Emergent Economics and the Knowing Web
A viable and humane economy and web
Photo by bertvthul via Pixabay
Our Situation is Dire
by Daniel T Mearns
The world feels wrong, and it’s getting worse. For the last few decades, we have lived in a state of constant urgency, alertness, and fear. Those who have grown up with the Web are in the worst state of mental health of any generation in history, and it’s not their fault. It’s also not the fault of the generations that preceded them.
The fault lies squarely with the Web-attention economy. The Web by itself was never the issue. The problems arose when the Web was combined with our market-based economy’s goal to maximize profits by creating obsessions and addictions. The power of the Web economy and its devices to keep our attention, manipulate our beliefs, and create states of constant anxiety and vigilance on a global scale is completely new and unprecedented in human history.
The Web also makes it easier for us to exist with minimal connection to real people. The people we consider our Web friends and connections are either interactive AI bots, human predators, or carefully designed branded facades of real people. The Web has created an environment where many of us are uncomfortable with or even fear in-person contact.
Despite delusional beliefs that humans will adapt to all this, the reality of humanity is that we can not be healthy or thrive without daily in-person interactions with people, especially those we care most about. In-person human connection is critical to our well-being.
Our extraordinary abilities to create strong connections with each other and cooperate in highly complex ways are the core distinction between us and any other species we know. It’s the defining feature of being human, and we are killing it for profit.
We are even seeing our democracy fade away due to the Web severely degrading our ability to relate to each other and work out our differences. The Web has tremendous and virtually unchecked power to convince people that almost anything is absolutely true. A representative democracy depends on pluralism, open discourse, and serving the people. Power achieved and maintained by using the Web to manipulate people will always destroy democracy.
We took something that could have helped us be more humane and used it to manipulate, control, create division, and generate extreme personal wealth.
We have degraded relationships, connections, and community to a degree where women are now choosing to have children at rates too low to maintain population levels. In some areas in Asia, the rate of decline will halve their populations in one generation. This behavior has never happened before in recorded human history.
The choices people are making everywhere in the world suggest that the current system creates social environments and living conditions that encourage them to either avoid parenting or not inflict the world on their potential children.
We need fundamental changes to our current web-economic system. We also need to create living environments that are scaled and designed to foster the establishment and maintenance of strong in-person connections while still providing a sense of privacy.
We need to set our knowledge horizon on a global scale and focus our social attention locally. We must make our lives local and be unlimited in collaborative reach.
We must not only create a web that cannot be used to manipulate us, but we must also establish a humane economic system designed for a digital world. We can not solve our issues without addressing both.
Below is an introduction to a new web-economic system that potentially puts us on a path to resolving our current problems. We need ideas that directly address our situation if humanity is to survive in the long term.
The Knowing Web
Our current web-economic system’s inherent goal is for us to spend more and more of our attention, energy, and labor to create extreme wealth for the few. The web-driven economy benefits from weakening the bonds between us, making it easier to create obsessions and keep our focus on advertising and more consumption. The web and its devices have redirected us away from strong and cherished human connections, undermining our supportive social constructs that once held us together (Ref. pg., Impacts).
The manipulation of information and attention with the web has put humanity at a social and economic tipping point. We must work to put technology in the background and build a web of reliable information, enabling us to create usable knowledge, be more human and humane, and have meaningful and lasting connections with real people.
Emergent Economics
We need to find a way for humanity to continue progressing (e.g., in health, standards of living, education, technology, etc.) and live in relative harmony with one another and our environment without self-destructing.
The primary reason for the relative stagnation in the U.S. (e.g., in real household income, widening wealth gap, and shrinking middle class) is we have not taken the next steps to dramatically increase the level, scope, and breadth of economic-related collaboration and information sharing (Ref.pg., Impacts). The current system encourages information hoarding so individuals can leverage it to maximize its value, primarily to benefit the few. This approach prevents or inhibits others from using the same information to build or improve products or services.
Instead, we must make all economic information related to product and service innovations inherently accessible to everyone. In doing so, we must also ensure a given innovation’s contributors always receive fair and verified monetary compensation for their contributions each time they generate economic value.
Professor Neil Postman’s 7 Questions for Any Technology Idea
Please see the pages Proposal and Detailed Notes for full specifics on Emergent Economics and the Knowing Web and related topics to consider.
- Restricted access to economic information
- Unverifiable Information
- Information manipulation
- Abusive attention-based economy
- Obsession culture
- Addiction culture
- Lack of a learning culture
- Failed education system
- Mental health crisis
- Weakening of human relationships
- Degrading of society
- Economic participation gap
- Wealth gap
- Simply being wealthy creates more wealth
It’s everyone’s problem, but especially the less privileged.
Contributor Accountability
If the system is not defined and implemented well, there could be a greater incentive to make products as addictive as possible to generate the maximum fees. Therefore, it is imperative that when a product or service causes measurable harm to someone, the applicable contributors must automatically pay for the use of any products or services needed to resolve or mitigate the negative impacts. The Moderated Intelligent Digital Agents (MISDAs) will be able to determine negative impacts privately and identify when they are resolved.
Temptation to Solve Social Problems Using MISDAs
There will be great temptation to directly use MISDAs to solve issues like child abuse. MISDAs must be restricted to adding private information to the Knowing Web at the direction of an individual or information that is economically related. However, MISDAs could identify changes in behaviors that could result in the involvement of services designed to alleviate negative impacts.
For example, once children start attending school, they will receive a Personal Knowing Module containing a MISDA to track their use of education-related services and products for which their parent or guardian pays fees. The MISDAs will also allow them limited (in terms of frequency and scenarios) queries of the Knowing web for information restricted to their age group.
A MISDA could notice a persistent change in a child’s reactions to specific scenarios involving products or services. The MISDA will attempt to determine if a product or service caused the change, and they will flag the situation so that services can be provided privately to all parties involved to resolve any issues.
MISDAs must never allow access to any private information on the Knowing Web without the consent of those involved. Any legal implications of interventions can never be based on or include data from MISDAs. Their functionality must not be altered to gather evidence of illegal or unethical behavior. Legal actions related to non-economic activities must always be based solely on the findings of human investigations.
Measure Usage at Feature Level
The system may encourage contributors to add unnecessary features to an existing product or service. The personal AI digital agents must be able to identify which features were used and how much they contributed to the measured benefits.
Mixed Participation
There are many potential problems in a situation where significant numbers of people choose not to participate in Emergent Economics. People must not be forced to participate, but many safeguards or boundaries will be necessary in a mixed environment. Hopefully, the significant improvement in people’s lives by directly benefiting from their contributions will draw almost everyone to the new system.
Pure Research and Speculative Products
Pure research and speculative projects may not generate fees for an extended period. Contributors working on these efforts will require a strong foundation of existing fee income to support their development and research work.
Ethical Codes of Behavior
The new system will be more than new technologies and processes. Any economic system functions from a set of ideologies, ethical codes of behavior, and agreements. Some of these will be embedded into the digital agents. However, many will be societal agreements. There are significant risks that, even with an optimal initial state, degraded ethical codes could result in altering the system’s functionality to benefit the few.
People
Everyone will be significantly impacted by many changes they will experience. The most fundamental of these changes is that income will be generated by each person’s contributions to creating, implementing, and provisioning products and services.
Ownership
The concept of ownership will be replaced with possession. People will maintain possession of products if they use them at the minimum rate designated for each product. Each product will have embedded, unremovable electronic tags to manage possession and pay usage fees. There will be no incentive to forcibly take a product from someone else’s possession. The system will track that change and start charging the usage fees to the new possessor. The original possessor could easily have the authorities return the product.
However, people who choose not to participate in the system would have a great incentive to steal products if they could disable or block the electronic tags. People who consume perishable products could be the most vulnerable to such theft.
Dependency on Digital Content
The current levels of dependency and addiction to digital content and minimal in-person interactions will make the transition to Emergent Economics and the Knowing Web very difficult. Services will likely be needed to help people learn new social skills and alleviate possible anxiety. The new system will naturally encourage people to offer these services. Hopefully, these difficulties will be alleviated by the collaborative focus of the new system and the freedom from social media and its constant attention manipulation. We all will need to learn or relearn how to treat each other with kindness and accept our differences.
Inheritance and Transfers of Wealth
For the new system to be fair, it must not allow the transfer of wealth from one person to another. Each person must succeed based on their contributions to products and services. This change will be significant and difficult, although easier to accept since generating income in the new system will be fair, reliable, and consistent. Instead of set compensation, each of our contributions will automatically generate income every time they are used in a product or service. Failure to prohibit wealth transfer between people in Emergent Economics will cause the system to be corrupted, and conditions will become much worse for humanity.
Fixed Income
People who depend exclusively on income from investments may need to make significant changes to create income in the new system. The transition from the current system to Emergent Economics must ensure that each person’s wealth, derived from existing income-related assets and savings, is transferred to the new system. The transfer must ensure that retired people and everyone can maintain their lifestyle.
Less Privileged
People with little or no income or savings will need support, including significant training and high-quality housing. The transition to the new systems must include a one-time minimum savings transfer to ensure people can pay for products and services until they start receiving fee income. All housing must become highly efficient and environmentally neutral to build and deconstruct. Emergent Economics will encourage low-cost building techniques and housing that generates higher satisfaction from people.
The transition to Emergent Economics must include a period where contributions will be measured while the current economic system is still in place. The goal is to create a foundation of contribution records for the switchover to the Emergent Economics.
Institutions
All institutions will change significantly. Emergent Economics allows only individuals to receive fees. People will certainly create and maintain working groups and organizations to collaborate on products or services. However, only the members of these entities will receive income relative to their contributions to the products or services created by the group. Of course, those who help manage the group or organization will receive fees if their efforts contribute to specific products or services.
The facilities used by working groups and organizations will be a set of products and services that the group’s members pay for as they use them. The contributors of a facility’s products and services may also receive a share of the usage fees when the group’s product or service is used.
Texting
Many of the jargon and abbreviations used in texting will likely fade away. The new web and digital agents (MISDAs) will entice people without speech disorders to use their voice to exchange messages.
Words used less or not at all
- Job
- Company
- Corporation
- All finance-related words
- Vocation
- Bureaucracy
- Owner and Ownership
- Most words that apply to the current web
New words or used more
- Emergent Economics
- Knowing Web
- MISDA – Moderately Intelligent Digital Agent
- Contribution Fee
- Working group
- Possessor and Possessed
Words that change meaning
- “Possessed” and “Possessor” will have new context and meaning closer to ownership and the owner.
- “Connection” – referring more to an in-person connection rather than a social media version
- “Government” – possibly less important, and a more positive meaning
- “Institution” will probably fade away
- “Organization” will focus on the people/members and be less associated with bureaucracy.
There will be huge shifts in economic and political power. Power and influence in the current system circle around the generation of extreme wealth. People mostly get into or stay in politics to increase their wealth and generate influence and power.
In Emergent Economics, those who excel at collaboration and whose contributions generate high levels of usage fees will be in high demand to work on new products or services. They may also have more influence in their communities and possibly beyond. However, political power will generally be greatly reduced as there will be significantly less money involved.
The potential technology needed for the moderately intelligent semantic digital agents (MISDAs) could form the foundation of products that actively participate in and possibly take over our collaboration and innovation processes. Until the checks and balances of Emergent Economics are in place, we must ensure the technology developed to support it can not be used for other purposes.