The market
economy exhibits most of the traits of the much hyped – and feared – singularity,
where an artificial intelligence takes over the show and humans are enslaved.
We have all
heard the stories of the powerful algorithms. They control our choices and they
learn by analyzing an ever increasing amount of data. In the book Homo Deus,
Yuval Noah Harari says that we have replaced the idea of God with an algorithm.
In this emerging ideology, which he names Dataism,
the ultimate goal is to increase the amount of information flow through the
algorithm.
“Hitherto, data was
seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans
were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and
knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope
with the immense flows of data, hence they cannot distil data into information,
let alone into knowledge or wisdom. The work of processing data should
therefore be entrusted to electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds
that of the human brain.”
Harari makes
a link to the markets in his analysis, for example he says that:
“We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they
were “good”. In truth, they won because they improved the global
data-processing system.”
These are
good observations, but in my view he doesn’t draw the full conclusions of his
own observation.
That the
market is the super AI and the Singularity.
According
to the singularity hypothesis, an intelligent agent (such as a computer running
software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a "runaway
reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent
generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion
and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would far surpass all human
intelligence. (Wikipedia)
I would
argue that ”the market economy” is already the super intelligent self-learning
algorithm or artificial intelligence that has taken over from the human mind
and brain. It is actually one of the main arguments of neo-liberal thinking
that “we” should not try to regulate or decide or control the resource
allocations in society but leave it to The Market to decide. The notion goes
back to Friedrich Hayek’s tremendously influential article The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) where he writes:
"The marvel is
that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order
being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause,
tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months
of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly;
that is, they move in the right direction."
Carey King is on the track of how the market is the most
powerful algorithm in his article Artificial Intelligence and the
Utility Monster: It’s the Economy
Stupid. He concludes that:
”In an extreme world
with markets for everything, each of us becomes an automaton responding to
price signals to maximize collective utility, or GDP, that might have very
little to do with our personal well-being.”
While many
seem to believe that someone has decided that the economy (i.e. the GDP) must
grow that is not the case. Economic growth itself is a result of the market and
not a result of plots by financial capital or governments. Even governments
have limited abilities to command or induce growth in the longer run (just look at Japan since 1990s). Economic growth is created by the
competition in the market place and a few more mechanisms which I have elaborated
upon in other articles (such as Competition, not consumption, drives
global destruction).
Gradually, societies have surrendered more and
more decisions to the Market Singularity, not only because of corporate
manipulation but also because it is indeed “efficient”, at least as long as
externalities can be dumped in a landfill, exported or hidden. In a similar way
as people voluntary accept the manipulation of their access to information by
corporate business such as Facebook, they also voluntarily yield their own
power to the Market. And the arguments in favor of this surrender are
seductive. The fact that “nobody” decides may sound very democratic as there is
no authoritarian ruler or state telling us what to do. Meanwhile, nobody is accountable.
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