperated only, I do not doubt that making them into true robots would be well within the capabilities of Transhumania's ten thousand or so researchers.


So, if you have robots like that, which you could set to work in any capacity imaginable be it in the agricultural, industrial or service industries, how can it possibly be the case that "those who don't belong... will sink the ship with their cumbersome weight"?


Jethro is not just talking about people who are actively opposed to transhumanism. He is not taking the position of Richard Seed, who said, "you do not have to contribute. You do not have to participate. But if you are going to interfere with me becoming God... we will have warfare". No, in Jethro's world you do have to participate and you must contribute. Nobody gets to spend their days watching TV all day. We can't have that. Those passive consumers use up resources and we cannot possibly support such layabouts.


Oh, come on. With technologies like those robots, of course you could have a world where work is voluntary and nobody need be forced by monetary and social pressures to go out and get a job. I do think that a compelling argument could be made, saying it would be a great pity if people chose to do nothing but watch TV all day when there are all those robots and neurochips and other amazing technologies providing infinite opportunity for creativity and contribution to the accumulation of solutions to problems. It would be something of a betrayal of all those who toiled away to produce such technologies if all we did was turn into couch potatoes. But, in the end, in so affluent and prosperous a civilization where the economy is (or could be) almost entirely automated,  people should be able to choose.


References:


“The Transhumanist Wager” by Zoltan Istvan
“Manna” by Marshall Brain
“Drive” by Daniel H Pink