AI as life coach

Inspired by the essay ‘Choice, Manipulation and the Self’, in Marco Aliberti’s and my book ‘Essays on the Optional Society – and a Letter Concerning Inclusion’ (https://lnkd.in/eYDsHX)

First they came for our clicks and our money, now they come for our soul!

Recently Google DeepMind announced that it would introduce a digital life coach as part of its AI fuelled suite of services. This should strike you with horror. 

Physical life coaches are already a carbuncle on the face of our time with its dilletantes, snake oil salesmen and Elmer Gantrys. But an AI driven life coach is a pest. If Silicon Valley had heard about Martin Luther (the 16^th century guy), they would perhaps argue that he is the salient parallel given that he swept away so much self-serving busy-bodiness. Yet, Luther was clear on the values he espoused, where Big Tech is certainly not. In fact, Google may argue that its chatbot life coach is value neutral, but how can this be believed even if we disregard the fact that value neutrality does not exist?

If society does not start to regulate digital chatbots we could well end up with a ‘counsellor’ representing Elon Musk values, New Age morality and West Coast culture – replete with micro-dosing of hallucinogens.  Whether that is to everybody’s liking is questionable even if you can buy everything necessary for this lifestyle (sans micro-doses) through, you guessed it, Google. If you do not like the Google life coach there will, no doubt, be a digital priest available in the foreseeable future instead. That, however, raises its own set of problems.

Nevertheless, we should be careful not to be instinctive Luddites. AI has something to offer also in the field of ethics and life management; the question being whether we can safely reap its benefits. Adam Smith has in his great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (much better than The Wealth of Nations), explained how we should try to judge our own behaviour by adopting a neutral third-party perspective. When in a given situation we are considering what the right course of action is, we should image what a disinterested third party would see as being right.

Nowadays, instead of doing the imaging ourselves, a digital life coach could be that disinterested third party. The hitch is only how we make sure not only that the digital life coach understands our situation in life but also that it represents our personal set of values. If we allow AI access to all the available information on our lives (a big if), there is no question that mature AI will be able to master our life circumstances. But how do we make sure that our values, as they evolve, will be adopted by the digital life coach for our circumstances?  Leaving this fundamental issue in the hands of the masters of the digital life coach is suicidal! In this domain, as in many others involving AI, we need a digital regulator with the task of trying to make sure that our lives are not hijacked by Big Tech and its unique mores and perspectives on life. How well such an idea will go down with the libertarians of Palo Alto and Seattle is sadly foreseeable.

The digital life coach is another of the many developments that currently pose truly existential questions. How we dive into a digital life (see the metaverse), how AI can make all professional and societal judgments better than us, how AI can find us the right life partner, how automation can eliminate the human being from being a part of the productive process are all issues we must address urgently and fearlessly. Top of our list should be to make sure that the digital tools we deploy will embody our personal ethics and unique life situation when they are advising us. Google DeepMind has given us cause to reflect on the complexities of this with urgency. But Google did not throw down an obvious gauntlet although a gauntlet it is! If we do not pick it up, we are doomed! They will take your soul if you let them!

Comrade Bezos

Jeff Bezos is a capitalist. Jeff Bezos is a communist. Two seemingly irreconcilable statements, but nevertheless both true. Few doubt that the God of Amazon is an arch-capitalist, but many would refute the assertion that he is a communist – Bezos himself certainly included.

He is obviously not a communist because he is spreading wealth around as communism was supposed to do. Bezos likes to keep workers at a subsistence minimum as communism ended up doing as well. But still, that is not where the most striking similarity lies. Where Bezos and communism overlap is in the attachment to planned economy. To be fair to Bezos and Amazon, they are not the only sworn capitalists who are de facto communists. All the trillion-dollar companies and their leaders are.

It should be unnecessary to explain why we have this paradox, because John Kenneth Galbraith already did so fifty-five years ago in his splendid The Industrial State, but fact is that the wisdom of Galbraith is largely forgotten in the debates about Big Tech and the trillion-dollar companies. The giant companies shield themselves from competition by virtue of their economic might, and government, wittingly and unwittingly, aides and abets. The abundance of riches and the benevolence of policy makers and policy planners allow the trillion-dollar companies to plan long-term and accept risks that no company in an Adam Smith liberal economy could. Facebook’s venture into the metaverse is a casebook example. It is exactly the kind of thing that could have happened in a communist planned economy, had the leaders been cleverer managers. One thing that sets Bezos apart from red secretary-generals is that he and his ilk undoubtedly are much, much better at identifying potential needs and using their economic toolboxes for their satisfaction.

There is more afoot than competition being replaced by economic plan, however. The historically unparalleled wealth of the giant companies brings power that does not only work hand-in-hand with the state but is starting to eclipse it. The leaders of the giant firms may not yet see it in quite that way, but still, this is the reality.  The tools deployed include time-honoured ones, such as picking up stray politicians, see the acquisition of the disgraced former chancellor of Austria by an extreme right-wing tech tycoon and, before that, of the former deputy prime minister of Britain by Facebook. Although there is a depressingly large number of historical precedents, such relationships are now married to corporate wealth that rivals that of states and that is unprecedented at least since the East India Company became a virtual state itself.

If the litany would stop here, the leaders of the trillion-dollar companies would still be communist yet risks for society could be contained. But consider now the horizonal expansion of the companies and the associated activities of their principals. Elon Musk’s avowed attempt to save democracy by buying Twitter and release all its right-wing demagoguery potential is something to behold in this respect! But let us stay on Bezos, because he even better exemplifies how much the moguls can spread their wings. Apart from his stake in Amazon and its subsidiary Whole Foods, Bezos owns Washington Post (to his credit he has not yet turned it into his private Pravda), and the Blue Origin space company. Amazon itself is dabbling in telemedicine and is a leading cloud computing company through AWS and experiments with drone delivery systems. As we know from Facebook, there is only a short reach to an own cryptocurrency (I propose to name it the Bezo), and security, robotics, virtual education, general health care and health insurance beckon. The trillion-dollar company can easily become a ten-trillion-company (Apple reached the three-trillion mark a while ago, before falling back). Most worrisome, the ten-trillion company will then constitute a rival to the state itself but will not have its solidarity and common welfare mandate.

Fact is that the current trillion-dollar companies in the end may be able to offer all the services the state offers – and more. And in undermining state authority, the trillion-dollar companies will deploy the siren song of ‘small government’, the pre-eminence of private initiative, all the libertarian slogans that the companies themselves know are hogwash. What will not be said is that once in the hands of giant companies, citizens will have exchanged a state that, however, imperfectly, tried to foster commercial competition with planned economy mastodons that will feel no responsibility towards those human beings who hold no commercial attraction. Bezos will become the better communist because he can choose his citizens and leave all others behind, where the communist state made almost everybody equally miserable.

The replacement of the state by giant companies is not yet inevitable, but the end is nigh unfortunately. The state is still strong enough to reign in the horizontal power of the mastodons, but we need to force it to act now – not only in order to protect consumers but in order to save the state itself. It is urgent to torpedo commercial communism!

(Inspired by Marco Aliberti’s and my book, Essays on the Optional Society and a Letter Concerning Inclusion,  https://lnkd.in/eYDsHXSs)

Kant, Putin and Perpetual Peace

 Inspired by Marco Aliberti’s a my new book, The Optional Society (https://lnkd.in/e_MC8pwX):

Immanuel Kant was a great thinker on space and time. Yet, his own sense of timing was hardly irreproachable. He published ‘Perpetual Peace’, his blueprint, a few years before the Napoleonic Wars.

225 years after Kant’s masterpiece came out, what does it tell us about the tragedy of Ukraine and about where it will ultimately take us? Does it contain relevant lessons?

One central assumption of Perpetual Peace is that when humankind understands that war is a zero-sum game, humankind will stop fighting. Yet, exactly the opposite is, of course, the case. We need not look to Putin, but only to the darkness of our own souls, to know that exactly getting something at the expense of others is greatest satisfaction. Humans and human societies are relativist and hence getting the greater share of a finite cake fills us with pride. This is immutable, yet common benefit optimisation makes our instincts amenable to regulation.

Whatever his logic, also Kant concluded that regulation of international affairs was necessary for peace but because he was such a strong believer in rationality he saw no need of international enforcement mechanisms. He was not a ‘World Government’ disciple despite being the high priest of political cosmopolitanism. Yet, the bloody sword of Napoleon proved Kant wrong in his lifetime, as the bloodiness of Putin does it today. Ambition and cruelty often get the better of idealistic rationalism!

In the midst of all the sorrow and despair caused by the invasion of Ukraine, it is, however, salutary to note that even without proper formal enforcement mechanisms Putin is being punished in all ways possible short of world war. Yet, the impotence of the Security Council provokes the entirely irrational, but Kantian, thought that such mechanisms just cannot be brought to work. Instead of attacking the absurdity of a warring party having a veto in the Security Council, we tend to resign in the face of its ineptitude. Given how international law is being contorted for all manner of unsavoury purposes, it is high time that we contort it for a laudable one and superimpose on the Charter of the United Nations a most fundamental principle of all law: that you cannot be party and judge at the same time. A decision of the Security Council on war and peace should not need agreement by a peace-breaker.

Ever since the publication of Perpetual Peace there has been broad agreement that Kant was right in saying that international trade is a tool for peace.  Although mostly forgotten, that is the rationale for the European Union. We now use international trade to sanction Putin by formally and informally blocking both what comes in and what goes out. That is right and proper. However, there is a concomitant thought that Europe was wrong in allowing dependency on Russian oil and gas, that, perhaps, it was wrong to deploy international trade in the service of peace. That is a most dangerous perspective because it leads straight to the autarky playbook. The idea is, in its essence, that your enemy should have dependency on you, but you should have none. In a perfect world you would thus be able to punish your enemy without pain to yourself. That, of course, is Kant on his head! The fundamental point of international trade as a peacebuilder is that dependency must be bidirectional. Exactly as we see in Europe today, we inflict pain on Russia whilst inflicting pain on ourselves. But, because there are many co-dependencies, those with many friends can weather the storm better than those with few. Ultimately, Ukrainian heroism aside, that will be the downfall of Russia. Russia’s only significant friend, China, is, of course, no friend at all.

If we look in the rear-view mirror, the problem with the dependency on Russian oil and gas was an optical delusion more than anything else. Russia appeared less dependent on the West than the West on Russia. That this perception is fallacious we are now being shown.  Without own capability to produce enough consumer goods, let alone industrial equipment, and with the supply of money drying up, there is a hard road ahead for Russians even in the short term. Whether their fabled ability to tolerate pain will carry Putin over is more than doubtful.  The staggering incompetence of Putin in building a prosperous Russia was, in sense, the autocrat’s ideal, because the right degree of poverty makes the general population pliable. What the West did wrong was to let Russia sink when the Soviet Union was dissolved rather than help it build a prosperous society with much more extensive bidirectional dependency. Now we have no choice but to throw the ordinary Russians into abject destitution, but we must understand that this will make the task of eventually making Russia a responsible international partner much, much harder. When clouds have cleared and the spectre of totalitarianism removed, we will need a Marshall plan for Russia.

The long-term risk to international society stemming from the rape of Ukraine is, however, not so much Russia, as what nations of good will may take from the conflict. If nations will proceed to build firewalls not only to perceived enemies, but also to assumed friends because they might turn enemy (a Brexit trauma), then the glue provided by international trade will disappear. Kant’s logic will have been given a deadly blow. Recent commentary by the great and the good in international finance to the effect that globalisation is dying suggests that a paradigm change is well afoot.

The threat of ever-decreasing interdependence is not a phenomenon caused only by Russia, of course.  Within less than a generation international trade will be existentially challenged by the rise of automation and 3D printing – putting manufacturing at local level within easy reach except for the most sophisticated manufactures. Listening to international experts, or any expert for that matter, will be replaced by the voice of artificial intelligence, and the metaverse will provide refuge from analogue reality.

3D printing a threat to peace?

.

What Putin has done is to release a strong impetus towards self-sufficiency that will reinforce existing trends. The paradox we will face in the future is that we will have the ability to make ourselves and our societies largely autarkic and exactly because of the lack of dependency we will, as per the old master, lay ourselves open to war. Fact is that only by staying vulnerable will we be able to avoid mortal wounds!

What we can learn from all this is that we should not rush towards self-sufficiency but nevertheless be aware that it is a destination that it will be hard to avoid in the long run. Ironically, this then brings us full circle to the reason why Kant was wrong to reject strong international institutions in the first place.

When rationality does not give cover and dependence no necessity of cooperation, there is only one way to avoid anarchy and inhumanity and that is to build strong international institutions that can ensure peace and equity – that will force us to turn our gaze towards other societies and make us vulnerable when we forget the dictates of humanity! Kant should have known!

Wealth and State

Below you will find a link to an oped inspired by Marco Aliberti’s and my new book, The Optional Society (available at (https://lnkd.in/e_MC8pwX). In Danish unfortunately!:

https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/debat/teknologiens-fremskridt-goer-ikke-noedvendigvis-os-allesammen-mere-priviligerede

Madame Bovary meets the metaverse

Madame Bovary meets the metaverse

In Gustave Flaubert’s famous novel, Madame Bovary, the heroine loses all grip on reality through the excessive reading of cheap romance novels. One wonders if Mark Zuckerberg may have the book, even if it does not appear on the reading list he shares with his ever-smaller group of fans. What is clear is that Zuckerberg seems to be prescribing us a heavy dose of bovarysme with his reach for the metaverse.

Madame Bovary takes arsenic when reality catches up with her, and she dies an agonising death. Surely, this is not what Facebook wants for us, yet a Meta metaverse will, in effect, turn many into Madame Bovarys on steroids. In quite a few possible scenarios of the future they may never have to face reality again. But the metaverse can, of course, offer an agonising virtual death should that be the desire, and, in another one-upmanship on Flaubert, such a death can be followed by glorious virtual rebirth. What is there not to like? That is, of course, the rub.

Albert Fourié, La Mort de Madame Bovary (Credit: Lisa Lc, Creative Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0)

Already ten years ago Minecraft showed us how addictive virtual worlds can be. The metaverse will be sophistication beyond belief in comparison. It will be able to suck you in because it offers attractions in so many ways, including, of course, virtual, unencumbered, zipless sex, air travel without security checks, food without calories! The explosion of Netflix during the pandemic makes it clear that many would have been overjoyed with overcoming restrictions and risk by withdrawing to the virtual world of the metaverse.

In science, one fantastic solution to a number of dilemmas of quantum mechanics has been the idea that every time several solutions exist each one continues as a reality in a separate universe. In one universe Schroedinger’s cat continues living, in another it is dead. That is not just the metaverse but the multiverse. It is not for nothing called the many worlds theory, because if it is correct (and few serious physicists discount the possibility entirely) then we have an almost infinite number of universes out there.

Even Facebook will not give us an infinite number of virtual universes, of course, yet we are certainly moving towards many worlds — although they will all be virtual. Each of us may inhabit our own digital universe, made just for us, to our specification and embodying all our wishes and none of our fears — unless you like fear, that is. Billions of virtual, parallel universes, courtesy of Meta!

You may ask whether this is so bad in the final analysis. After all, what we will experience in our own virtual universes might become really close to what we experience in our current reality. And isn’t imagination the highest achievement of humankind — and this just a further add-on? If robots and AI will take care of all human needs in the future is virtual life not the next logical step?

God, let us hope not! Despite all the fake news and alternative realities peddled by the Trumpists, many of us remain wedded to reality, sorry, to real reality. It may sound corny to talk about the human soul but I, for one, am not convinced that I will be a real human being if I do not embrace actual reality as the core of my existence.

But Zuckerberg and Madame Bovary have thrown down the gauntlet. Zuckerberg teases us with the social ease, the attraction of meeting the avatars of our actual distant friends, relatives and colleagues at a click of a button. However, when that blurring of reality starts there is but a short distance to the fictional taking over entirely; social media turning anti-social.

It is true to say that much of our reality is already mediated: we talk on the phone, we do videoconferences, we look lovingly at photos or a sweet letter. And it makes emotional sense because we can correlate with an underlying reality. When we fight Zuckerberg and the compulsive quality of the metaverse, as we should, we must do so because we want to make sure that reality is always our starting point and our final destination. What is proposed is not all bad, just as the romance novels of Madame Bovary were not all bad. The risk to humankind is in the excess and this we must resist as individuals and as a human community. If not, real arsenic might start to look as appealing to us as it eventually did to Madame Bovary!

(This post is inspired by the essay Virtual Life in Marco Aliberti’s and my upcoming book, The Optional Society. It comes out on 19 Nov on Ex Tuto (https://lnkd.in/dAxW2J-k))

Richer than the law permits?

Inspired by my upcoming book, The Optional Society, with Marco Aliberti (Ex Tuto):

 

‘You can never be too rich or too thin’ was the statement of the late Duchess of Windsor. Both assumptions are wrong. The latter is disproven by anorexia, the first by Amazon and brethren.

Let us stay on ‘too rich’. The value of Amazon has almost doubled over the 15 months of the corona crisis. It currently stands at 1.6 trillion dollars and will not shrink hereafter! The activities of Amazon not only deepen – they broaden. This is a natural consequence of economic theory. The abundance of capital must be allocated and there are only two choices: to give back to shareholders or to deploy to new activities. Giving back to the owners is pusillanimous and hence the quest for new fields of business activity is mostly preferred. Where banks use other people’s money for other people’s activities, mega-firms use their own money for their own activities. Their incredible wealth means that there is almost no entry threshold for these firms to enter new fields. Their acumen in managing a new type of activity must not pass the crucible of third party capital allocation like start-ups. Mega-firms become planned economy instruments, albeit not of the communist type. Managers need not consider the general good of society. This may be conducive for efficiency but is a far cry from Adam Smith and liberal economics.

The general good is in this model supposed to be taken care of by the political decision makers, and by and large they have so far had the tools, but not always the ability, to exercise the function. But imagine Amazon at three times its current size. It will have branched into currency, health care, security, education, and deeper into news and entertainment. It will have reached such compact power that no state will have the de facto ability to rein it in. But not only that. Companies like Amazon will increasingly replace the state by providing most of what the state currently offers or ensures: retirement benefits (as a financial institution and as large-scale employer), policing, health care and hospitals, funding of new medicines, going to the Moon, you name it! All the while, the human factor in economic activity will become more and more irrelevant because of automation and AI. Wealth will therefore inevitably amass with the owners of the means of production.

What we are experiencing, and will so even more in the future, is that authority  increasingly moves from the state to private actors like Amazon. The state will become ever more emasculated and will ultimately not be able to fulfil its role of ensuring fairness and solidarity in society.

In order to avoid such an outcome in the incredibly wealthy world we are moving towards, we have to ask ourselves the impossible question: should it become illegal to become too rich? Should a company with a market value of a trillion dollars or more be deprived of the option to further expand – and hence be forced to return excess capital to shareholders, who would then have to find other vehicles for investment?

There is an antitrust logic in this, although such a proposal goes far further than just regulating monopolistic activity. Capital itself becomes the regulated object.

If we do not start to entertain this question we will, knowingly, have sacrificed the state and its benefits on the altar of an Adam Smith who, being a moralist as well as an economist, would never have imagined that his liberal economics could be taken to advocate such an illiberal result.

But in the interest of full disclosure it should also be said that where this regulatory screw ends is with the question whether personal wealth should have a limit also. When Jeff Bezos becomes a trillionaire must he be forced to give back to the society that enabled him all the further wealth beyond that measly first trillion?

The Wounds That We Carry

Life is a bruiser; exacts its price for living.

The young girl falls and hurts her knee,

gets up in tears, yet floats away on lightest feet – all pain so readily forgotten.

Forgetfulness of hurt gets harder as we age; petrification of the self sneaks up on us unnoticed.

The broken heart, the friendship lost, ambition unfulfilled, stay with us as mementos vitae.

–

Poor Nietzsche had a lot to say on pain and personality:

what does not break you makes you stronger; full natures will recuperate and brush aside.

This may be so, although the issue is, in truth, what strength should serve?

Eliminating pain is not the only aim and worship of the frightful scars should not be entertained.

Becoming strong enough to not be strong, to that we must aspire!

To smell the rain worm’s summer paradise you need the nose’s softest flesh!

Unclenching the Handshake in Space

Human exploration of outer space is currently being upended in a fashion unheard of during the last more than forty years. Russia’s declaration a few weeks ago that it will leave the International Space Station in 2025 and the successful launch of the core module of a new Chinese space station (Tianhe, Harmony of the Heavens) a week later are gauntlets thrown at the feet of NASA and the West. As space activities are a bellwether of international relations in general there is reason to worry what these developments mean in the long run and for peaceful relations on Earth. As if to underscore the putative challenge, China this week became the second nation to successfully land a rover on Mars. 

The close link between what happens in outer space and what happens on Earth is well documented. The iconic meeting of an Apollo and a Soyuz capsule 200 kilometers above Earth in 1975 allowed cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and astronaut Thomas Stafford to make the handshake that demonstrated in a most powerful way that terrestrial détente was a reality.

Ever since, human spaceflight has, with ups and downs, been a domain for cooperation between the US and Russia/the Soviet Union. It signalled that, although there was frequent tension on Earth, cooperation between the two was still possible in the right circumstances.

The pinnacle of cooperation in outer space has for more than 20 years been the International Space Station (ISS), which joins together not only the US and Russia, but also the European Space Agency with its 22 member states, Japan and Canada. The ISS is admittedly becoming long in the tooth and very expensive to operate, but has been kept alive not only because no replacement was forthcoming, but also because of its strong international symbolism.

The decision of Russia to abandon its part of the ISS in 2025 and its intention to build its own national space station are momentous news, demonstrating not only how strained relations between the US and Russia have become, but also the evergreen adage that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. This is so, because China is waiting in the wings as an attractive partner for Russia.

The US and Russia are the traditional superpowers in outer space, of course, but have been joined by a China that has a wildly ambitious and highly successful space programme of it own. Thus China wants to put humans back on the Moon, allegedly in the first half of the 2030ies. 

The Chinese leadership clearly sees successful space exploration as important not only for its standing vis-á-vis the Chinese people, but for pressing its claims for a seat at the top table of the international system.

In pursuit of international recognition, for a long time China wanted to cooperate with the five partners of the ISS on space stations, only to have the door slammed in its face time after time, mainly by the US. In the end, China gave up on pursuing such cooperation. and hence China is now well on its way to create a space station of its own, and will likely succeed within the next couple years, and long before Russia. The launch of Tianhe provides China with the centrepiece around which its station will be built.

The plans of the West, promulgated by NASA, are to create a new space station orbiting not the Earth but the Moon. This station is an integral part of NASA’s project for reconquering the Moon. The highly tenuous schedule is for a launch of ‘Gateway’ in 2024. China is, as always, not part of the endeavour, and Russia declined last year.

All this sets the scene for a new space race! Russia and China are not natural friends but are forced into the arms of each other by the ‘my enemy’s enemy’ logic. Russia and China have already signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate on a future lunar base, and given the recent Russian history of being unable to fund grand space ambitions it would hardly be surprising if also space stations would become part of the equation.

In other words, a tragedy is taking form. As a stripped-down illustration of how international relations work, human exploration of outer space shows that fronts are hardening even in an area that withstood the tragic shadow-boxing in Syria and the confrontations in Crimea and Ukraine. What outer space as a bellwether makes clear is that our world is fragmenting – differently than in the past that is true – yet perhaps as fundamentally as during the Cold War. Sadly, there is no assurance that the war will remain cold this time around. Hence, we must demand true statesmanship of our leaders. One first step in that direction would be for them to figure out a way to reintroduce broad-based cooperation in the exploration of outer space. That must include China! Going to the Moon again, and from there to Mars, should be humanity’s challenge, not that of competing states.

In September 1963, President Kennedy suggested in a remarkable and daring speech to the UN General Assembly that the race to the Moon be turned into a joint effort of humankind. Two months later he was killed and with him, so it seemed, his dream. Yet, Apollo and Soyuz and thereafter the ISS ultimately made Kennedy’s vision come true. It is in the strong interest of us all to make sure that this vision is kept alive even now so that hands can continue to be shaken in outer space!

Poverty and Choice

Self-interest and altruism lead to same results more often than we assume. Because we have not internalised this basic truth we frequently go wrong. Exhibit A in this respect is the Trump administration with its religion of America First. Did that bring America happiness? I think not. 

Fortunately, we are now in a new era. Yet, we continue making the mistake. The competition for vaccines between countries is Exhibit B. Not only are we getting suboptimal results when we compete in the way we do in the rich world, but by leaving the developing world high and dry we are not only inhuman but also undercutting our own efforts. Leaving India and Africa as labs for the corona virus to establish new variants that can defeat our warp speed vaccines is hardly a great idea even if looked at purely from the egoistic perspective.

What we are doing in this situation, as in so many others, is that we are leveraging our wealth of options against the dearth of options of the developing world. The downside of having few options is that you have few possibilities to improve your lot. But a downside of having many options is that that you have a good chance of exercising them wrongly. Given a choice, you would certainly always go with having many options despite the exposure to own stupidity in exercising them. Nevertheless, what is poorly understood is that to achieve best results and most happiness there should be a reasonable balance of options access, be it within a country or between countries. Imbalance is not only a source of tension, but undermines the power of the options of the privileged. There is no point in being able to buy a Bentley if not enough people have the option of buying cars so that proper roads can be built.

Very often the rich and the poor do not compete for the same resources, of course. The poor are nevertheless left in dire straits because of our ignorance, arrogance, neglect. They are left destitute because the rich do not understand that it is in their interest to lift the poor out poverty. It is a wry old Marxist insight that the bourgeoisie is better off with a robust underclass that can produce and consume. Although the recent wealth of the West can be ascribed largely to the empowerment of the lower middle class, the working class, we are racing headlong for disaster because we have again forgotten this truth. The current gaping inequality is testament to our forgetfulness.

Ethical behaviour should be an imperative, but it is shocking that we also ignore a most fundamental win-win. With the number of options increasing exponentially in virtually every domain of human endeavour we risk creating a much larger and more desperate proletariat if we do not make sure that everybody has both the means and the capability to exploit all that choice. 

The idea of a universal basic income has a lot of wind in its sails – hot on the heels of the first inadvertent experiments in this direction in the United States, where coronavirus stimulus cheques were sent to a very broad swath of the population. Universal basic income may not be the only way to ensure that all have the means to benefit from the options revolution, but it is certainly one way, particularly if we are able to achieve such universal basic income on a truly universal scale, that is, in all countries. When the objection comes up in response that this is unaffordable the bourgeoisie should remember the usefulness for capitalism of the above Marxist insight.

As to the capability to benefit from the mass of options, the only way forward is, of course, much better education, both within the rich world and without. Elites have been very complacent in this regard for half a century. They assumed that the education task was achieved with the right to go to school. However, the next step should have been to introduce a process of continuing improvement of the quality of teaching. The rich have, of course, achieved this for themselves but have left the poor to sink. The desolate state of many underprivileged schools has been an important driver of inequality, and will continue being so unless something is done. That ‘something’ should include the revival to former glory of the social status of teachers in the rich world. Accordingly, the starvation wages paid to the teachers of our children at their most impressionable age must become a thing of the past. The professors of Stanford should perhaps be paid less, the teachers in poor East Palo Alto certainly more. 

In the developing world the remedies in this respect are more complicated, yet the optional society has shown how new tools are invented when compelling educational needs so dictate. Zoom teaching is now commonplace in the West because of corona.  If we would understand the needs of developing countries as being equally compelling, the world could, without being patronising, put the same creative mechanisms to use in order to meet their requirements.  Think about the potential of digital avatars as teaching buddies to help overcome teacher shortages.  The result of such efforts would be that we would turn the deprived into effective participants in society. That is not only right but also our self-interest!

Ode to Pettiness

To see oneself reflected in the Other

is something every human wants;

it reassures each doubting soul

that, indeed, it is an island in the stream.

:

The light of others is, however, not what makes us human, we are a ‘Ding an sich’

– of substance even on a hermit’s pillar!

The person with no core, where emptiness resides inside, is he who seeks attention never-ending,

who uses others as a magnifying glass,

to make the Pudels Kern, so insignificant,

appear as something splendid and heroic.

:

There, empathy will be the undiscovered land

because, as brother Dracula,

the undead narcissist will gain existence also through the blood of others.

‘What does it mean for me?’ is all that matters

when pestilence appears;

what jubilation when he sends the mob to fight and kill and die!

That good and ready night will find him not-so-gentle –

the anger that he feels and lives will turn, he hopes, his pettiness to grandeur!