Peopleless economy? Terrifyingly enough, not technically impossible

George Malandrakis

Peopleless economy? Terrifyingly enough, not technically impossible

Reductio Ad Economicum is a thing

Something that sounds too good to be true, probably is too good to be true

Now that AI actively threatens to replace mostly all white collar workers, and even lots of blue-collar in the near future, lots of people seem to calm themselves with a seemingly correct thought: if we are all getting replaced, who will be consuming? Consumption will halt, and The Economy will fall apart. Therefore, we will not be replaced.

This conclusion seems sound, just like the question that led to it. At the end of the day, the economy is based on what the masses consume, and without consumption, there cannot be any economy. Or that is the implicit assumption...

Logical delusions

(Feel free to skip this section if you are not interested in philosophy)

It is a well attested fact that human logic is far from flawless. We are all victims of our biases, emotions, and equally importantly, our implicit assumptions. Just like in mathematics, where all our theorems stem from sets of axioms, so do our beliefs stem from assumptions. But unlike in mathematics, where the axioms are concrete, explicit, and shaped by natural observations, the human logic's axioms are more abstract, implicit, and shaped by our knowledge and our cultural background.

Indeed, a large proportion of our beliefs comes from "axioms" expressed in words we cannot even define. What is Justice, for instance? We take it for granted that Justice is a thing and exists. It is a thing, but it is not something that can be described in words or shapes, like a straight line. Any logical assumptions involving justice, are unfortunately dubious.

Not only Justice is an abstract concept, though. Even many concepts regarded as technical and factual are as well. Money is an example. Really, what is money? A piece of paper? Some metal? Some number on a computer? Could you put your finger on what money really is, especially in the modern world? Living in the mostly cashless Sweden, I realized that I had a tough time giving a proper reply to my three year old when he asked what money is.

If even money (a parameter measured in numbers and used for generating alleged "hard facts") is something we can't even accurately describe, we can only begin to imagine how much more abstract of a concept The Economy is.

Indeed, The Economy is not only an abstract concept, but a very twisted and perverse one as well. It once used to refer to the well-being of the masses (at least in the minds of the many and the pretentions of the media), but the ruling class has thrown away this pretention, and it now openly refers to the profits of a handful few. Millions of people struggle with the rent/mortgage and consume less and less to make the ends meet, even in the once thriving West. But as long as Wall Street does well, The Economy is somehow thriving even with less consumption.

Defining The Economy is beyond the scope of this writing; but I expect the reader to accept, and indeed internalize, that any belief or conclusion that involves The Economy is flawed by its nature. The Economy is a concept that is even more abstract than Justice, because at least Justice does not refer to two contradictory things at once. Such conclusions are "buggy", as we say in software. They may "compile", but do not really work.

A logical fallacy so normalized that it doesn't (didn't) have a name: ad economicum.

"If we are all getting replaced, who will be consuming? Consumption will halt, and The Economy will fall apart. Therefore, we will not be replaced."

We can identify at least two implicit assumptions here: that The Economy, whatever it is, requires human consumption, and that it falling apart will somehow be bad for the resource-hoarders even after they have hoarded mostly everything *and* have robot-slaves to serve them. It also assumes that that only humans can consume, but let's set this aside.

I am fully aware that it may come as a shock to many of you, but here is the thing: none of these implicit assumptions stands much scrutiny.

Once the owning class owns mostly everything *and* has intelligent machines that serve them, The Economy crashing will not have real consequences for them. It barely has real consequences for them already -as they have consistently ended up richer after the dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the covid recession.

The other assumption does not seem to pass the crash test of reality either.

The weird monster we call "The Economy" can keep on rolling without (many) humans in the loop. This is not a hypothesis or a thought experiment; corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to...