We’re all in this Together, but we’re not
Right versus Left. Trump vs Harris. Le Penn vs Macron. Tories vs Labor. Partij voor de Vrijheid vs The liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. China vs US. NATO vs Russia. The “West” vs BRICS. Everywhere you look there is cultured and mediated division. Meanwhile we are largely ignoring issues like climate and AI. In the last US presidential debate just weeks ago, AI wasn’t even discussed, but Biden’s mental health was. Now it’s all about fake crowd sizes, but not AI or climate.
As humanity reckons with the damage we’ve done to the climate, the increasing inequality gap in major economies like the US and the UK, and the increasing political divide, it seems impossible to consider a future where humanity as a whole is motivated to work together for our collective future. This is before the incredibly transformative influence of AI, which is still yet to come, but even that is creating debate — will it, wont it, when is AGI coming, will it ever, etc… It may be best articulated in the simple phrase “United we stand, divided we fall”
Figure 1 - American WWII propaganda poster
The concept of a weakened society through division can be likely be attributed to the Ancient Greek storyteller Aesop in his fable “The Four Oxen and the Lion”, but it is also embodied in the New Testament in both Matthew 12:25 and Mark 3:25
“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” — Mark 3:25
Looking back at human history, the times when humanity has accomplished the most for the species has almost always been when we’ve worked together with singular vision and intent.
Examples of world shaping collective action by large groups of humans include constructing the Great Wall of China, building the Great Pyramids, the Second World War industrial mobilization, the Apollo project that put men on the moon, the Human Genome project, and possible future achievements such as colonizing Mars or creating Free Energy through fusion.
Certainly individual achievements have contributed to humanity’s progress such as thePrinting Press, Railways, Vaccines, the Lightbulb, the Integrated Circuit, and such, but these each relied on collective adoption and effort to move them from a simple invention to large scale mass adoption. Even for incredible inventions like the lightbulb or radio, there were numerous advances and science that preceded the major milestone that led to commercialization — so even when capitalism is working it’s generally about someone commercializing the idea first, when the collaborative function of learning or advancing the tech has been a massive group effort over many years. It’s very rare for one individual to come up with and execute on a concept without any collaboration.
The advanced of the species is most always an effort by many people over a long time, to advance even just one small aspect of society. Markets do not recognize this in legal ownership or commercial structures, but it is, of course, a fact regardless. It’s why we have constant debates over IP and who originally came up with the idea, etc. Because this is always happening simultaneously, not in some individual creative vacuum
Winners versus Losers
The ability of capitalism to distribute wealth effectively has long been compromised, resulting in greater inequality today than what we’ve seen historically (the US saw a 40% increase in inequality between 1990–2021). Not only is income inequality greater in the US today than at any other time throughout history, but global inequality due to per capita incomes is also higher than it was say 200 years ago. Inequality is a byproduct of political and economic policy and social-cultural norms. We can change it (as demonstrated by the fact it has worsened over the last century), but this requires a philosophical shift where we prioritize the welfare of the whole of human society over the wealth of the individual — sounds like communism to me!
Capitalism itself is built on the concept of competition being core to growth. We compete individually for salaries, at a company level for investment and talent, and at market level for resources and trade. This competition, while a catalyst for market forces and advantage, I would argue is counter intuitive when it comes to human advancement.
“The Market” does not have a solution to the world’s biggest issues
Zurich Insurance projects that by 2050 the world will see somewhere in the order of 1.2 Billion people displaced by climate change — or as they are generally termed “eco-refugees”. Just 10 years ago those estimates were 200–300 million by 2050. Some estimates are as high as 1.6 Billion people, but others maintain 200m would be a more reasonable figure. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees cited that in 2023 114 million eco-refugees had been forced from their homes and countries due to collapse of farming ecosystems and the flow on economic effect in the community. If today there are already 114m eco-refugees, it would be incredibly niave to think that by 2050 that number might be limited to 200 million.
Both the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctica Ice Shelf are expected to collapse as a result of current warming trends, the big question is when. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour today.
Either of these events would increase sea-levels by 2–7 meters within the next 1,000 years. But the immediate effect could be a 2 meter sea level rise by 2050. That would put 500 capital cities around the world under water. This is not a Chinese climate hoax, this is what the available data is forecasting as possible. But we don’t have a hard date that we can say with 100% certainty. Even if we did, there’s a whole section of society that wouldn’t believe it until they were personally doing the dog paddle in Lower Manhattan. When it does happen, then we have the economic impact of an event like “Super Storm Sandy” ($93 Billion in damages) repeated all around the world. Trillions of dollars of potential damage to infrastrcture and that’s before we even get to eco-refugees displaced.
The economic effects of this are simply far too chaotic for the markets to absorb. Without a change in our current political and economic environment, the human costs are immense and incalculable.
This is not limited to just developing nations either, nor is it something that you should think about as solely a future problem. The graph below shows the increase in extreme weather related events is going to cost Trillions of dollars annually in the United States alone by the 2040s (see US Government Climate.gov analysis). It is likely that by 2035 that extreme weather events will account for more of the US annual budget than military and defense spending! And we’re investing minimally in resiliance.
Climate is going to require a complete rethink on public policy and on economics. There is no acceptable taxation regime that can absorb these costs as they climb, and there is no free-market function that could support this spend. Certainly AI and Quantum could provide us with solutions in the medium term. But AI is also going to massively disrupt employment and work practices.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) concluded in a 2020 report, “A new generation of smart machines, fueled by rapid advances in AI and robotics, could potentially replace a large proportion of existing human jobs.” Robotics and AI will cause a serious “double-disruption,” as the pandemic pushed companies to fast-track the deployment of new technologies to slash costs, enhance productivity and be less reliant on real-life people.
Forbes, “Goldman Sachs Predicts 300 Million Jobs Will Be Lost Or Degraded By Artificial Intelligence”, March 31, 2023
Goldman Sachs estimates that upwards of 300 million jobs will be lost to AI over the next decade or so, while global GDP will increase by 7% just through productivity and efficiency gains that AI affords. Some argue that we will need Universal Basic Income to fend off the collapse of society as people find themselves simply unable to find paid work in an increasingly autonomous age, others argue that we always create new jobs to replace old ones lost by technological advancements.
Even if we can create new jobs, the amorphous Market is not incentivized to fix these problems. There’s just no profit in it. In fact, the opposite is true. Just on human labor alone, the market is very heavily incentivized to eliminate humans from the workforce in the name of economic productivity.
“In my little groupchat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion dollar company…Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI discussing human-less corporations (Source: Yahoo Finance)
New Order Thinking
When I debate this with militant capitalists, they rush to defense of the current system reinforcing the amazing progress that we’ve seen since the industrial revolution. But try a little thought experiment.
Adam Smith came up with the basic supply and demand (Wealth of Nations) theory in the late 1700s. We’ve obviously evolved that theory to the dominant economic model of the planet today. But in 10,000 years is it likely that capitalism will be the best economic model that humans have ever been able to come up with? No, that’s impossible. So why wait 10,000 years to fix our economics so that it can absorb climate, AI, eco-refugees and food scarcity issues to name a few?
The Market, capitalism and our current political environment are simply not adaptable enough to absorb these shocks that are coming. We need new economic thinking, and we need a completely evolved view of public policy and funding.
Otherwise Capitalism will drive us right into extinction because the species needs to be a single organism focused on survival and sustainability, not on growth and profitability any longer.
It’s time for humanity to grow up.
Ok, cue the passioned defense of capitalism in the comments…
