Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

2 The Three Disruptions

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts.

Freeman Dyson

Agriculture: The First Disruption

While change is history’s only constant, some changes matter more than others. Indeed some are so powerful that they alter the very meaning of what it is to be human – making an imprint so profound we can never return to the way things were before.

In this respect, two changes – what shall be called disruptions – stand out in particular.

The first disruption took place around twelve thousand years ago as our ancestors transitioned from nomadic hunting and gathering to a life of settled agriculture. Referred to as the Neolithic revolution, this shift, powered by the innovation of domesticating animals and plants, generated something never known before: a sizeable surplus of food and energy. For the first time in their existence, humans could begin to think about the future and make plans for a world that would be diferent to the one around them. The realms of abstract thought and practical action increasingly overlapped.

Over subsequent generations, and through constant modification of the natural environment, these settlements became ever more populated – capable of sustaining higher densities of people. Slowly, a world recognisable to us emerged: labour began to specialise, bringing along with it trade, the development of arts, centralised administration, codified systems of knowledge such as writing and mathematics, and various forms of property. It was during this period that the human animal asserted its mastery above all others, its existence increasingly defined by an ability to deploy complex technologies alongside sophisticated social institutions. All of this was built upon the shift to agriculture – the foundation of the First Disruption.

Industry: The Second Disruption

The second change was more recent, and certainly easier to locate. Beginning around 250 years ago, what has been termed the ‘First Machine Age ’ gave the world the Industrial Revolution. Just as the earlier development of agriculture transformed human society, industry allowed previously unimaginable feats of both creation and destruction.

This Second Disruption was powered as much by a transformation in energy as it was in production. Even as late as the 1600s – the century of Isaac Newton and Galileo – the primary sources of power remained much the same as in antiquity: water, wind, animals and humans. While there had been an energy revolution in medieval Europe, centred around the vertical windmill, this was unevenly distributed and far from exercising a regional, let alone global, impact.

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Yet all of that changed over the next 150 years. Increasingly eficient engines powered by fossil fuels untied economic production from organic labour and unreliable forms of renewable energy. The general-purpose technology on which this was based was steam power, the first commercial application of which was Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 atmospheric engine. And yet it wasn’t until the closing decades of the century that capturing the power of steam proved transformational. While the steam engine was not a new creation, an improved version designed by James Watt turned it from a tool of marginal use to the focal point of what became the Industrial Revolution. Just as with agriculture twelve thousand years earlier, this was a shift so big that there was no reverse gear.

The consequences of all of this were extraordinary. The combination of steam power and fossil fuels re-oriented production around the factory system, and allowed the creation of national and global infrastructures through railway networks and ocean-going steamships. In 1830, less than two decades after the railway locomotive had been designed, the world’s first intercity route opened between Liverpool and Manchester. Another twenty years after that, Great Britain was home to over 7,000 miles of railway lines used by more than 48 million people annually.

Although Britain was at the forefront of such change, such trends rapidly went global. Thus while it was conceivable in 1873 that Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, could circumnavigate the world in under three months, the same journey took more than a year only a generation earlier. This unprecedented contraction of space and time would have particularly profound implications for the world’s rising economic superpower, the United States. In 1847, the journey from New York to Chicago took at least three weeks by stagecoach. A decade later, the same trip by rail took three days.

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With the rise of global transportation networks came international, real-time forms of communication. In 1865 the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid between Britain and the United States. By the early 1870s the same technology connected London and Adelaide on opposite sides of the world. In 1871 the results of the Derby, the prestigious horse race, were flashed from London to Calcutta in five minutes, putting to shame the eighty days of Verne ’s travelling adventurer. All of this – global transport, electricity, rapid communication – would have been impossible to predict when Watt patented his first engine with Matthew Boulton a century earlier.

Capitalism’s Critics

Alongside the emergence of a global economy with new forms of transit and communication, the technologies of the Second Disruption significantly entrenched the division of labour, making new kinds of abundance possible. The incremental substitution of natural by mechanical power, combined with open markets and global competition, significantly reduced the numbers of those engaged in artisanal work, displacing craft from the centre of the human experience to its margins. Perhaps paradoxically this made previously unthinkable feats of ingenuity an almost mundane feature of life. Even Marx, a profound critic of the new system, was in awe when he wrote in 1848:

The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

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For Marx, however, these new industrial feats were just the tip of the iceberg. He believed that such changes in technology, production and social life, would come to form the basis of an entirely new society. This reflected his view of history as unfolding through an ensemble of fields encompassing not only technology, but also politics and our ideas and assumptions about both the world and each other. Technology – just as it had done twelve thousand years earlier with the First Disruption – had ushered humanity into a new paradigm, yet we remained unable to create the institutions and ideas appropriate for this new age. Achieving that was the project to which Marx would commit his life.

In contrast to his portrayal by critics, Marx was often lyrical about capitalism. His belief was that despite its capacity for exploitation, its compulsion to innovate – along with the creation of a world market – forged the conditions for social transformation:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

As a result, his conclusion was that capitalism inevitably ‘created its own gravediggers’:

The condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.

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And yet this never came to pass. There was never a workers’ revolution that overthrew the system – at least not on a global scale. The reason why was that contrary to Marx’s predictions capitalism could ‘fix’ – both spatially and technologically – the very problems it generated. The ‘spatial fix’ is what underpins contemporary globalisation, characterised by the global distribution and relocation of production. This was one of the solutions the bourgeoisie adopted to counter rising worker militancy in Europe and North America after the late 1960s, and is the background for contemporary discourses of ‘competitive ’ labour markets in a world ‘racing to the bottom’. It is also why more cars are produced in Mexico, Thailand and Brazil than nations which previously dominated the industry such as France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The spatial fix is always only temporary, of course, and has recently reemerged in the context of rising wages in China. Once more we see production relocating to wherever labour is cheap and profits easier to realise.

The ‘technological fix’ is diferent, with Marx consistently clear that technological innovation is an inherent feature of capitalism. His explanation, just as it would be for later voices such as Milton Friedman and Joseph Schumpeter, was that it was propelled by competition between capitalists. The imperative to compete means capitalists must always find cheaper, more eficient ways of producing commodities – often substituting machines for human labour – while also ofering improvements on goods and services available to consumers. It was this imperative which governed the immense expansion of railways, the emergence of the factory system and guided constant innovation until the present day. It would become the iron law of the prevailing economic model within the Second Disruption – market capitalism.

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Information Unbound: The Third Disruption

This tendency to perpetually innovate as a result of competition, to constantly supplant work performed by humans and maximise productivity, would ultimately lead to a Third Disruption, one whose fullest conclusions are no less dizzying than the two which preceded it.

This Third Disruption has already started, with evidence of its arrival all around us. As with the Second Disruption its basis is a general-purpose technology: the modern transistor and integrated circuit, contemporary analogues to Watt’s steam engine over two centuries ago.

While the Second Disruption was marked by a relative freedom from scarcity in motive power – coal and oil rather than muscle and wind moving wheels, pulleys, ships, people and goods – the defining feature of the Third Disruption is ever-greater abundance in information. For some this signals the completion of the Industrial Revolution, marking an era in which machines are increasingly able to perform cognitive as well as physical tasks.

This new situation of post-scarcity underpins what will be referred to as ‘extreme supply’, something not only limited to information, but – as a consequence of digitisation – labour too. Here, continuous improvements in processor power, in combination with a range of other technologies, means machines will be capable of replicating ever more of what was, until now, uniquely human work.

As with preceding disruptions, this shift represents a transformation in energy as much as work. Just as the First Disruption depended on the energy of domesticated animals, humans and the elements, and the Second was powered by the condensed solar energy of fossil fuels, the Third Disruption sees a move away from hydrocarbons and back to renewable energy – particularly solar. This will partially be a response to the perils of climate change, but as with other features of the Third Disruption its tendency to extreme supply is more profound than the simple pursuit of sustainability. It will spell an end to energy scarcity altogether, as a new technology-energy matrix of ever-smarter machines combined with ever-cheaper and cleaner energy will make resource extraction beyond our world possible, yielding extreme supply in raw materials. This completes a chain that permits humanity to entirely exceed our present limits.

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In a sense this abundance is befitting of nature and our solar system. While we are accustomed to thinking of work as necessary and energy as a scarce resource, there is literally nothing on our planet so plentiful as the power of our sun. In the span of just ninety minutes enough potential solar energy hits the Earth’s surface to meet present demand for an entire year. Every twelve months we receive twice as much energy from the sun as will ever be obtained from the entirety of Earth’s non-renewable sources – coal, oil, natural gas and mined uranium – combined. While rising global demand for energy might seem daunting, it is nothing compared to what the giant nuclear reactor approximately 149 million kilometres away can provide.

Such unearthly wealth is only matched by the mineral resources beyond our planet, particularly among near Earth asteroids (NEA). Take the asteroid 16 Psyche, located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Measuring over 200 kilometres in diameter, it is one of the largest asteroids in our solar system. Composed of iron, nickel and rarer metals such as copper, gold and platinum, its iron content alone could be worth \$10,000 quadrillion – not bad when you consider the annual GDP of the Earth economy stands at around \$80 trillion. Psyche is unique, but it demonstrates a crucial point: the opportunities of of-world mining – once the technical barriers are surmounted – are as breathtaking as machines that can perform any task, or the sun sustaining our cities as it presently does our forests and fields.

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Biology as Information

The implications of extreme supply in information extend beyond automation. Ultimately, we will encounter new possibilities in maintaining the biological systems of our planet, as well as feeding and healing our own bodies. And why not? After all, organic life is itself nothing more than encoded information, if a little more complex: there are four nucleobases in double-stranded DNA – C, G, A and T – rather than the binary code of 0s and 1s as with digital information.

So while biological systems are much more complex than any digital equivalent, exponential trends in the latter will enhance our mastery over the former – something which will increasingly resemble an information good. This will transform our relationships to health and lifespan, not to mention food, nature and how we treat our fellow creatures. That doesn’t mean we will come to consider any of these to be ‘dematerialised’; rather, we will finally grasp the underlying informational rhythms to overcome nearly all forms of disease and feed a world of 10 billion people while using less, rather than more, of our planet’s bio-capacity.

Exponential Travel: Understanding the Third Disruption

Given the period between the First and Second Disruptions was some twelve thousand years, it might seem remarkable that the Third comes so soon after Watt’s steam engine and the emergence of market capitalism. The explanation why is simple: the rate of historical change is accelerating. The primary driver of that acceleration in recent decades is a number of exponential, as opposed to linear, trends in areas such as the cost of collecting, processing, storing and distributing digital information. It is these exponential trends which underpin extreme supply in information and digitisation, making possible the Third Disruption.

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Digitisation is more than simply a process that applies to things like words, pictures, film and music – that these are now digital objects rather than physical ones is important, but not to be overstated. More vital is how digitisation has allowed progressively greater amounts of cognition and memory to be performed in 0s and 1s, with the price–performance ratio of anything that does so falling every year for decades. It is this which allows contemporary camera technology to land rockets and, increasingly, drive autonomous vehicles; it is what will provide robots with fine motor coordination and dexterity equivalent to that found in humans; it will permit the built environment to know more about us, in certain respects, than we know about ourselves. It will even allow us to edit DNA – the building blocks of life – to remove hereditary disease and sequence genomes at such low cost, and with such regularity, that we will cure ourselves of cancer before it reaches Stage 1.

Going Exponential: Ibn Khallikan to Kodak

To better understand how digitisation will shape our future, the story of how photography came to be about 0s and 1s, rather than plastic film, is a good place to start.

While photography went mainstream with the arrival of the first mass-produced camera, Kodak’s 1900 ‘Brownie ’, the world would have to wait almost a century before the same company released a digital successor. Released in 1991, the DCS 100 enjoyed a maximum resolution of 1.3 megapixels and originally cost \$13,000 (around \$23,000 today). Despite the stellar price tag restricting its availability to elite institutions and wealthy individuals, the shift to digital was decisive. With photography now an information good, it would exhibit trends analogous to the falling costs and improved price performance described by Moore’s Law in computing. As a result, pixels per dollar on commercial digital cameras doubled every year. Just as with computing, the exponential tendencies with digital imaging compounded significantly over time, meaning that the camera on the third generation iPad had a superior resolution by a factor of seven compared to its predecessor, the iPad 2. The significance of this extends beyond the convenience of having afordable consumer cameras. Cheap, ubiquitous cameras are a cornerstone technology in any move towards a society built on automation and data.

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