Taxing Robots: A Naive Appreciation

First, I wish to make clear that any redistribution of wealth is in itself disruptive and polarizing. It is a brutal admission to the failure of a political economy to provide, at once, prosperity and the general welfare. Taxing robots is such a redistribution of wealth and such an admission of failure. This being said, such a tax or usage fee would manage disruption to the gain of the entire society and should be countenanced given the power and reach of smart machines. Realistically they could replace all but the most talented of us economically in the near future.
We have, since Joseph Schumpeter formally identified it, been in the business of the unprincipled business of managing disruption with a constant eye, and a shifting focus, to both prosperity and the general welfare. It is time, in that cycle, in the face of the enormous potential impact of robots and AI, to shift focus once again to the general welfare. How can this be done without destroying the market basis of material existence?
I see a bipartite process of shoring up the existing employment by mandating a Living Wage and, for all those employed by corporations, mandating affordable stock options for all employees and substantial severance packages including stock and stock options. Had these conditions been met thirty years ago, we would be much better off but still behind the curve of the catastrophic disruptive effect of smart machines. In view of this creative destruction tail wagging the dog of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, intervention, however unprincipled, is in order.
Secondly, I see room for the mandated issuing of licences to deploy Artificial Intelligence and robots with a significant licencing fee. Would this inhibit disruption? Yes. Does disruption need inhibition? Yes. Unless the cost/benefit of deploying new technology includes the cost of dislocation the accounting cannot hold. Vast economic disequilibrium will occur driving market irrationality. That market insanity is, without qualification, the failure of a capitalist political economy. It requires immediate redress, and, in a heuristic unprincipled fashion, prescriptive remedy to prevent such future events. This is an attempt at such remedy and while these remedies notoriously fail in a shower of unintended consequences, as noted by Adam Smith, the history of these attempts compose a narrative from which patterns can be analyzed and more successful remedies made. As in the old saying, Rome wasn't built in a day.
This licencing fee would be significant enough, but well within what the market will bear, to fund free tuition at  the post-secondary level and a subsistence basic income for those displaced even marginally by new technology. The fee has no basis in theory, is derivative of the injunction to provide for the general welfare, and is strictly a management technique in the measured adoption of innovation. It would provide until such time as stock ownership is common, dividends are given due regard, and wholly irrational market dynamics subside.
This suggestion is not made lightly. I believe that markets allocating resources to relevant talent provide the true basis for reasonable, humane social existence. When they do not provide that basis then that is a market failure and, in consequence, a social failure. We are at present flirting with social decay and facing social disintegration in the near future. This is no time for escapism or kneejerk views of the political economy. This is a time to reason and respond ahead of the curve of innovation.

Civilization and Its Bounds

Civilization is not an easy subject to ponder. Clearly there is an historically broken but intellectually continuous thread from Sumer to Greece to Rome and then to Byzantium. After that the canon passed to the Arabs who held it through the darkness along with the Byzantine monasteries. From the ruins and towers of Byzantium then rose the bourgeois phoenix, market driven, not quite civilized, like Christian Byzantium, but closer to the barbarian than they, which entrepreneur by entrepreneur, disruption by disruption, yet owns the planet.
If it be possible to characterize civilization as moral and intellectual agents conserving pattern and meaning from chaos then market economies are not quite civilized however effective they are at wealth building under specific social environments. The market conserves the pattern. Participants conserve the market. They do not curate the canon so much as engage in database exercises as technicians. This is not ancient civilization. It is civilization evolved and once removed. It is not the same thing.
Make no mistake. Market driven economies build wealth and concentrate wealth in order to build more wealth. That is all they do and they are without equal in doing it. Meaning, in a market economy, is a game and the score is kept in money. An arbitrageur, an entrepreneur, and a banker are moral agents in a closed system of behavior involving these major elements: due diligence, contract performance, and market discipline along with codified considerations of merchant law such as warranties of merchantability. The logical end of the process of wealth creation is the holder of the larger score, the capitalist, employing his cash as a market moral agent to increase the capability of the market economy to create wealth.
This is a closed system. It goes nowhere but to the bank with bags of money and it needs rational constraints to make it humane.
Realize, market morality and the civilized moral system are probably incommensurate. It is essential that market morality be contained in that larger moral structure as something separate, not inferior but different. We clearly need a model of society and business complementing whatever economic model arises from Big Data and AI and we do not have one and are not particularly discovering one. We are behaving into a theoretical vacuum which can result in nihilism and social decay. That is the dilemma we face.

Writing in the Moment: Some Views on Writing

"Thinking never hurt a novel."
First, the title describes an impossible situation. Writing is always done at a remove, 'Emotions recollected', as Wordsworth said, 'in tranquility.' However, being in the moment, engage' with the universe, is essential to the quality of the written experience. One cannot 'be' a writer and create legitimately. One can only 'be' a citizen of civilization, a civilizado, living in the 21st century, being in the moment and stepping back occasionally from the chaos of innovation to write.
It is important, in this postmodern age of diversity, to create, maintain, and write from, a psychological space of intellectual and emotional legitimacy. One cannot cast oneself adrift on this sea of innovation and disquiet and expect any result but pure escapism, which is a valuable commodity but a less than serious genre. A novel is an entertainment, created and evolved to divert, and it is well to keep in mind that there is such a thing as intellectual entertainment, such as chess or a good translation of Aristotle. Philosophy is incredibly entertaining to those so inclined and while we are all differently talented and differently placed in different psychological spaces, one cannot overemphasize the intellectual content of a work. It is important to say something. A tree gave its all for that book and I don't even want to talk about what goes into an ereader.

The Argument

As I have examined in earlier blogs, information overload, exceeding the brain's plasticity, induces individual insanity and collective chaos. Plasticity stress is a function of the speed and degree of innovation and individual contexts; paradigms, databases, and narratives. The only brake on the locomotive of 'progress' is cultural inhibition to the adoption of new technology.
Early adopters, who fall in the autistic stage of the brain plasticity range, have little cultural inhibition. The slowest to adopt, the schizophrenic stage of the brain plasticity range, are singularly culture bound. Our present method of working out the speed of adoption operationally, progress to social breakdown, is social suicide. It is dystopian.
We absolutely must manage innovation. As discussed earlier, the nature of the universe and the limits of human intelligence preclude any pretense of being 'real'. We all live in distorted realities of filter bubbles. Reality can no longer be an argument for progress. We are generally exceeding the plasticity of the human brain and must manage change. We must increase cultural inhibition to the deployment of new technology while increasing the range and complexity of our personal contexts in order to adequately integrate new technology in humane social schema, a process of some 20 to 40 years.
That is my postmodern mantra and my prescription for dealing with our present chaos.

Do well and be well.

Modern Innovation

Modern innovation begins arbitrarily with Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity. This, following on the heels of the Long Depression and a general increase in the capability and employment of machine tools, and preceding the Great War and a general collapse of civilization and its narratives, fueled a truly incomprehensible flood of innovation that became intense and socially pernicious after 1945.
The list of innovations introduced into society in the period, 1905 to 1945, is significant but the list of the period, post 1945, is mind boggling, atomic power, television, the integrated circuit and its transistors, the internet, robots, and, now, gadgets that are organized as the IoT, all of them pushing the limits of the human brain and culture and increasingly going beyond those limits into functional insanity and social chaos.
When an innovation is subject to inclusion into a culture that innovation is accomplished individual by individual. Yes, there are protocols for dealing with technology that are circulated among populations. These do not imply comprehension and they are temporary to task completion. They are a part of machine culture, not human culture. Social acculturation means integrating new ideas into neural networks so that behavior becomes meaningful. If one's behavior is a repertoire of such protocols, a machine culture, then one is a minion of the machines and the only meaning is the machine. That is intolerably inhumane. Thus, the eternal drive to comprehend, to integrate new ideas into a coherent brain mass.
With relativity and quantum mechanics and their esoteric and difficult concepts we find this drive, the drive to meaning, frustrated by the individual limits of the ability to understand, a function of talent and plasticity. Culture moves ahead, semper ad Lucem, incorporating new technology and ideas into humane behavioral systems but it moves slowly in filter bubbles and approximate realities. Compounding this are absolute theoretical limits of comprehension, the universe consists of scalar fields decaying into particles and scalar fields are unknowable, and the absolute limit of general comprehension, as Feynmann once said, nobody understands entropy.
Only with artificial intelligence and IoT gadgets do we see the possibility of a meaningful existence obtained within the comfort zone of the average human being, without performance enhancing drugs, without elitist exclusion. There is, at the logical terminus of technological development, more day to dawn, as Thoreau put it. We may be in sight of that dawn, the dawn of machines adjusting to human beings, the dawn of the truly humane society, but we still have to reach that point of technological development and acculturate it. We are not there yet.

Brain Plasticity and Innovation: A Model

Prerequisite to any examination of the consequences of innovation on human behavior is a working model of brain plasticity. I define this arbitrarily as the ratio of dendrite connectivity over pruning which, at one end of the spectrum, defines aspects of autism, hyperconnectivity, and at the other defines aspects of schizophrenia, excessive pruning according to recent genetic studies. This model excludes the formation of new neurons in adults, which does occur, for purposes of simplification and concentrates on the formation and destruction of dendrite connections in a phenomena of the constant rewiring of the brain, plasticity.
Armed with this model, a larger model of response to innovation becomes possible. Positing an aggregate learning curve to adopting a specific technology, there are five characteristic states to that adjustment in behavior. There is the prophet state, well ahead of the curve. There is the autistic state, ahead of the curve. There is the normal state, even with the aggregate curve. There is the laggard state, behind the curve, and there is the schizophrenic state, off the back of the curve. Please keep in mind that these are characterizations of brain plasticity, not value statements nor epithets.
This model implies aggregate states of efficient task performance in the deployment of new technology, the productivity curve, in which the five states occur as a specific population in relation to that curve as a function of brain plasticity.

To be continued.....

The Acculturation of Technology and Ideas

I am writing this, not in the role of scientist or scholar, but rather as that of a thinker exploring new concepts. My usage of 'acculturate' is nonstandard as the word is usually applied to interactions between different cultures but it is the perfect word for the inclusion of new technology and ideas into behavior and narrative and I could find no other suitable term. It is not a neologism, which I deplore, but it is a significantly different usage although describing similar dynamics.
Acculturation, in the sense that I am using it, has been studied. There are theories. The Theory of Diffusion being foremost. There are celebrated and brilliant books such as 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas S. Kuhn. There are historical and anthropological studies. What interests me however are the limits of acculturation such as the plasticity of the human brain.
Acculturation is a spectrum of behavioral accommodation to new technology and ideas distributed through a given population anchored by childhood exposure and living memory which is governed by brain plasticity, cultural inhibition, and context: database, paradigm, and narrative. There are, as Kuhn found, significant limits to significant change and these limits are in the range of generational transfer. Standards for one generation are fairly set for that generation's flourishing, some twenty to thirty years.
Increasing the rate of innovation pushes that dynamic and the human brain to and beyond their limits. The results are fairly chaotic.

To be continued....