The automated future needs geoism
Unprecedented technological advancement carries with it the potential for unprecedented societal upheaval. Indeed, improving the human condition with more efficient methods of production has always been accompanied by luddites and socio-political turmoil. It seems that no matter the global gains, there are always those who profited by working in the old way and are marginalized in the new way. From these are born the luddites. But what happens in the automated future where everyone's work is marginalized? Are we all doomed to become luddites? Or is it possible for everyone to benefit from the automated future?
Technology is an incredible lever on material prosperity. However, technology by itself cannot create justice. Geoism is a practical theory of resource justice which asserts a common right to all natural opportunities and resources. Without this justice, the lever of technology turns against humanity rather than for it. Ultimately, as the lever of technology grows even more powerful, resource justice will become the fulcrum that defines the fate of the next human era.
Forward to the automated future: its possibilities, its inevitabilities, and how we might meet them.
Automated modes of production
The first step in understanding the automated future is to understand exactly what it would mean for all production to be automated. The automation of all production means that any work (human effort undertaken for any form of reward not intrinsic in the undertaking itself) required to satisfy human desires can be done most cheaply through a mechanical process requiring no more human effort than for a machine to be informed about the desire.
The automation of production would not eliminate scarcity. Production would continue to be constrained by access to raw materials, physical space, and time. No level of automation can create something from nothing and in zero time. Production requires inputs that are either consumed (like energy), passed along in the product (like materials), or temporarily utilized (like land, equipment, water). The fundamental limits of these inputs are matter, space, and thermodynamic free energy; but processed materials and machines, being products themselves, add an additional layer of scarcity due to their production time. This is no different to today except it excludes the need for human effort, another source of scarcity.
In the automated future, processed materials and machines would themselves be most cheaply produced by a process requiring no particular human effort. They would only require the allocation of input materials, space, and time. Recursively applying this analysis from any final product to its original inputs, it's apparent that every link in the chain of production comprises combinations of raw materials, energy, time, or intermediate goods subject to the same analysis. Since eventually the chain must start somewhere, it's clear the cost of goods in a world with automated production resolves entirely to the opportunity cost of allocating natural resources over time toward those goods.
Consider as a concrete example bottled water, whose production already employs a tremendous amount of automation. Today what you pay for when you buy a bottle of water goes to the water itself, the plastic for the bottle, the energy to run the bottling machines, the transportation of materials as well as the final product, the design of the bottle and label, and of course various people involved in machine tending, operations, and administration to make it all come together. The jobs of the machine operators, truck drivers, administrators, technicians, engineers, and designers would be done better by machines but this would do nothing to eliminate the need to allocate the water, plastic, energy to run the machines and trucks, nor the spatial land needed for the factory, transportation channels, and distribution points.
The process of deciding which resources (both raw natural resources and derivative products, the latter being capital proper) to tie up and how in order to most efficiently meet human desires is itself a form of work. And, by definition of having automated production, this work is most efficiently done by machines. So while today's entrepreneur is rewarded for their foresight, economizing, and willingness to undertake risk, the entrepreneur of tomorrow faces competition from an AI who measures & predicts customer preferences better, who economizes more ruthlessly, and who takes better calculated risks. The automated entrepreneurial process does not need to be perfect, it does not need to have access to information which today's entrepreneur does not have access to, nor does it necessarily need to centralize decision making any more than today's market actors. The only requirement is that the machines be better at the entrepreneur's job than the human entrepreneur.
By the same token, while the scientists and engineers of today push the boundaries of mechanical efficiency of production, this will also be done more efficiently by the machines. The machines need not be perfect, neither making discoveries as fast as physically possible nor making the most efficient machines physically possible. They only need to do better at the scientist's and engineer's job than their human counterparts.
It would in turn be a mistake to think that automating production would eliminate the efficacy of money, trade, specialized companies, or the private management of resources. The unavoidable finiteness of raw resources and time, differing of desires between unique individuals, and need to make tradeoffs between present and future desires all demand the advantages and expedience that private markets provide. Machines would still need to make decisions about whose desires to meet, and to what extent, and which available resources to allocate to what. Similarly, individuals would need to make trade-offs within their own desires. The pricing of productive resources and consumer goods and services would continue to allow machines and people to make apples-to-apples comparisons between their competing goals and desires, just as they do today. Pricing under free-market conditions would reflect, as it does today, the opportunity cost of using limited resources to those ends versus some other. The difference in the automated future is nothing more than the elimination human time and effort as a limiting factor in costs.
Basically, the machines are likely to find money, commodity pricing, private capital, and markets generally to be every bit as useful for planning and economizing as people do today. Today, financial advisors and investment funds are rewarded for making the most efficient of use of invested capital. The automated future does not eliminate the need for capital to be used efficiently, it eliminates only human decision-making in the process. In the automated future you simply express your risk profile and time horizon, authorize the management of your capital, and let the machines to do the rest. The choice between consuming wealth now or investing it for the future, various types of bank accounts and investment mechanisms, none of it goes away with automation. Your money manager may become an AI but the process under the hood would duly remain.
Automated modes of production do not need to be revolutionary in every sense. Of course, there's little doubt that many things will evolve in fascinating and unforeseeable ways. But the replacement of human effort with mechanical action is at its core just that: machines able to complete productive tasks more efficiently than humans.
Will we make ourselves obsolete?
Of course the other side of this coin paints the picture of the obsolescence of human work. But the obsolescence of human work means the obsolescence of humans themselves with respect to the production process. People become entirely obsolete when their ability to add value (measured in market wages) to anywhere in the production process equals the cost (measured in market price) of the minimum resources necessary for their sustenance. In other words: while people will always be able to add some marginal value to production, even if it is just the value of the raw materials contained in their body (macabre though it may be of the robots), people can actually stay alive selling their labor only if its marginal value is at least the cost of their food and a space to sleep and work. This is part of the reason why automation thus far has not eliminated much human labor; the price of human labor is ultimately bounded only by the cost of the resources needed to provide the most slavish condition in which the worker prefers to death.
This limit can be pushed quite low, especially as necessities such as food and clothing are made even cheaper and cheaper. However, the endgame is one where the robots can always do more with less, and so a person ends up better off dying than laboring to sustain their life. Surely this cannot be the promised land of automated production; there must be a mistake! If no one can keep themselves alive with their own hands, how can anyone benefit from the massively efficient capacities of this new-found economy?
Unsurprisingly, not everyone becomes obsolete. There is one thing keeping a person relevant in this new automated world: the legal right to command resources in general, and raw natural resources (economic land) in particular. Economic land is all inputs to production freely provided by nature including 3d space, raw materials, and free energy. It is those limited resources that were not the output of previous production; it is the natural bounty of the earth. Economic land by definition cannot be created and in practice it is not substitutable for anything humans or robots can make on their own. A person with the legal right to command enough economic land to produce (with the aid of machines) enough necessities to sustain themselves, survives in the automated future. In fact, in the automated future, a person's capacity to enjoy life and meet their material desires would be limited exclusively by their legal right to command those inputs toward the satisfaction of those desires.
We might take a moment here to note that there will always be niches in which humans will hold the upper hand over machines. Human companionship or athletic competition, for instance, are both valuable because they involve human participation. However, this doesn't alter the underlying economic reality. In the automated future, while these uniquely human domains might persist, their consumption would be a luxury for those with true economic power, for those with access to the resources necessary to sustain life. The people performing in these residual human jobs would play a role akin to that of a pet: sustained by their value to someone else but without the means to independently sustain themselves.
In our technologically progressive society, those without the command of economic land are progressively being forced to choose between laboring for a bare existence -- an existence that makes one question whether life is even worth it -- and deciding that it isn't. It should be no surprise then that technological advancements create luddites. It is only thanks to the ongoing creation of new niches where machines remain relatively incompetent, and the cheapening of the necessities for keeping workers alive, that human society has persevered and remained relatively civil.
Yet despite the ongoing creation of newer and newer niches, we regularly see the results of people with marginalized skills in a world relentlessly pushing human labor toward irrelevance. Social changes due to automation have not and will not come all at once. We should not be surprised to see fits and starts. For each advancement edging us closer to the automated future there will be unique groups of people affected in unique ways. But if we can carefully step back and see the forest created by the trees we should also be able to find our path through it.
To the bringers of automation
We have glimpsed the fates of the commanders of land and of the marginalized worker, but what of the original human creators and owners of automation? The early commanders of progressively more powerful machines will undoubtedly benefit from a meaningful time advantage, and should be able to capitalize on it for a while. However, the creation of new machines in a world of automated production is limited only by the scarcity of raw materials, energy, space, and time. Eventually, anyone with the right resource rights and time will be able to match the productive capabilities of the early capital owners. So although the owners of already-made machines (provided they not be made from large quantities of particularly rare materials) may be able to temporarily command a larger proportion of resources toward their desires, their advantage will ultimately be squashed to 0 by additional machines being made evermore cheaply and quite likely of higher productivity. This would all happen while the cost of consumable inputs to their own production remains. What's more, the effect is a compounding one: whatever the production costs of new machines may be, it will be paid incrementally more and more to those in control of the non-producible inputs, to the owners of economic land.
In today's world, where machines do not yet economize as well as people, nor predict preferences as accurately, the accumulation and deployment of capital (true capital, exclusive of economic land) is a critical element by which efficient economizers reap the benefits of their economizing and risk-taking. The continued reward for succeeding in these endeavors is necessary and desirable for the ongoing maximal fulfillment of human desires using the least human toil and fewest natural resources possible. That which penalizes the accumulation or deployment of produced capital, be it taxation, legal bans, or any form of physical arrest, is one which artificially limits human potential. More generally, interference with the ownership of, and right to profit from, a product of production is an economic net-negative. This remains as true while we approach the automated future as when the automated future fully arrives. Simply speaking, the creation of bona-fide capital is not, will not be, and has never been free.
The economic loop between production, its inputs, its final products, and consumption thus closes in the automated future not unlike it does today. You have legal rights over a set of assets. You hand control of these to machines specialized in allocating them. You express your desires to the machines, both immediate and future, and they spend and invest accordingly. The more you choose to withhold consuming the assets and their produced wealth rather than spend them, the more they might yield dividends or grow, not unlike today. What's unique is that first, machines have surpassed the most talented human abilities to invest wisely or launch new ventures, thus eliminating skill, talent, or foresight as a differentiator between individuals' ability to grow their wealth. Secondly, not only is the possibility of staying alive with only your labor (and no land) lost, but by extension the possibility of working to bootstrap your asset pool for investing is lost too. What you start with and your consumption rate become the only two free variables in the trajectory of your economic well-being.
The creation, ownership, and trade of bona-fide capital -- the essence of capitalism as we'll define it here -- is the engine powering today's industrial breakthroughs beyond what was once conceivable. We will be wise to allow people to profit from their efforts and foresight to bring about a more productive future, and wise to allow the same even when it only requires abstaining from present consumption. This powerful capitalistic direction of machines, the most capable engine to power us into the automated future, does not need to undo itself with injustices as we arrive. We simply need to commit to understanding and defining it correctly.
Geoism
Geoism is a practical theory concerning the just allocation of economic land. It does not seek to tear down the venerable capitalist framework heretofore defended but rather to carefully define it so that it may be practiced to its fullest and most powerful extent. Geoism simply proposes returning economics back to its proper foundation: land.
In contrast to bona-fide capital, economic land -- legal rights to occupy & use land, water rights, mineral rights, etc. -- is entirely free in the sense that it is provided freely without the need for human effort nor time to create. Despite this, economic land commands, and will always command, market value due to scarcity and opportunity costs. The competitive advantage of whoever has the legal right to occupy, use, and dispose of these raw inputs is measured by the market value of their land rights, also known as the land's rent.
In order to sustain one's existence, some amount of land is necessary in addition to the application of one's time and effort (labor). One who commands more land than necessary for their own sustenance can trade access to their land for whatever else they may desire. Perhaps they may even be able to trade enough that they don't need to labor at all; they can survive on rent. On the flip side, one who commands insufficient land for their own sustenance must labor not only to sustain themselves but must sell additional labor to exchange for access to the land necessary for their sustenance; they survive on wages while they pay rent.
Geoism responds with the principle that no individual has an inherently better claim to make use of economic land than another. It asserts that while making use of a virgin resource may provide a marginally better claim, it does not do away with the original common and equal right to use the land.
This poses the obvious question: If we all have a valid right to the land, who gets to decide how finite economic land gets applied to which human desires? The exclusive legal right to use land is an invaluable convention not to be haphazardly discarded. It's the basic security of knowing you're protected from random people waltzing onto your land to conduct their own business; it's the indispensable legal tool which that enables people to do more than they could in a free-for-all. However, because land cannot be created by definition, laying absolute claim to land renders it monopolized. Since it cannot be created, no one can "enter the market" to compete in providing cheaper and better land and location; people can merely trade their existing share of the supply. In effect titleholders receive rights to monopoly profits while the landless and land-poor are denied access to the basic means of their survival. Geoism resolves this dilemma through understanding land's rent.
Land rent is derived from the productive value of exclusive use of a site or resource over a free alternative. It is simply the market price of tying up a site or resource for a fixed period of time (e.g. annually). The economic competitive advantage of land, its economic power, is measured by its rent. One can capitalize land's rent to yield its sale price, i.e. the price of the land's title under conditions of land monopolization. The title's price has little to do with the cost to bring the land to market (a legal title is effectively free to manufacture) and everything to do with its natural productive power and its scarcity -- its rent. Consequently, as the economic power of land is measured by its rent, so too an individual's economic power, the very degree of their economic opportunity, is measured by the land rent they command.
Geoism rejects the monopolization of land by demanding that land users be liable for the market rent of land they consume or tie up. Geoism then demands that it be distributed to all who make a physical claim to it: the residents of a city share in the land value of their city by virtue of living and working there; the users of a watershed share in the value of the water rights by virtue of partaking in that water cycle; so on and so forth. This is often known as the "citizen's dividend": an individual's distribution of the earnings of the land in their local economy. A real example of a citizen's dividend can be seen in Alaska's Permanent Fund, through which every Alaskan resident receives a dividend from the revenue generated by mineral resources such as oil. It's this paired collection and distribution of land rent that synthesizes equal claims to the earth with the structural advantages of exclusive land rights and private land management. This is the central tenet of geoism.
A pure and direct form of geoism returns all land rent in equal shares directly in a dividend to the people. To the extent that the institution collecting and distributing land rent can avoid capture by special interests, some may be used for public works as well, with the remainder distributed in the dividend. This is mostly useful for goods which are non-excludable, non-rivalrous, but universally valued. By definition, if it is efficient to provide a good publicly, then land rent must increase by more than the cost of providing the good publicly. This implies that the remaining shares -- the individual's autonomous claim to earth for the pursuit of their own happiness -- ought never be consumed in public spending. Any scheme that would attempt to control one's individual share through collective decision-making can only be defended as paternalistic coercion. It would subjugate the individual to others' preferences and desires and drive a blow to the very heart of the economic problem we sought to solve. Geoism must therefore always safeguard the individual's equal and autonomous economic power with respect to the earth.
The strongest contention against geoism is that improvements which cannot be alienated from the land (such as buildings and land modifications) cannot be traded separately from land, and therefore cannot be valued separately from the land. No matter how advanced the art of land assessment becomes, this objection is incontrovertibly true. Nonetheless, the original common right to make use of the earth persists. So while it is prudent and good to allow people to profit from the improvements they make to land through their effort and ingenuity, it is on a best effort basis. At the end of the day, as Henry George explains:
It is the greater that swallows up the less; not the less that swallows up the greater. Nature does not proceed from humans, but humans from nature. And it is into the bosom of nature that we and all our works must return again.
We are all the product of nature, and nature is no one's product. This truth underlies the essence of resource justice. There is no difficulty determining where the individual right ends and the common right begins. There is only difficulty in negotiation of the terms. But negotiate we must.
The automated future needs geoism
Before the automated future, one's economic power is the sum of their command over natural resources and their labor power compounded over time. Before the automated future, conditions where labor has been relatively scarce and land has been relatively plentiful (and where chattel slavery has been avoided) have often sufficed for a healthy, prosperous middle class to thrive. Unreliable as this pattern may have been in the past, it becomes a sheer impossibility in the automated future. In the automated future, a person's economic power will be dominated by the natural resources they control.
Geoism does not attempt to deny the existence of land rent the way that "cost the limit of price" thinking does. To wish away rent and the market value of land is to wish away all tradeoffs; it's to wish away the very physical constraints of the universe. Instead, geoism seeks to share the value of the land. It means people pay for natural resources they use but would in turn receive a perpetual dividend from those very payments. In doing so, it gives each and every person the power to command automation to make the automated future more as they would like it to be. For every person to have enough dollars to "vote with their dollars" would not require the sacrifice of comfortable survival. Indeed, it would become the default activity. The human economic condition would be ruled by decisions to invest their dividend in long-term projects one wishes to see achieved, to conserve and preserve things one wishes not to be destroyed, to save for their own future, or to simply enjoy life in the current moment. This is the way the automated future can work for everyone.
Of course, these promises depend not only on the complete surpassing of human capabilities by machines, but also a widespread economic understanding that faces significant political hurdles. But the alternative to a geoist automated future features the forced arrest of technology, violence, and unnecessary suffering. The choice is clear. Geoism need not wait for the automated future either; we have centuries and even millennia of the history of land monopoly and its effects on societies at our fingertips, and the solutions are within our reach. Shifting local taxes from productive activity to land ownership is something any city can do. Real geoism (Alaska's PFD, Estonia's land value tax, Singapore's land lease model) already underlies some of the most equitable and prosperous economic well-being we've ever seen. The geoist automated future is merely the north star guiding our path.
What exactly the fully automated world will look like is an unknowable wonder. The machines will be tasked, like our human-driven economy is now, with the job of meeting as many human desires as possible while using the fewest resources as possible. If human desires are best satisfied by being clustered together, perhaps for low-cost transportation or simply because people enjoy being near each other, we might see a world of dense cities where space near the centers come at a premium but with stellar amenities and tremendous opportunities to connect with others. Or people may want more space to themselves, putting high-value locations at a premium. The machines would be tasked with developing highly efficient and rapid transportation modes to support the sprawl. There may be multiple excellent options for all sorts of preferences. But regardless of its form, society's fabric will be more than ever defined by the distribution of rights to make use of the earth and beyond.
The automated future is a test. It will test the moral and political constitutions of humanity. There is no reason to believe we will pass the test, but there is no reason to believe we cannot. The good news is that passing the test gives way to a world where technology works for everyone, without the need for people to take it by force. The other good news is that we can still think, and we still have time to act. As the ramifications of progressive automation make their way through society, action will be unavoidable. We can act to harmonize society with economics and natural rights, or not. However, the automated future cannot deliver on its promises if we don't. The automated future will need geoism.