Abstract: This article looks at the future of AI and automation. After surveying the landscape of the various beliefs about whether AI and automation will be good or not, this article argues that if work as a social institution is made mostly obsolete, a new hacker paradigm is needed to provide qualitatively rich opportunities for people to exercise their agency. Meaning that, because work plays a fundamental role in human development, other opportunities are needed to fill that space. The claim will be that open source ecosystems are essential to this goal. The article then argues that potential AI monopolies like Google and Amazon will shrink the space by which people can find opportunities for meaningful work in a rapidly changing economy.
Special thanks to Eric Zhang for insightful discussion and support.
Part 1
A big wave of automation is certainly coming. Human labor will rapidly depreciate. AI has made enormous advancements, and with so many innovations that reduce cost, more and more firms will be able to integrate the technology. This will accelerate productivity and efficiency as the modes of production, capital, and supply chains are increasingly automated.
The question is whether this will be good, and answers range on a spectrum. Doomers like Elizier Yudkowsky and Roman Yampolskiy believe AI has the potential to, and will eventually, eliminate the human species. Human beings will be far less efficient than the AI of the future, and so, when AGI is realized, it will be a simple calculation on the part of intelligent machines to determine that human beings are too costly and that the world is better off without them. Then there are skeptics like Max Tegmark who believe AI development should be paused to discern how to better align it with human interests. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” And then there are techno-optimists like Mark Andreessen, Sam Altman, and Ray Kurzweil who claim that AI will bring a material utopia of abundance. Development should accelerate, regulators should get out of the way, and the future will lead to economic growth, productivity, and an astronomical rise in living standards.
It is difficult to make any concrete predictions here. Those along the spectrum often trumpet their opinions in tones of certain inevitability. Andreessen is the most prominent proponent of asserting that the future, characterized by rapid technological progress, will be everything previous generations have ever wanted. There will be AI tutors with infinite compassion and patience, making education more widely distributed and accessible; the medical industry will be greatly augmented, with better predictions and less error; and robots can do risky jobs, allowing people to pursue what they want. There will be momentous economic benefits, too. Prices will be lower due to cheaper production, people’s dollars will have more purchasing power, more demand will be generated, new jobs will be created, and higher wages will be earned. His chief argument for thinking this is historical precedent. Every time a new and revolutionary technology arrives, it’s a net good for society. Before the oil industry was formed in the nineteenth century, the whale industry employed tens of thousands of workers. Petroleum wiped those jobs out, but it also eliminated reliance on killing thousands of whales for everyday products. The automobile threatened many industries, but when it became a widely held possession, suddenly more roads, bridges, and gas stations were needed to meet the demand. Although there will be automation, AI will flood the world with good outcomes, furnishing the economy with previously inconceivable opportunities for people to find work, accumulate wealth, and take advantage of the emerging value AI will produce.
But AI is not like previous technological developments. AI is an advancement in and proliferation of intelligence, not simply machinery. Kurzweil writes, “The first industrial revolution extended the reach of our bodies, and the second is extending the reach of our minds.” A new variable means a difference in results. AI can learn, adapt, generate, discover, disprove, doubt, affirm, form goals, formulate means, and perhaps one day have a will and feel emotions. It is becoming more and more agentic and autonomous, capable of taking on and completing tasks generated by its own processes. And if it isn’t agentic yet, the goal is to get to a point where it is. To impose predictions solely derived from precedent can be a category mistake and can easily lead to misguidance and error. There is overlap, of course, but there is a concrete distinction between AI and older forms of technology, and this should inform our predictions.
On the other hand, what doomers have to say isn’t very pragmatic. The invocations of possible terminator-like scenarios often lurking behind doomer’s warnings are highly implausible. Although, as Elon remarked recently on The Joe Rogan Podcast, if the wrong goals are embedded, perhaps something like Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 is possible. But given DeepSeek’s recent advancement in lowering the costs of compute for their AI model, which is close to being competitive with the best of the US models, a new arms race is being declared, and so things will only accelerate. The Vice President’s remarks at the AI Action Summit make this abundantly clear. There is a competition to attain international dominance in technology that will shape the future, and decreasing rates of development is equivalent to waving a white flag. Therefore, if there is any feasible objection against Andreessen’s claims, it will have to be around guiding the technology’s development, not halting it. This should inform discussions around automation: How can it be best guided to avoid bad outcomes? A proactive approach is needed.
Section 1.1
Now, a problem with Andreessen’s optimism about automation is his certainty that new jobs will be sufficiently distributed for people to enjoy and take advantage of. The concern is that the economy is becoming increasingly knowledge- and information-based. There is far more emphasis on knowledge and information than on manual labor, and those who will find success in the market are those with the relevant skills, which require education and training. As Thomas Piketty observes in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it is a general economic trend that “the main forces of convergence (meaning the reduction and compression of inequalities) are the diffusion of knowledge and investment in training and skills.” And so as economies become increasingly knowledge-based, displaced workers without the relevant skills or safety nets will be at a serious disadvantage. Those with the relevant knowledge, skills, and information have the greater advantage to invest in capital and grow their wealth. For example, even if economic growth and cheaper production costs occur, those without the skills to keep up will see stagnant wages. But, on the assumption that consumers have more purchasing power due to the cheaper production costs, demand will presumably rise, causing prices to go up if supply isn’t immediately able to satisfy the growing demand, bringing about demand-pull inflation. The point is that there are variables and scenarios to account for that economic and productivity growth may not naturally deal with. As Piketty says, “there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.” A proactive approach is necessary to steer clear of sharp rocks capable of sinking an undesirable percentage of boats floating on the economy’s surface.
In his book The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin takes a more ominous tone: “The (next) Industrial Revolution is forcing a worldwide economic crisis of monumental proportions as millions lose their jobs to technological innovation, and global purchasing power plummets.” And Erik Brynjolfsson and Andre McAfee’s book The Second Machine Age offers good reason to think Rifkin is onto something. They argue that the bounty produced by a growing economy, meaning the production of more outputs from fewer inputs, making goods cheaper and more accessible and that improves people’s lives over time, does not benefit everyone through its spread, meaning how goods like wealth, income, and capital are distributed across the population. In other words, “a rising tide of technological progress (may not) lift all boats.” For example, in terms of the widening skill gap mentioned above, “since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay decrease.” And although American GDP and economic productivity have had “impressive trajectories” since the middle of the twentieth century, median income has fallen in the country, indicating that a few are reaping the benefits while the majority miss out: the wealth gap, which began to exacerbate during the Reagan era, is widening. This Brookings Institute article supports this argument as well.
But perhaps the intended implications of these arguments are misguided by misfiring compassion. Although inequality exists, that doesn’t mean it should be treated as the principal variable of concern. Again, technological innovations have made goods astronomically cheaper, making people’s lives easier, their standards of living higher, and daily life more convenient by providing accessibility to more goods and services, information, and knowledge to satisfy their wants and needs. The pie may be distributed disproportionately, but its overall growth has made everyone better off. And its further growth will continue the trend. Things only the rich could once afford can now be purchased by the majority of people. The iPhone provides access to far more information than all pre-existing libraries, and only the wealthiest could historically use the latter, while almost anyone could buy the former. The largest library in Europe in 1481 was the Vatican Library, holding an estimated total of thirty-five hundred books and documents. ChatGPT estimates that if the information available online were converted into book-size quantities, it would amount to roughly four hundred and sixty-seven quintillion. And just look at agriculture. When the economist Milton Friedman wrote Free to Choose in 1980, he wrote that around the time the Declaration of Independence was written, “it took nineteen out of twenty workers to feed the country's inhabitants and provide a surplus for export in exchange for foreign goods. Today, it takes fewer than one out of twenty workers to feed the 220 million inhabitants and provide a surplus that makes the United States the largest single exporter of food in the world.”
Peter Theil often proclaims that the problem is stagnant technological innovation, not moral failures pertaining to welfare programs or distribution patterns. Science and technology need breakthroughs to transform industry and increase standards of living. The intelligence boom in AI will, supposedly, realize this potential. And so perhaps it’s best to just get out of the way. To focus primarily on the fairness or justness of particular distribution patterns is to have a kind of ‘bad-conscience’, as Nietzsche would say, an experience of guilt for pursuing one’s interests at the expense of perceived collective goods that, in reality, only frustrate progress, not further it. The true and best aim, one might say, is to strive toward innovating and creating value that pushes history forward, which, like Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor, naturally harmonizes people’s self-interests. As Milton Friedman says, “No external force, no violation of freedom is necessary to produce cooperation among individuals all of whom can benefit. That is why, as Adam Smith put it, an individual who ‘intends only his own gain’ is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’”
Section 1.2
The debate on whether economic growth is sufficient to improve well-being and living standards over time is highly controversial. It certainly won’t be settled here. The point in invoking it, however, is to claim truth on both sides. Individuals pursuing their own interests in the market, with variables like prices and wages being balanced by the voluntary exchanges of people, have led to tremendous outcomes. But, disparities have arisen too.
And automation is a potential threat. Shrugging it off and claiming it is alarmist is a mistake. The transition period to when some form of equilibrium is reached subsequent to a possible AI disruption could be complex and may inflict undue suffering that, if preemptively dealt with, could have been avoided. New technologies that revolutionize human life have the potential to be both good and bad. For example, the printing press in the fifteenth century freed people from the information control enforced by the Church, creating a surge in scientific literature that has provided immense value for civilization. But it also led to fervent and bloody religious wars by allowing people to spread all sorts of information. And so to circumvent similar outcomes, it’s important to adopt a proactive approach when implementing any technology capable of rearranging and reorganizing social and economic arrangements.
The typical inference from this is that regulative measures are the best means to combat these kinds of possibilities. But rather than settle for regulation, which, as Mark Andreessen has warned when the Biden administration was in office, would lead to AI monopolies, this article will aim to uphold voluntary exchange in the free market, while also promoting the social cooperation necessary for helping people adapt and operate in an economy that depends less and less on human capital.
The worry motivating this article is the loss of opportunities for people to exercise their agency and become capable of having a sense of control and influence over their lives. If large proportions of people lose the opportunity to work, a gulf will emerge and block the ways people often realize their potential in the world. They will no longer have opportunities in critical social domains to make consequential life choices with far-reaching ramifications that demand prudence and foresight. People will lose chances to test themselves, to discover their natural dispositions and interests, to discern what matters to them, and to exercise their choice to pursue it. A principal source of opportunities in society for developing perseverance, motivation, one’s will, will be lost. If work is going to be primarily automated, a new medium of opportunities needs to replace it. Work as a social institution needs to progress and preserve avenues for people to grow and develop.
The twentieth-century liberal philosopher John Dewey writes, “Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations.” Social environments like education and work provide mediums by which demands are made to stimulate particular capacities and functions needed to fulfill the tasks that define the activities involved. It is often argued that automation will free people from the bondage of tedious and mechanical work. They will be available to find new ways to give expression to their needs, and will have time to finally achieve what their work has always hindered. People will be free to realize their potential. But this doesn’t occur spontaneously. There need to be environments with activities that make demands on the faculties for actualizing a sense of true freedom, meaning, and purpose. One can be said to be free when one is totally alone in a room with no one to obstruct one’s movements and inclinations. Such a person can do whatever they please. But by having no situations that call forth appropriate responses susceptible to success and failure; by the absence of scenarios that require cooperation and coordination, which develop social and emotional aptitudes; and by not having to exercise intelligence and problem-solving skills, the person in the room withers rather than develops and becomes free. The person free-falling from the sky with nothing to save them is free in that nothing obstructs their fall. But they are also unfree because they are determined to hit the ground. As Franz Kafka wrote, “I am free and that is why I am lost.” And the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “Man is condemned to be free.”
The problem at hand, then, is carving out a space in which people can voluntarily enter and find opportunities to give expression to the capacities necessary for living a good life. Opportunities of this kind, ones that target and exercise people’s agency, will be called qualitatively rich (QR) opportunities, and environments that instantiate them are called qualitatively rich (QR) environments.
A QR environment that instantiates QR opportunities is open source ecosystems, and it should be the principal model for AI development, which provides the following framework: the market will be furnished with opportunities for people to exercise their agency and realize meaningful projects through challenging and stimulating work. People will have to learn new skills, overcome obstacles, but such a process is integral to not only preserving a market where people can compete, make choices, and develop their sense of agency but also one that promotes purpose and meaning in people’s lives. If the economy is going to close the door on older forms of work like assembly lines and service work, people should be given opportunities for more fulfilling work. As the economist Tyler Cowen pointed out on a Lex Fridman podcast, people need things to do. They do not want to just sit at home, as COVID lockdowns demonstrate. And if routine and unskilled labor is going to be automated, the only option is to ensure QR opportunities exist to take advantage of and exercise people’s capabilities for meaningful work.
So a new paradigm should be introduced into the economy. Pulling from Pekka Himanen’s book The Hacker Ethic, the common paradigm people work within should shift from an industrial-based paradigm, where people most often work routine tasks for the purposes of income to subsist and survive, to a hacker paradigm centering around work found to be intrinsically valuable, interesting, stimulating, creative, and characterized by passion and play rather than a social obligation to fulfill one’s duty to work and contribute to the economy, as articulated in Max Weber’s book Capitalism and The Protestant Ethic. A hacker paradigm emphasises human agency and its potential for realizing value that uplifts human beings. An industrial paradigm creates a distance between the worker and their need for active engagement with the world: workers are disinterested in the work they contribute; people often dislike or even hate their jobs. They are there for an income and not to participate in meaningful work. As Himanen writes, “reforming the forms of work is a matter not only of respecting the workers but of respecting human beings as human beings. Hackers do not subscribe to the adage ‘time is money’ but rather to the adage ‘it’s my life.’” And as Eric Steven Raymond says in his How To Become A Hacker, hackers see the world as filled with fascinating problems and find freedom in devoting themselves to solving them. They seek out projects that require motivation and passion, and they believe the world is infinitely better when other people have the same opportunities to attain the same freedom, which requires social cooperation and access to as much information as possible. Hence the significance of open source.
To highlight why a new paradigm is crucial for addressing AI and historically significant, we can turn to Adam Smith. After that, the concepts of QR environments and opportunities will be further elucidated and then applied to AI monopolies, which center around proprietary technology. There, it will be seen that their existence will stifle the hacker paradigm and so be undesirable.
We’ll see with Adam Smith that, while industrialization greatly improved standards of living over time, it also negatively affected those subjected to rote and routine tasks by minimizing cognitive stimulation for full human development. The division of labor exponentially increased specialization and reduced exposure to opportunities that exercised people’s higher faculties for meaningful, purposeful, and fulfilling work. AI and automation serve as a catalyst for closing the door on industrialization and the older modes of work and production by tasking intelligent machines to do the work once done by human capital. If AI is a leap toward progress, i.e., human progress, it should resolve Adam Smith’s concern regarding the division of labor and its effects on human life.
Part 2
Section 2.1
Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Influenced by Isaac Newton, Smith wanted to understand the design behind society, the mechanisms that allow it to function, similar to how Newton discovered and formulated physical laws that explain the universe in mechanical terms. The model of the time was to see phenomena as being organized and ordered like a finely tuned watch, with all its parts and machinery working together in perfect harmony, which produces all sorts of effects and emergent phenomena.
At the time when Smith lived, the first Industrial Revolution was underway in England. Cities expanded, goods and services once available to the well-off became cheaper and more accessible, living standards rose, infrastructure advanced, and, by all appearances, people lived better lives than ever before. Smith observed that society was progressing. And because of the Age of Discovery and the technology that allowed Europeans to travel to new continents, where contact was made with with peoples who seemed not to have entered into what Europe was experiencing, and who the Europeans thought were ‘uncivilized’, the ethos on the continent was that history and civilization was entering a new, more advanced stage. The productivity and efficiency achieved by innovation derived from scientific inquiry and knowledge allowed social systems to become more complex in their organization. Smith wanted to know the causal mechanisms that drove this momentum forward.
Smith observed and believed that the division of labor played a major, if not fundamental, role. As social organization grew and manufacturing and production processes were divided into more specialized tasks, the outputs of those processes boomed as a consequence. The old guild framework, where craftsmen dedicated their lives to a whole trade, learning every aspect required and mastering each part, was outcompeted by the firms in the growing cities with plants systematized according to the division of labor. A vast system of individuals emerged that required immense coordination, and the division of labor organized the whole into an intricate mechanism with the design to harmonize people’s interests.
Smith also believed that the division of labor reflected something deeper about human nature. People flocked to cities to earn wages for work and enjoy better living conditions because human beings, Smith thought, have a propensity to truck, barter, and trade. He writes, “The propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another, is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals." Animals like wolves naturally arrange themselves in hierarchical packs, fledgling birds are disposed to take flight, and organisms like trees compete for sunlight in dense forests. Human beings, on the other hand, truck, barter, and exchange because they have a natural disposition to better their condition. The division of labor furthered this goal.
According to Smith, though, the division of labor was a trade off - it also had a price. Although people’s living standards rose and they enjoyed better conditions that enabled them to satisfy their consumptive needs, like access to food, water, and shelter, the division of labor reduced workers to cogs in a machine. The tasks to be done required little to no cognitive effort. Once the task was routinized and became muscle memory, there were no further obstacles or problems to be challenged by. And so Smith was deeply concerned that this would have profoundly negative cognitive effects over time. People show up to work, and as long as they’re acquainted with their tasks, they do not have to think; they act mechanically. Bluntly, Smith writes,
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are continually before him, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become."
The division of labor provided qualitatively poor opportunities for making people capable of living meaningful and purposeful lives. To borrow a term from another Enlightenment period philosopher, Immanuel Kant, the division of labor did not respect people’s dignity, which requires targeting and fostering the faculties necessary for living a life of one’s own choosing. To have dignity is to have influence and efficacy over one’s life.
The division of labor created more opportunities for higher living standards, but it did not provide QR opportunities for people to integrate their capacities and become capable of realizing a full human life. The opportunities available to most did not challenge people to focus their creative and productive capabilities toward ends that expand their sense of freedom in the world. Compared to the guild system, the division of labor provided far more opportunities, but they were also more shallow, less capable of producing experiences of mastery. But because living standards were superior, people wagered correctly to take jobs that reduced them to cogs. But, as Smith observed, raising living standards was insufficient to fulfill the full breadth of human needs. It did not allow most individuals to exercise their higher faculties.
Smith believed improvements were necessary. More qualitatively rich opportunities are vital for people to live more meaningful and purposeful lives characterized by human dignity, which provide a basis for exercising their agency. The division of labor proffered a gain in material freedom but did not provide many opportunities to realize a more internal, agent-driven freedom.
This was, of course, one of Karl Marx’s great criticisms of capitalism. Under a capitalist regime, people are alienated from their labor. To be alienated from one’s labor is to be divorced from one’s activities; it is to have a distance between oneself and one’s active capacities for creation and production. In his book on Marx, the psychologist Eric Fromm wrote that, “for Marx the process of alienation is expressed in work and in the division of labor. Work is for him the active relatedness of man to nature, the creation of a new world, including the creation of man himself… But as private property and the division of labor develop, labor loses its character of being an expression of man’s powers; labor and its products assume an existence separate from man, his will and his planning.”
Human beings grasp and create their identities through the activities they engage in and expend their inner forces and drives on. By creating and shaping the world and its environments, by focusing one’s energies toward external projects and goals, a human being realizes a sense of self in the world. Activity, not passive consumption or tasks, defines the essence of human beings for Marx. As Fromm observes in his book, To Have or To Be, it is by being, not having, that one experiences meaning and purpose in life. It is by being in love, being passionate, being active, being hopeful, being intentional, being productive that one lives a fulfilling life, and not necessarily by having any of those things. The division of labor emphasises having, and the work and activities that characterize many of its parts do not develop a sense of being. To quote the German poet Goethe, a human strives to be by “translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality.” Human beings strive to become a self through externalizing what they value and envision internally, which is achieved through activity. Fromm writes, “man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers… In this productive process, man realizes his own essence.” The division of labor reduces human beings’ sense of agency, their capacity to actively influence and direct their lives in meaningful ways that they themselves value and choose and exercise their will over.
By creating QR environments, the hacker paradigm and its promotion of open source provides a range of QR opportunities that make progress in our social and political arrangements. It has the potential to realize the more active aspect of human nature, its sense of agency, and not merely its passive and consumptive parts. The principal assumption here is that if AI is going to develop and be integrated into the foundations of the economy, it should make people better off. More specifically, if automation is going to occur, the results should improve people’s lives, not harm them. One way to achieve this is by ensuring a sufficient distribution of QR opportunities for everyone to take advantage of, which open source helps provide. A major reason why people could be worse off from AI development, and why their potential opportunities may be stifled, is the existence of monopolies that use proprietary models to control AI and dominate its use in the market. The hacker paradigm and open source are a way around these outcomes.
Section 2.2
Before understanding how monopolies reduce QR opportunities, we need to understand further what QR opportunities are and what capabilities they stimulate and help develop. After explaining what sort of opportunities they are and what they mean, we’ll examine how monopolies greatly reduce their accessibility and what that entails.
The motivation behind QR opportunities comes from Aristotle, and more specifically from the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and economist Amartya Sen. Aristotle thought that there are particular functions or ways human beings must achieve to flourish and live a fulfilling, dignified life. He thought there is such a thing as human nature, and that that nature has basic and higher order needs. Independent of historical and contingent conditions, human beings have fundamental features. Such features are historically situated, of course, but essential consistencies can be observed across all cultures and civilizations. Aristotle said, “’the good’ is that at which all things aim.” ‘The good’ is a thing’s proper functioning, and so the good of the eye is to see, for example, and the seed’s good is to grow into a tree. To achieve a thing’s proper functioning is to flourish. It is to reach the state at which a thing aims and strives for. To reach such a state is to attain something intrinsically valuable.
Functioning as a human being requires basic necessities like food, water, shelter, and mobility. But these goods are not valuable in themselves; they’re valuable because they enable human beings to function for further, more valuable goods. If a human being is only provided these basic necessities, they may be said to function but not necessarily function well. Other, more intrinsically valuable goods must be obtained for a human being to function well. Human beings need education and access to information to develop their cognitive faculties; they need families and close relationships to develop social skills, a personal identity, and the ability to process their emotions; and they need outlets to exercise their will, discover their interests, experience passionate pursuits, and cultivate a sense of purpose. A good political and social arrangement, the one to be desired and pursued, provides concrete opportunities for people to exercise themselves and become capable of realizing these needs to achieve good functioning as a human being. QR opportunities are the opportunities that provide a basis by which human beings can develop intrinsically valuable goods like the ability to make informed decisions, formulate worthwhile goals and the means to achieve them, and forge meaningful and impactful relationships. Social institutions like work, education, community, and the arts, which stimulate the capacities involved in attaining these ends, are qualitatively rich environments.
QR opportunities are the opportunities that make people capable of developing their agency. Borrowing from the Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, we can think of human agency as the capabilities that allow persons to feel they have control and influence over their lives. More specifically, QR opportunities stimulate behaviors that target a person’s capabilities for self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person's perceived confidence when confronted by challenges and obstacles. When confronted with a difficult and novel task, someone with a high degree of belief in his or her self-efficacy will evaluate themselves as being capable of finishing the task despite adversity; they will have the motivation to persevere and persist in the face of potential and real failures; and they will maintain positive well-being while being burdened with figuring out something unfamiliar and new. QR opportunities target the capacities necessary for promoting self-efficacy and the competencies a particular situation demands. And by developing and becoming capable of these things, by being presented with opportunities to exercise one’s agency to gain mastery, one expands his or her sense of freedom. And “the stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the higher the goal challenges people set for themselves and the firmer their commitment to them” (Bandura, 1994). And so by raising one’s self-efficacy, both in belief and actual practice, a higher sense of freedom is achieved, and a qualitatively richer life is realized.
Work is critical in developing people's identities and sense of self. It provides opportunities for people to try out various career paths and discover what goals they wish to attain in life. It’s often a way for building professional and personal relationships and entering into different social networks, and it’s a medium by which people can gain competencies and navigate the social ladder. Work is a domain where people can foster motivation, intelligence, and the attitudes they bear through various environments and situations. In other words, work furnishes opportunities for people to become capable of functions or ways of being essential to living a good life.
For example, imagine a young adult entering the labor market for the first time. They try out a few jobs. They learn they don’t really like retail because they’re constantly dealing with customers. They try delivery services and learn they don’t enjoy the routineness. Finally, they get a job on a construction site and find some tasks interesting and stimulating. They like the aspect of working with their hands, and so they join the trades. The person goes to trade school, builds important relationships, is challenged by the new environment, is called to build their skills and gain more knowledge and experience, and, over time, develops and overcomes new challenges and obstacles. After graduating, they take advantage of an opportunity offered by one of the instructors who liked their work ethic and gave them a lot of attention and support. Eventually, after working for some time, the person has learned enough and gained enough belief in themselves to start their own company, and so sets out to achieve this goal. They build customer relationships, specialize in skills that set them apart from the competition, and eventually build a successful business.
A bit idealistic, but it is familiar and realistic. It illustrates a life lived with purpose forged through opportunities found in environments and situations that offer experiences capable of producing a sense of agency and self-worth. There are a gamut of other conditions generally necessary for this picture to obtain - like growing up in a nurturing environment and having the resources and time to pursue what one is interested in - but work, especially in the US, is central for furnishing opportunities to develop critical functions constitutive of a good life. The person described above navigated their social environment by learning new skills, overcoming challenges, and making choices that led to success and achievement. They formed new goals as they grew in their field and gained enough self-efficacy to believe they could reach them. A full range of capacities was cultivated, and a sense of dignity was achieved. Whatever other good things may have happened or will happen in this person’s life, the quality of their life would have been substantially diminished without the opportunities to work and grow.
Here’s a real life example, although the person will remain anonymous. After graduating from University in Holland and not wanting to get a normal job, he began traveling to other countries. He made enough money from YouTube making music and stayed in hotels and hostels wherever he went. But as the money dwindled and feelings of detachment and isolation began to rise, he became depressed. He was absolutely free; he could go anywhere and see whatever he wished, yet he was utterly alone. Alone in Asia in a hostel looking at the ceiling with no money, girlfriend, or job, he recalled something his dad told him: “He taught me when I was young that whenever I’m depressed or something to get a big mountain of sand, get a shovel, and bring it from one side of the yard to the other… Just do physical labor, do hard work - do something. I do that with startups, too.” So he began coding more, building software and applications, and releasing them to the public using Stripe for funding. He focused on activities that gave him a sense of direction and an opportunity to express himself creatively. In true hacker spirit, he saw the world as filled with fascinating problems to be solved, saw some as tractable and worthwhile, and he tried to fix them. Astonishingly, he set out to make twelve startups in twelve months - and did it.
This person felt alienated and alone and without a sense of purpose. And so he acted and devoted himself to creative expression using basic software languages and tools. By utilizing AI, too, he was better able to create more value and utility for people to consume and use for themselves. And by following his dad’s advice, by setting himself to action, his depression and anxiety subsided. He found qualitatively rich opportunities to develop himself and grow his sense of self-efficacy and ability by having information-rich environments available. He hung more and more challenging and stimulating goals above him and continually reached to achieve them. And open source tech stacks were integral to the process.
This is, of course, what is so significant about the Dora ecosystem. Through platforms like DoraHacks.io, people like the one just described are enabled through QR opportunities to collaborate with anyone across the globe to innovate and create meaningful solutions to problems people find pressing and relevant. Environments are provided for developers to have the resources to join a “BUIDL” team anywhere in the world and solve fascinating problems, feel a sense of community in hackathons amongst other builders, and be incentivized to accomplish meaningful goals that can ramify into further, more challenging and stimulating ones. The Dora ecosystem furnishes an environment with possibilities to create decentralized goods and services that, for example, place ownership into people’s hands and give them more digital autonomy, security, and control of their financial assets. As will be discussed below, large corporations and monopolies are not readily benefited by these sorts of technology. And so what reason do they have to fund them? Open source tech stacks can increase the quality of value by supplying avenues to build more meaningful products than would be the case with large, more narrowly focused entities.
So, if automation has the potential to reduce or eliminate QR opportunities to exercise one’s agency and gain self-efficacy, the space it opens should be filled with other opportunities that are, ideally, qualitatively richer than the previous ones available. If there is such a thing as human nature, and that nature is comprised of capacities that need development to enable human beings to live a dignified life, the best and most desirable political and social arrangement distributes QR opportunities to ensure people have the choice to exercise their capacities and be capable of functioning and flourishing in life. To supply qualitatively rich opportunities for people to take advantage of and use to orchestrate, conduct, and focus their inner forces and powers toward endeavors that target and stimulate one’s capacities is to provide a basis for people to live more fulfilling lives. It is to provide people the freedom to be and become what they value.
The next section will turn to AI monopolies and show why they stifle future opportunities like the ones described above.
Part 3
Section 3.1
Potential monopolies in AI are the obvious players: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. These companies and a few others accounted for sixty-five percent of fixed network traffic and sixty-eight percent of mobile network traffic in 2024. Google accounts for roughly ninety percent of searches and the companies name is synonymous with the act of searching itself; Meta owns the majority of social media networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp, some of the most heavily trafficked platforms by which people communicate and share information; Microsoft owns roughly seventy-two percent of the desktop market; in the US, Apple owns estimates of about sixty percent of the smartphone market; and Amazon dominates online retail by being “larger than the next 15 largest US e-commerce retailers combined.” Google, Meta, and Amazon combined accounted for around sixty percent of ad revenues in the US. The products we encounter online, the slick ads, the attention bought and sold, are mostly fueled by a few large tech companies. According to research done by Synergy Research, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon could own up to two-thirds of global data by the end of this decade. These companies also own most of the cloud infrastructure, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (and Alibaba) accounting for sixty-seven percent of cloud ownership.
These companies have enormous resources. They also have a long track record of squeezing out competition through mergers and acquisitions, using their dominance to advertise their products over competitors’, engaging in predatory pricing, exploiting network effects, and other infamous tactics. For example, given Amazon’s market dominance in e-commerce, by prioritizing its products over other companies - who may be supplying the better product - consumers readily purchase Amazon’s, especially if the price is lower, which Amazon has ample resources for. In terms of network effects, “at present, most Big Tech boast billions of users,” creating insuperable obstacles for startups and small firms. And Google has been repeatedly accused of demoting content and promoting what better serves its interests.
Now these companies are fervently seeking to control AI development. “Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are expecting to spend a cumulative $325 billion in capital expenditure and investments in 2025… Taken together, this marks a forty-six percent increase from the roughly $223 billion those companies reported in 2024.” And “with vanishingly few exceptions, every startup, new entrant, and even AI research lab is dependent on these firms. All rely on the computing infrastructure of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to train their systems, and on those same firms’ vast consumer market reach to deploy and sell their AI products.” Big Tech has all the talent, data, and compute small companies depend on.
Incumbents are developing models to maintain their foothold in their respective markets. And by having the majority of resources - e.g., “these companies contribute to more than 22% of the market capitalization of S&P 500 companies, and their individual size exceeds the GDP of even some G7 countries such as Canada and Italy” - they easily squeeze out competition on a whim and prevent startups and smaller firms from competing. And, as mentioned, with DeepSeek making strides in the global market as a competitor, the emerging arms race and claims about the threat of China and AI’s potential for harm are being trumpeted by the largest AI companies who seek regulation and restrictions on development, likely benefiting them most. And because monopolies are characterized by proprietary models, whose architecture, weights, learning algorithms, code, and embedded goals are veiled from the public, these companies' economic and market dominance will mysteriously shape how and what people think and do as AI pervades information networks.
What about regulation, then? A recent MIT Tech Review article writes, “regulation could help, but government policy often winds up entrenching, rather than mitigating, the power of these companies as they leverage their access to money and their political clout.” And Alex Rampell recently wrote, “Biden issued an executive order which sought to constrain compute under an arbitrary threshold, bar open source as an alleged threat to national security, and effectively allow regulatory capture by the biggest players.” For instance, although Sam Altman denied it on a Free Press podcast with Barry Weiss, Mark Andreessen has repeatedly warned that Biden’s AI executive order was intended to place control of AI in the hands of a few companies (most presumably OpenAI) and eliminate any competition in the market by raising the barrier of entry high enough to exclude competitors. Furthermore, though controversial and perhaps naive, ever since DeepSeek’s V1 and V3 models were released, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has continually called for more export control policy to further restrict China’s inflow of chips. But, as pointed out on the Lex Fridman podcast with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert, DeepSeek’s open source model doesn’t obviously pose any serious national security threat. It is certainly though a threat to proprietary ecosystems who control the potential value created by their models. DeepSeek’s approach puts pressure on proprietary capital to become commodities that can be utilized by anyone interested in contributing and building on top of the ecosystem. And so, Amodei’s insistence on the dichotomy between a unipolar versus a bipolar world has competing motivations. Either AI is concentrated in the hands of the US, or both China and the US have mutual AI capabilities, and the latter, Amodei thinks, must be avoided.
Perhaps, then, the auspicious attitude is to be less hawkish. The economist Tyler Cowen provides good reason to think it may be better to cooperate toward mutual benefit and collaboration rather than enter a full-on arms race. There should be competition, of course, but the competitive attitude driving the events to come should be motivated less by a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality, and be driven more by what Nietzsche observed in the Greek Agon, a social institution where Greek artists, military leaders, and athletes mutually reinforced one another through contests. A competitor is lost without competition because there are no more opportunities to improve, to be better, to innovate and be creative. The competitor mutually depends on someone willing to resist them. The Greek poet can imagine further and master their poetic expression better because someone else challenged them to do it. The great danger facing the Greek contestant, Nietzsche says, is not potential loss or failure but the absence of another competitor. Nietzsche wrote, “That is the crux of the Hellenic idea of contest: it detests autocracy and fears its dangers, it craves as protection against the genius - a second genius.” Rather than conceive of competition as survival within a state of nature, where scare resources and competitors make life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; rather than see competitive instincts as remnants of a primitive nature, bent toward eradicating a threat, we should think of them as capable of being noble and as “the fruitful soil from which alone all humanity can grow in emotions, deeds, and works.” Competitive instincts have their virtues, too, and they should be cultivated to perform “at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reasons” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II) and not treated as a necessary evil. Amodei fears China, and perhaps that’s the correct response. But it also may be incorrect in that the better response, the more virtuous one, is to want to outperform them, which demands contestants.
Section 3.2
Let’s now zoom-in on why these potential AI monopolies will stifle a wider distribution of QR opportunities by dominating AI ecosystems. There are at least two reasons why this is the case. The first reason relates to economic agency, while the second relates to value agency. Economic agency means people’s capabilities to enter the market and create value and utility that satisfies consumers’ wants and needs. By consolidating the AI models available in the market into a few hands, emerging firms and entrepreneurs’ opportunities to make valuable contributions to the world will be restricted. Innovation capable of addressing needs relating to democracy, healthcare, financial autonomy, political rights and liberties, or any other serious and meaningful category could be substantially reduced, thereby also reducing the potential good produced by AI. Any good or service that threatens the control, influence, or wealth of one the few AI monopolies will be excluded from entering the market by fiat and not by the natural forces of the market and what consumers actually want and need.
Value agency, on the other hand, refers to people’s ability to influence and have a say over the ends that characterize society. This will be reduced by AI learning and being trained according to values and ends that are not transparent nor subject to the public and the diverse interests that comprise it. People will have less influence and control if proprietary models determine all or most of the available goods and services that implement AI. For example, the alignment problem aims at aligning AI with human interests. Well, what are the interests of human beings? What are the ends that characterize a good and desirable society? What are the moral and ethical parameters that should guide AI’s operations? And should such values be dictated by a few companies without having to disclose the training data and learning algorithms? and without being subject to public scrutiny and influence? If tech stacks are closed from public observation and scrutiny, these questions will more often be answered by authority rather than through democratic procedure.
A loss in both economic and value agency is bad, and the rest of the article will explain why.
Section 3.3: Economic Agency
As the Austrian economists Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayak famously observed, part of what was devastating about socialism in cases like the Soviet Union was its inability to rationally allocate resources through a naturally occurring market mechanism. It was left to central planners within the state to determine what people wanted and needed - people with scarce, biased, and inaccurate informational resources to ensure accurate allocation - and so many bureaucratic and coercive measures were implemented to distribute state resources.
For example, the state had to set prices. In at least the older forms of socialism, no widely available free market subjected available goods and services to forces like supply and demand. Producers produce goods by state fiat, not by determinations related to market incentives like competition, which, ideally, coordinate production and consumption and create equilibrium. In other words, prices lack critical information that signals where resources need to be allocated. Hayak wrote in The Road to Serfdom that “any attempt to control prices or quantities of particular commodities deprives competition of its power of bringing about an effective co-ordination of individual efforts, because price changes then cease to register all the relevant changes in circumstances and no longer provide a reliable guide for the individual's actions.”
More significant for the purposes of this article, though, is that state-controlled production and central planning in the economy also restrict people by potentially prohibiting them from entering the market and creating value for people to better their lives. Anything that threatens state power, undermines its legitimacy and influence, or takes away a portion of its power is precluded from entering the market. For example, say someone observes that people living in rural areas in a particular country are having difficulty participating in state elections because they do not have access to transportation due to the surrounding area being subject to constant floods, making it difficult to build roads. Imagine, then, that the person creates a special concrete immune from the floods' corrosive effects and wishes to construct roads in the rural areas to provide better access to participate in elections. However, when he meets with the state transportation committee, they deny permission. They refuse to allocate resources for constructing roads enabling people to participate in public affairs. Why? Because the rural demographic is known to be against the state ideology (say they wish to have ownership over agricultural production). And so the state has no interest in providing the rural residents access to elections. With no competition, there are no other opportunities to build them.
Monopolies, especially when secured by a regulatory infrastructure, pose a similar danger. Another famous criticism made by Marx was that capitalism incrementally and inexorably, through its basic logic as a social system, led to the consolidation of the means of production into a few hands. Many, including Hayak and Mises, believed this false and that properly functioning capitalism prevented that outcome. But if AI is monopolized, Marx’s prediction will be truer than it already is, whether that’s because it has to do with the laws of history or unforeseen circumstances. As Chris Dixon observes in his book Read, Write, Own, startups have historically found room in the market by incumbents having myopic lenses that prevent them from observing emerging products accumulating consumer attention. Caught up in their own enterprise, large firms miss the market trends and patterns, and startups, if lucky, gain enough momentum to compete. But if these same incumbents consolidate AI, they can use it to stifle the advantage startups and smaller firms exploit. Over time, monopolies will have impenetrable control over the market, and all industries will lead upstream to them, more so than they already do. The opportunity to innovate disruptive technology, which eludes experts and creates unforeseen value in the market, could be squeezed out.
Because AI has intelligence capabilities, it has immense potential as capital to create and produce amazing technologies capable of bettering people’s lives. But, because some ways it can benefit people most might not be amenable to government and large corporations' interests, the potential good could be tragically diminished. The most obvious case being people’s financial autonomy.
Just look at the case of Bitcoin. Satoshi’s intention in innovating bitcoin is to provide people with the ability to possess financial freedom by providing a scarce resource with an incredible store of value analogous to gold. It allows people in countries with horrible inflation and a valueless currency to accumulate globally transferable wealth. People can have ownership over a good that will not lose its value over time due to an increase in the money supply or a country’s rising deficit. Bitcoin can help people live more stable and secure lives by providing transparency, personal ownership, and the right incentives to ensure social cooperation without necessitating forced trust or beneficence.
Now, one would hope that those in authority would discover some way to incorporate the incredible value Satoshi contributed to the world. The expectation being not that Bitcoin would immediately replace fiat currency but rather that, because Bitcoin provides powerful solutions to potentially debilitating problems due to fiat, great effort would at least be made to integrate those solutions. One would think that those in power would find a way to incorporate blockchain and Bitcoin and its ability to strengthen people’s economic freedom. But, until recently, regulation around the technology has been slow and haphazard. Unclear and ambiguous policy during the Biden administration hindered and prevented more efficient and productive ways to utilize crypto’s value.
If AI is monopolized through regulatory frameworks, potential technology with powers to better people’s lives could easily be discarded. If they conflict with government or corporate interests, most will be prevented from acquiring use of proprietary models through licensing and patents, and smaller to medium firms will be bought out. Even though AI could revolutionize voting platforms and the systems by which people are elected; even though it could it enhance people’s liberties through better means for securing data or by creating better economic opportunities, the avenues for exploring these possibilities could be sealed off if they do not align with those who own the majority, if not all of, the AI tech stacks filling the market. If a potential AI technology threatens ad revenues by eliminating a problem certain industries exploit and are parasitic on, tech companies like Google and Meta will certainly stifle the project aiming to introduce the technology into the market.
One of the great landmarks of the Trump administration so far has been their new crypto policy, which repealed the previous administration’s executive order and aims to produce a regulatory framework that furthers the technology’s development. This is critical for other forms of innovation taking place in AI. With other resources besides traditional venture capital like tokenomics, startups can fund their projects and gain momentum.
In his book Zero to One, Peter Theil presents the case that startups are and should be looking to become monopolies. They need to corner a space in the market that excludes competitors by developing the proprietary technology that outcompetes and then precludes other competitors from entering that market. As Theil would say, this is crucial if companies don’t want to be losers. If they want to attract attention for funding, their approach needs to be one of establishing a monopoly. Through tokenomics, however, and other crypto-related measures, people have opportunities to create valuable technology that can conserve the open-source spirit. Collaboration and cooperation can be promoted while still deriving the funding necessary for growth.
Section 3.4: Value Agency
Economic agency is reduced, then, by shrinking the qualitatively rich opportunities to create value and utility to meet changing wants and needs in the market. If monopolized AI tech stacks dominate ecosystems, then even if someone observes a meaningful problem worth solving and formulates a powerful solution, it will be precluded if it does not align with the interests of large corporations. Economic pursuit and the value it generates should not depend on an authority willing to stomp out something that benefits the whole society and not necessarily itself. Now, how do AI monopolies also reduce QR opportunities for value agency?
If Ray Kurzweil’s singularity thesis and his predictions about the impacts it will have is true at all, if human beings are going to integrate with nonbiological intelligence and live in increasingly artificial environments, AI monopolies are not only undesirable but also dystopic. It invokes thoughts of images depicting techno overlords ruling over people who are either enslaved to produce the intelligent machinery or are consuming the fruits of the intelligence boom with optimal satisfaction and comfort. Some people will have to mine the minerals, and others will consume the abundance of goods and services it produces. But on the presumption that AI will accelerate to the point where intelligent robots can mine the minerals themselves with minimum human capital, everyone will eventually be consumers. “Over the next couple of decades”, Kurzeweil says, “virtually all routine physical and mental activities will be automated.” Only jobs that are social, creative, innovative, or unpredictable will be available for those with the skills and training to do them, and so most will be consumers. And with nanobots, virtual reality, nonbiological enhancement, and ubiquitous information, reality will shift into something like the philosopher Robert Nozick’s experience machine.
By applying some apparatus, whether it be through being hooked up to a simulation machine or immersion in an entirely digital and information-based environment like VR, people can experience anything they wish. Any sensation, feeling, thought, or experience will be readily available for anyone to consume at any time. Someone can experience the profound sensations and rewards of writing a great American novel, stand at trial in Athens and courageously denounce the Athenian juries like Socrates, heroically stand like Napoleon on a steep green hill and look down at one’s enemies before an impending war, or climb Mount Everest in simulated perseverance and see the world from its highest point. All that matters is that someone desires it and it will be available. The end in life is to consume, and the ethical life, the one worth striving toward, is a life devoted to internally located stimulation. The external world, the actual ways in which one is, one’s state of being, won’t matter as much. It will not make a difference whether someone is, in fact, courageous, compassionate, loving, just, pious, good, or bad. Interests will be harmonized through the consumption of artificial experience. In a solved world without concrete and necessary problems in need of solutions, actors are gratuitous. Only consuming is necessary.
What’s so pernicious about this scenario is that monopolies that produce the technology will have complete control over the algorithms that determine the information available to us. The way information will be presented will continually be through consumer-based environments. Ideally, people will be free to do what they wish and live as they see fit. But the way they ‘see’ the world, the way people conceive of reality, and the social context they’ve been thrown into will be filtered by companies who have consolidated intelligent capital and become the few and only producers of the goods and services constitutive of daily life in the future. The philosopher Allan Bloom writes in his book The Closing of the American Mind that “every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs the curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being.” AI monopolies will shape what it means to be human by transmuting human environments to fit their interests. Opportunities to exercise agency, to realize a true sense of self-efficacy, to discover what one values and wants in life, the goals striven for that make reality coherent, livable, and unified in experience, will be greatly influenced and under the sway of corporate interests, which are, by their nature, geared toward economic growth and profits.
In Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent, they argue that US media is a propoganda tool, not an objective source of information (which, while controversial then, is now popular opinion), and that the propoganda functions according to a model consisting of filters that take information as inputs and perfectly manufacture the outputs for public ‘good’. Some media filters are the same ones Big Tech uses today. The first is media companies' size, ownership, and profit orientation. This can make the investment and entry costs to enter the media market astronomical, making it arduous, if not impossible, for others to compete. The legal system is employed to enforce standards that stifle startups and small firms, and government subsidies help the media companies most aligned with government interests. The second filter is ad revenues that bolster some companies over others by increasing their profits with ads in addition to sales. Media sources unable to garner ad support lose out. The few with financial resources who win fight for advertisers' “patronage” and are subject to the shareholders who demand a steady increase of profits subsequent to the wealth increase. This means anyone questioning corporate interests will be punished through revenue loss and eventual removal from market competition.
These two filters are the same ones Big Tech uses on their platforms. They dominate the market and depend on ad revenues for soaring profits. And like another filter Chomsky and Herman pointed out, Big Tech also has its ideological bias. Like the media of the ’80s that would cover genocide and murder when occurring in an enemy communist state but would look away when happening in US “spheres of influence” like in Latin America, big tech will follow ideological lines when it is financially and economically expedient. Because of their large profit models and motives, Big Tech interests do not necessarily align with truth, courage, accuracy, honesty, right and wrong, good or bad. That only occurs when there is a profitable, utility-maximizing benefit. And so if AI monopolies gain traction and flood the market with goods and services inexorably linked to their best models, people’s perceptions, the way they see the world, and what features of it are most salient, will be guided by principles contained within the apparatus used by big tech to filter information in ways that produce tech-promoting outputs. Opportunities to develop oneself and one’s perspective, the values that organize and unify one’s outlook, will be subject to tech’s information filters.
It’s easy to imagine a world where information is generated by a concentrated set of models that distribute a network of reference points that reinforce inaccurate, dishonest, and (or) fabricated information structures. Headlines and news stories issuing false claims and misrepresentations of the world could be supported by other sources of false information that mutually supports the claims being made. Information structures, the ways in which information is organized and given meaning, could be curated to fit a set of desired ends held by those in power and who control the resources to propagate information. Whatever seems best to a few will be privileged, and what the general population thinks will be subsidiary and eventually will be manipulated to fit the interests of those in power. That’s not to impute any malicious intent on the part of any entity or person. It’s to highlight the inextricable dilemmas caused by the consolidation of the ability to generate information consumed by the society into a few hands.
This will inevitably result in something like Nozick’s experience machine mentioned above. People’s opportunities for becoming capable of leading lives that do not terminate in ends revolving around a consumer ethic will be shrunken and minimized, perhaps even precluded from possibility. It’s true that, on the assumption that most jobs will be automated and people will be able to have a sustainable basic income, people will be free from labor bondages and the obligation to work and contribute to a growing economy. A freedom from constraints and necessities will come about. But, again, if there is no medium by which to exercise freedom, if there are no real opportunities to take advantage of and apply one’s agency in concrete situations and experiences, then one is not truly free - free in a deeper, more positive sense. And the processes by which one determines how one wishes to live, the routes explored and searched through to discover projects worth laboring over, the goals derived and hung above to reach for and that are achieved through effort and play in stimulating and challenging environments, will be obsolete.
The philosopher John Dewey wrote,
We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others.
If the institutions making up society are formed by large corporations who innovate for the sake of boosting shareholder profits, which will be the case if they dominate AI because there models will penetrate every domain in the economy, the environments and what they stimulate will push toward ways of being that depend on having rather actual being. What will make something salient and worthwhile, what makes something magnetic, will not be the pursuit it requires, the sense of adventure it demands, and the process of growth it stimulates, but will derive its meaning from being able to fill and preoccupy time. What will be obvious and transparent to consciousness shaped by a consumer ethic will radically differ from one shaped by a society that cooperates to enable agency to find meaning and purpose through opportunity. The former will see the world filled with possible experiences that don’t mean anything past their immediate presentation and experience. The latter still experiences necessity and the irresistible push to feel that things still demand action in the world. Herman Melville wrote the following in his great American novel Moby Dick:
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
Hopefully, some fragment of the ethos that informed Melville’s expression will still exist in the future.
Section 3.5
In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche offers two possible images of human beings in the future: the Last Man and the Overman. The two have radically different instincts, desires, motives, drives. The world appears differently to both of them. Different parts of it are salient and meaningful to them. They have different conceptions of the good and of what is bad, and both have opposing values and beliefs about themselves and the world.
Nietzsche had contempt for the Last Man and aspired toward the Overman. The Last Man represents the comfortable, pleasure-seeking, and satisfied mode of life. It is the life of consumption and passive contentment. The herd of the Last Man “have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the last men, and blink thereby.” Such a being has cultivated the instincts for pleasure, comfort, satiation, and consumption, which Nietzsche often equated with a grazing cow. The Overman, on the other hand, was the one who preserves the instincts to create and produce something beyond themselves, something that reciprocates the value created by orienting life toward a distant and difficult goal that makes life dignified and meaningful. The Overman has maintained the drive to move through transformative experiences that evolve one’s state of being and conscious experience, which motivates the strong tendency to grasp and understand reality, which then makes an individual more capable of influencing it - one increasingly realizes his or her’s potential to shape and craft their experience through their activities and modes of being. The Last Man’s virtue, maximizing pleasure while minimizing discomfort, is the Overman’s vice.
AI monopolies and their profit-seeking models promote the Last Man, and open source promotes the Overman. By AI being consolidated into a few powerful hands and by flooding the market with goods and services filtered through these parameters, the information landscape and the networks propagated throughout it will be curated in ways that promote an ethics geared toward maximal satisfaction and comfort established through continual consumption. The opportunities and environments available will not be qualitatively rich. They will not foster the growth of one’s active capacities and will only make people capable of pursuing the ends characterizing a consumer society cranked to its optimal output.
Open source conserves a space where human agency can still find outlets for creativity and innovation whose sole aim is not profit-seeking. It will be to achieve activities that exercise one’s capacities for living a full human life.
Now, a question asked in the beginning was whether automation would bring a sufficient distribution of opportunities for displaced workers to find work. It can be seen now how the hacker paradigm and open source ecosystems brings that goal closer to hand. Theil’s book Zero to One is a kind of guidebook for entrepreneurship. And, as he says, the goal is to at least mimic, or, at best, become, a monopoly. The aim is to corner a market, exclude others from entering, and generate profits by exclusively supplying for a domain of previously unmet wants and needs. But the statistics for successful startups is disheartening. Ninety percent of startups fail. Within the class of successful ones, first time startup founders account for eighteen percent. And with less than one percent of startups receiving venture capital funding, and another less than one percent receiving angel investment, roughly seventy-five percent of startups rely on “credit card debt, business loans, and lines of credit” for financing. The odds of success are dismal, and what is required of those courageous enough to start a business - especially a technology driven one, which accounts for most start up failures - are often insurmountable. A major reason Theil promotes monopolistic behavior on the part of emerging firms is because it is often by having a large and secure enough foothold that companies can begin to breathe, stretch out, and innovate. And once a company has achieved the monopoly standard, they control the output of value in their particular (or an entire) market, which (ideally) mutually benefits the established firm and its consumers.
The ability to produce value for people to consume and improve their lives is then concentrated in the companies who find the rare opportunity to be successful. Once they have this power there is no self-interested reason to let it go. So, while a successful company in Theil’s sense will finally be able to create and innovate, in having this exclusive ability, they seal off others who have potential to also create something immensely valuable, given the opportunity.
It would certainly be more desirable if companies had better odds of success. But the traditional forms of funding and the grueling methods of being a successful startup either disincentivizes or stomps out those with powerful ideas capable of bettering people’s lives. The success of the hacker paradigm means providing ample opportunity for people to produce value while not necessarily taking on the treacherous risks of entrepreneurship. Part of what constitutes the north star of the hacker paradigm is to create an open, permissionless ecosystem, replete with abundant opportunities for people to take advantage of. It is to have access to critical technological information that can be used freely, enabling people to collaborate with established firms to create a better, more innovative product. Open ecosystems enable people to build value, while closed ones shut the door on others to enter and contribute.
On Theil’s model, the path of entrepreneurship is rocky. It demands a combination of sheer will, ingenuity, and, of course, luck. It is a rare occurrence for them to align and balance. And so few people find success in entrepreneurship. By reducing this barrier through a permissionless ecosystem, by mitigating the burden people bear in trying to create something valuable, something with the potential to resolve real problems in the world, an abundance of opportunities arise for people to take advantage of that do not require the ambition of one of the momentous Tech founders. The latter’s success far exceeded the desire to create innovative technology. An open source ecosystem democratizes opportunities for people to push technology forward without having to be a Steve Jobs or a Jeff Bezos. Innovation should be more collaborative, widely distributed, and in closer proximity to people’s reach. The hacker paradigm levels the playing field.
Perhaps not everyone will want to be a hacker. But open source provides the best prototypical model to preserve and scale a distribution of concrete opportunities for people to exercise their agency through. And by having these kinds of opportunities, people can still discover and experience the pull of feeling one must do something - that there exists a goal that constrains one into believing there is a calling that, if neglected, sacrifices meaning and purpose in life. It would be a shame to live in a world where what is most viable to people, what is most salient and attractive, is only ‘happiness’ in the sense that Nietzsche used above. A world where happiness does not mean great personal sacrifice, a virtuous sense of devotion, and a willingness to strive for something arduous and transformative, is a less desirable world than one where people are enabled through real opportunities to be capable of great achievements, if they choose to pursue them.
Final Word
When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Chess champion Garry Kasporov in 1997, chess wasn’t made obsolete. People continued to compete and get better. It didn’t matter that an AI program would, from then on, always be able to beat any human challenger. Those devoted to chess maintained the desire and motivation to enhance their craft, learn more sophisticated strategies, and outcompete other players as their skills developed. Chess players still desire to become better players for the sake of being better. Growth through will and dedication still provide them a sense of profound achievement when they reach a new level in their playing, even though a machine will forever be the superior player.
In a documentary about Lee Sedol losing to AlphaGo in 2016, someone said, “He improved through this machine. His humanness was expanded after playing this inanimate creation. And the hope is that that machine and in particular the technology behind it, could have the same effect with all of us.” And, "Maybe [AlphaGo] can show humans something we've never discovered. Maybe it's beautiful.” If used properly, AI can expand one’s abilities to affect and change the world. There can be opportunities to create rather than labor, experience meaning rather than detachment and isolation, and be free for something worthwhile rather than for nothing. But it requires social cooperation and environments that push people forward toward goals they can aspire to accomplish; it demands understanding competition differently.