Information, Ideation, Productivity, and Civilization

Civilization is no more than the attempt to remove humankind from the dismal swamp of Nature and its pathological vagaries in order to induce a common condition of sane cognition. Access to information drives civilization. Ideation drives and is driven by information. Productivity increases are driven by ideation and productivity drives material existence, the limit of the possible of civilization. They are all linked.
The quest of the intellectual exercise which is the central element of civilization is perfect information. Game performance and market performance, a related phenomenon, both improve with better information. Assuming perfect information makes Game Theory analysis possible and that describes the motivation for the evolution of civilization, iterative attempts to achieve perfect information in order to improve performance.
This has resulted in digitization of information. Today, we have digital platforms, Google, Amazon, providing access to digital libraries of databases and paradigms in the attempt to create an easily accessed Library of Civilization, all extant written works. In addition to this Database, there are online attempts to make paradigms accessible, MOOC's, a sort of University of Civilization. The net result of this is to realize the limits of the plasticity of the human brain and that is a driving factor in developing artificial intelligence analysis.
Central to the central element of civilization, the intellectual exercise, is ideation, the creation of ideas. There are three aspects to ideation: intellect, the talent of integrating new information into a coherent body of knowledge; intellectual curiosity, an appetite for information, a hunger for the next fact, the next insight; and access to information, as covered above. These aspects describe the process by which ideas are generated, the ideas which define our possibilities.
Productivity, which is the measure of the efficiency of Labor, describes the process, in Western Civilization, under the tenets of Classical Liberal economics, by which ideas are reified into product and process to the end of the greatest good for the greatest number by which we mean Utility.
By simple logic, the greater the productivity of Labor, the greater the Utility of that economy, to which end we have engaged in a vast program of Research and Development and entrepreneurship. We are are now in a position to judge the consequences of such an exercise. They are:
1. The marginalization of Labor as a production input.
2. As Labor becomes more and more inconsequential to the cost of production, markets, which primarily set the price of Labor in Classical Liberal economics, move into focus as bazaars of arbitrage, a significantly different role.
3. Money, which value is tied to the cost of Labor in Classical Liberal economics, becomes of indeterminate value in such conditions and must seek definition elsewhere.
As this exercise in productivity proceeds we are approaching the point of self-reproducing automata, the mathematical model of which was developed by John von Neumann, which undercuts the assumptions of Classical Liberal economics by making the productivity of Labor approach infinity.
I do not know what economic analysis will replace Classical Liberal economics but I suspect it will include AI as an essential element.
Do Well and Be Well.