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In a kind of counter intuitive argument in this article in The Wall Street Journal , Uber drivers may now have to battle with the fact that no human is actually telling them what to do. Most of the tasks are now being automated. The study by Researchers at the Data and Society research institute at New York University point out that Uber uses software to exert similar control over workers that a human manager would.
The world looks more and more like the Manna short story, where every aspect of our employee life is used to classify our performance. Another interesting discussion point: Is the middle manager role disappearing?
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Meet your New Boss: The Algorithm
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I consider the day misspent that I am not either charged with a crime,
or arrested for one.
-- "Ratsy" Tourbillon
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Friday November 06 2015, @10:21AM
I don't buy this. There's obvious forced scarcity/rent seeking going on, but we're not going to magically have post scarcity just because of IP law changes.
Is that all you think that Technocracy is? I think that you need to do some more reading. It is easy to mistake Technocracy for things it is not when you only look at its parts. [wikipedia.org]
What is it with people trying to destroy some of the principle tools for achieving post scarcity?
Money is one of the principle things keeping us from having post scarcity! Assuming for the moment we could produce more than we can now for whatever reason, suppose we just double the income of all citizens, what would happen? The value of money would be cut in half and people wouldn't be able to buy anything more anyway. Then there is the problem of what if we actually did produce more? It already happened once, with disastrous consequences [technocracy.ca], the Great Depression. We had a choice: ditch the old scarcity-based system and keep our new-found ability to produce an abundance, or destroy the abundance and keep the old system. Too bad we decided to give away all that prosperity.
In other words, energy accounting is the new scarce currency, but we're not actually going to let you do anything with it.
If that's what you got out of that article, then I'm afraid you are very mistaken. Energy Accounting is nothing like money. People don't have anything to "exchange" or "earn". People simply go to the store (or shop online), find what they want, and they get it. The whole EA system is exactly that, an "accounting" system, that keeps track of all the things that people get so that the production part of the system knows how much of each thing to produce for the next cycle. It's all transparent, behind the scenes; the citizens need not be aware of its inner workings at all (not that its a secret or anything). As far as they are concerned, they just get stuff for free. No money, no bank accounts, no budgeting. That's what post-scarcity allows.
Post scarcity just means that the stuff you need or want for some basic standard of living is too cheap to meter (including effort and time). That's it. There's no reason we can't still use money and all the paraphernalia of finance to make our post scarcity society better.
No, post-scarcity means that there is no more scarcity, that the goods and services people want no longer have any (or enough) monetary value with which to make any kind of "business" work. Look at air, it is abundant. Can you sell ordinary air? No, because anyone can get it whenever they want. Same thing in Technocracy. Now, make that air scarce, say by pollution, or locking someone in a bank vault, and suddenly that air is scarce, and people will gladly pay for all the air they can get. So what happened to cause the Great Depression, as explained in the article I linked to above, things became so abundant, they lost their value, and companies couldn't stay in business. That's the whole reason Technocracy was invented, to deal with this problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 06 2015, @02:45PM
Is that all you think that Technocracy is?
No, and honestly, I don't care. I just drilled down to the important stuff. When you get the role of money so horribly wrong, the rest of the system is sure to be horribly wrong too.
No, post-scarcity means that there is no more scarcity, that the goods and services people want no longer have any (or enough) monetary value with which to make any kind of "business" work.
The difference is that my post-scarcity is achievable while yours doesn't even make sense. Everything we want is finite in extent or requires something finite in extent, hence there is no such thing as no more scarcity. But there is such as thing as not worthwhile to charge you by unit for human-scale consumption of a bounded population.
Money is one of the principle things keeping us from having post scarcity!
And this is an example of how our difference in opinion matters. The "Technocracy" scheme not only irrationally assumes the non existence of scarce goods is possible, it has to go to considerable effort to force us to stop using scarce goods. My scheme doesn't require us to stamp out money usage or even care about it.
If that's what you got out of that article, then I'm afraid you are very mistaken. Energy Accounting is nothing like money. People don't have anything to "exchange" or "earn". People simply go to the store (or shop online), find what they want, and they get it.
Read it [technocracy.ca]. The transactions still happen. They're just "transparent" to the consumer.
Energy Accounting is one of the core elements of Technocracy. It is a form of economic distribution <*> unlike anything in use by any nation today. It employs energy measurements to replace money transactions. To the consumer the process is essentially transparent; they need only consume what items and services they will (e.g. transportation, food, entertainment, etc.), and the physical "costs" of this consumption is recorded by the E.A. system, to determine how much of these same things need to be made available in the future. This will however require a change in the concept of "ownership?".
Notice that there is still at least one scarce resource, energy (else you wouldn't need any sort of accounting at all!). And that it is still used as a currency. But now, people are prohibited from owning or trading this currency. This is a vast disfranchisement of humanity.
Then there is the problem of what if we actually did produce more? It already happened once, with disastrous consequences [technocracy.ca], the Great Depression. We had a choice: ditch the old scarcity-based system and keep our new-found ability to produce an abundance, or destroy the abundance and keep the old system. Too bad we decided to give away all that prosperity.
Notice that the link is only to US manufacturing not global manufacturing where employment still goes up. You can't base decisions on looking at a small piece of the whole which has enormous biases against manufacturing employment (like regulators who ignore the cost of regulation or societies bent on punishing richer people rather than employing poorer people).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 06 2015, @04:02PM
There are many, but a few can be summarized here:
A thoroughly scientific method of control of the technology of the continent.
Democratic controls for all non-technical issues and decisions.
Maximum freedom for all citizens in terms of latitude of purchasing power and personal rights
Removal of methods of scarcity economics such as money, debt, value, and interest.
The elimination of political decision-making from technical affairs
Replacement of these methods with an empirical accounting of all physical resources, products, and services (called Energy Accounting).
Productive capacity many orders of magnitude higher than currently possible, without requiring any new equipment.
Decrease in human labor required to produce these amounts through proper use of automation.
Highest possible standard of living for ALL citizens in terms of income, housing, health care, education, and leisure.
Sustainable resource management through conservation and industrial efficiency
Elimination or vast reduction of various social ills, such as poverty, crime, pollution, insecurity, and disease.
Let's start with item one
A thoroughly scientific method of control of the technology of the continent.
If it's scientific, then it is at least empirical. That means at least a physical demonstration of the principles of Technocracy. But that hasn't happened yet. It's also worth noting here that a number of assumptions made are not scientific. I'll note these in turn. If you have a scientifically based belief system, then you can empirically demonstrate the axioms/assumptions of the system hold and the system works for what you wish to use it for.
But we have further problems. A fundamental problem is that we are implicitly ignoring even better truth-seeking methods than the scientific ones for economic systems. Markets are superior with millennia of demonstrated effectiveness. But the assumption that you can actually exist in a world without any scarcity means you are blind to markets because now there is no need for trade or the various features markets offer.
The final problem is the word, "control". Choices are "controlled" by different parties based on highly subjective characteristics. This segues into the next bullet point,
Democratic controls for all non-technical issues and decisions.
Sounds to me like some faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy decides how much asbestos is in your pants and you decide what color they are. Important decisions are made by parties that in turn are not adequately controlled. It's unscientific because it ignores millennia of evidence that organizations which have power evolve to serve their own interests.
Further, we also have no way to determine when a choice is technological or not. It will happen that a party will attempt to control more. Vague delineations like this are ripe for abuses of overreach of power.
Maximum freedom for all citizens in terms of latitude of purchasing power and personal rights
No money eh? But we have "purchasing power". And how are you enforcing personal rights when you don't have control over decisions that affect you? Also sounds like a goal not a characteristic. Finally, this is the first of the non-scientific assertions. How do we know a technocracy provides maximum freedom of this sort in the absence of a demonstration? Profoundly unscientific because it doesn't even logically fit with several of the other claimed characteristics.
Removal of methods of scarcity economics such as money, debt, value, and interest.
I wrote about this already. I'll note in addition that removal of money seriously impairs your purchasing power. Also, there are a variety of non-scientific attitudes expressed on the Technocracy site with respect to money that both ignore the purpose of money and its widespread usage even in systems where formal currency is non-existent or extremely devalued by circumstance.
The elimination of political decision-making from technical affairs
Not going to happen. Every nontrivial decision or choice involving a group of people is inherently political. This is just another artificial delineation of control ripe for abuse and ignorant of reality.
Replacement of these methods with an empirical accounting of all physical resources, products, and services (called Energy Accounting).
I wrote about this already. Now, that we removed money, we have to reintroduce it. But in such a way that our plebes can't use it directly. Just another fuck you to "maximum freedom in terms of latitude of purchasing power and personal rights". It also implicitly acknowledges that energy is a scarce resource, a paradox baked into the core mechanisms of Technocracy.
Productive capacity many orders of magnitude higher than currently possible, without requiring any new equipment.
Cool with this. We have already demonstrated considerable improvements towards this.
Decrease in human labor required to produce these amounts through proper use of automation.
Cool with this.
Highest possible standard of living for ALL citizens in terms of income, housing, health care, education, and leisure.
Cool with this though I see it as a goal rather than a characteristic. And unscientific, since we don't have a demonstration of the superiority of Technocracy in delivering these goals.
Sustainable resource management through conservation and industrial efficiency
In a post-scarcity world (especially your ideal where there is no scarcity), these things just aren't relevant. You don't need them.
Elimination or vast reduction of various social ills, such as poverty, crime, pollution, insecurity, and disease.
The developed world has done so well as reducing these social ills, that we're seeing the social ills that come from not having these around. Here, the key one is "insecurity". Humanity has evolved to worry (and express other negative emotions). If there isn't something real to worry about, then people will find something imaginary to worry about. And anything that goes wrong in your society will receive an inordinate amount of concern and perhaps require an inordinate amount of theater. I point this out because this is a limit to what you can do (unless you start modifying people so they worry less) with people in any utopian system.
And we're basing a lot on hope, that the people in charge of technical decisions will chose to reduce these social ills.