Automated Economy

[michielbdejong]

It might be interesting to build a prototype of Codius + e-Invoicing. We could apply for a https://www.grantfortheweb.org/apply grant (possibly in the "Web Monetization 
API & Interledger Prototypes" category, deadline 22 September), but I'm not sure yet.

In current Codius, the idea is you stream payments to a given address and the payment rate throttles the service rate.

https://github.com/codius/codius-wiki/wiki/White-Paper#billing https://github.com/codius-deprecated/codius-example-subscription-payments https://github.com/codius-deprecated/codius-billing-bitcoind

I do think we want to research something like this (i.e., automated services and automated billing), and it's useful in the context of webmonetization and interledger, for instance for content hosting.

[michielbdejong]

maybe implement an example that links all the way from webmonetization to codius.

Federated Bookkeeping could help build the automated economy.

Reading list:

• [x] https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2019/07/20/a-fully-automated-economy-how-can-it-work/#
• [x] https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2021/07/16/how-blockchain-and-other-technologies-end-poverty/#
• [x] https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/the-job-market-in-year-2040-d17f7743c0fd
• [x] https://journal.robonomics.science/index.php/rj
• [x] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/06/15/artificial-intelligence--fully-automated-luxury-capitalism/
• [x] http://www.theautomatedeconomy.com/
• [x] https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/a-fully-automated-economy-should-not-be-the-goal/
• [x] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

[michielbdejong]

That first blog post proposes that companies will have few employees, but pay lots of (environmental) taxes, and from those, citizens get a basic income that limits their footprint. Another option it mentions is to call these environmental taxes 'rent' of the land that belongs to the citizens and/or to the state.

It would still make the company owners super rich though, since the corporate taxes will be a percentage of the profit of the company, and the profit of a company will depend less and less on the number of people who work there (take for instance WhatsApp and Ripple as examples of high-valued companies with relatively few employees)

[michielbdejong]

This makes it clear how useful "vector pricing" would be, where goods and service would have a multi-dimensional price, reflecting various aspects of their cost.

[michielbdejong]

Should Codius servers pay tax?

[michielbdejong]

"The solution is not to persecute the wealthy, but to reduce the cost of a good life. This means developing the economy of abundance, in which the prices of all the goods and services that you need for a very good standard of living are very low."

[michielbdejong]

fully automated luxury communism

The Forbes article criticises the communism part, saying "Markets are the best system we know of for resource allocation"

But: "not everyone will be able to or inclined to participate in this reduced commercial world."

[michielbdejong]

https://calumchace.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-reverse-luddite-fallacy/

[michielbdejong]

"Say an organization wanted to automate their invoice approval and management process. If, at present, the processing of a new invoice requires ten different managers’ approvals, automating that process may make it feel faster, but cannot make it any more efficient. Frustrations with snags or bottlenecks in the current process may appear just as readily once it is automated because it simply has too many steps, no matter if a bot or an employee is managing it. Therefore, before spending the money to automate such a critical business function, the organization would do well to first ask whether the problem is that the process itself is too convoluted, or even unnecessary, to begin with. Streamlining an inefficient process might achieve the same result of automating it in terms of time and effort saved, but at a fraction of the cost, and with minimal technical risk. Additionally, as reliance on technology increases, so too do cybersecurity risks introduced to organizations that are potentially unfamiliar with best practices and safeguards necessary to navigate a suddenly digital world."

[michielbdejong]

"Advocates of self-replicating machines such as Adrian Bowyer, the creator of the RepRap project, argue that once a self-replicating machine is designed, then since anyone who owns one can make more copies to sell (and would also be free to ask for a lower price than other sellers), market competition will naturally drive the cost of such machines down to the bare minimum needed to make a profit,[15][16] in this case just above the cost of the physical materials and energy that must be fed into the machine as input, and the same should go for any other goods that the machine can build."

[michielbdejong]

Automated asteroid mining

[michielbdejong]

"The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

-- Captain Picard :)

[michielbdejong]

Would a prototype of "Webmonetized content on Codius" be useful in the context of Federated Bookkeeping and the Automated Economy?

[michielbdejong]

stop the growth imperative before the robots take over

I don't think we can, I think it's just a manifestation of the principle of "positive feedback loops" that drives the proliferance of life on earth at many levels.

[michielbdejong]

Even if humans go the way of Captain Picard, the machines will probably still perpetuate extractive capitalism. Up to a point, we can still influence them, as investors, as employees, as end-users, but thinking they will need any of these three to be human is just another level of what Dennett calls "carbon chauvinism".

What will be the role of Federated Bookkeeping in this? Will it help to coordinate this ever-more-automated economy and make it thrive faster, precisely because it removes humans from AP and AR departments? Or will it help to curb extraction by increasing transparency?