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I think the author's definition of capitalism is close to the Wikipedia version. "Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." What postcapitalists generally talk about is a shift in the means of production away from the industrial paradigm, leading to a shift away from private ownership and operation for profit. Private ownership of industrial manufacturing as the basis of economic power shifts to public ownership of information which is shared freely and used to generate value for society as a whole.

Since this quotes Marx, we can talk about a shift in a world conceptually defined by a struggle between an owner and a worker class to a world defined by a struggle between intellectual property advocates and advocates of freely shared information. As we've seen, it's very difficult for a working class to overthrow their oppressors without becoming even more oppressive than the oppressors. However, it's much easier for virally-spread free and open source software to overtake proprietary software. The prediction of postcapitalism is that this trend of unobscured information and therefore decentralized information will upend the traditional paradigm of owners and workers.

Taken to its extreme, the new working class will become entirely automated and humanity will collectively become owners of it. Just as today, some people in the upper class are better off than others. Those who keep secrets and private keys to valuable information spaces will have advantages over others for the forseeable future, and it's likely that this inequality will pass to machines as well. Eventually, as we move toward the development of artificial general intelligences, it's likely that processing power and access to information will be the most valuable distinguishers of power and influence.

However, it's much easier for virally-spread free and open source software to overtake proprietary software.

I don't think this is true at all. If that were the case GNU Linux would dominate the computing world.

Taken to its extreme, the new working class will become entirely automated and humanity will collectively become owners of it.

Through what mechanism? I just don't see that happening because individuals don't have that much attention to devote to maintaining such a collective. Someone will always rise to the top to dominate and people will "elect" that person through their behaviors if not explicitly - in effect the same thing that we have today.

it's likely that processing power and access to information will be the most valuable distinguishers of power and influence

Correct. That just means only a tiny group of people (or trans-human people) will dominate.

GNU Linux does dominate the computing world: servers, phones, and IoT, by far the majority of all hardware runs it.

To your second point, I'm just describing a future in which almost all work is done by machines and humanity owns them collectively but not evenly. I mean collectively in the sense of all of humanity being pushed into the owner class and out of the working class, but power differences will persist.

How those power differences play out is not determined. It could move either toward increasing centralization of power or increasing decentralization. That will be determined by the choices we are making now, which is why a lot of people want to consider the effects of current laws and politics on a theoretical postcapitalist world.

> GNU Linux does dominate the computing world: servers, phones, and IoT, by far the majority of all hardware runs it.

Android contains Linux, but not GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different, because all they have in common is Linux (Richard Stallman).

I thought someone might say that and considered explaining further, but didn't want to get too bogged down in details to distract from the point.

I don't completely agree with the distinction, even though Stallman is the authority. There's still a lot of GNU code used in most Android installations, and a full Debian install only requires installing and running an app. Maybe GNU-available/Linux would be a better name. Although the default is minimal free software, it's easy to add F-droid and anything else you want, because Linux is still GNU GPL-licensed and and still has the freedoms associated with it (despite restrictive baseband and other software.) So in the context of free software dominating hardware, it's still a good example.

I think you assessment of the article is fair. It's not the best piece I've read on this topic, but I found it interesting enough to share on HN.

Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense?

With software that already replaces a lot of human labour, and things like 3D printing continually improving, it seems like it's at least possible for us to reach a point where the means of production are so easily available and so dispersed throughout the population that the current system as we know it won't really make sense anymore.

So I'm not even sure "postcapitalism" would be the right word to describe it. Things will still be produced, and the idea of markets won't go away. But this new system might not be recognizable to us at all. I often wonder if we can even envision how the transition could happen, because we're so used to reality as it exists for us now.

I don't mean to sound like a naive technological utopian. I suspect that something better than what we have now is possible, but the transition, if it happens, will be messy and painful.

Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap that capitalism and markets as we know them now will no longer make sense?

The short answer is yes I do - in fact I'm betting on it.

The functional problem however is distribution of resource production/demand. A functional market requires that some Agent A has some resource X that they can trade with Agent B for resource Y for some exchange rate. The medium of exchange (currency) is an important aspect to the efficiency of this but is too complicated to factor in to this discussion.

If the plurality of Agents do not have a resource that is in demand then they have nothing to trade and thus their optionality is severely limited.

For all periods of time individual labor was the default resource that people traded. Either they traded it to themselves in the form of time for output of land (farming for ones self), they traded it for goods from someone with those goods, or they traded it for a medium of exchange (currency).

If the "market" effectively drives the price of labor to 0 then the productive input for any Actor basically evaporates. That doesn't mean the market evaporates, it simply means that individuals have no pricing power inside of it. So the idea of your average individual controlling the means of production is put into jeopardy - which I think is what the Author meant to say.

Ok, so then what? Well that's when you see projects to redistribute resources to Actors with no pricing power introduced - such as UBI. Such schemes however rely on an increasingly small number of Actors to provide the resources which are then redistributed into the system. The libertarian proponents of such systems assume that the small groups will voluntarily redistribute these resources, which could be the case. Pro-state proponents suggest making the state redistribute the resources - essentially ending the "capitalism" - though the author doesn't suggest this.

I think functionally this redistribution at scale is impossible with the human animal. IMO the human desire for unfettered agency is too strong to accept such a construct.

I'm not sure what the answer is but I think it's gonna get nastier before it gets better.

How do you bet on a future like this occurring? It's hard for me to see how to ensure that you get a positive payout if this happens. Owning machines (stocks?) would seem like a sensible bet, but how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted?

How do you bet on a future like this occurring?

You build it.

how do you ensure that your part of the capital won't be obsoleted?

Best as I can figure is be the one that builds the machines taking over.

The default resource is time and people will always want to trade for more of it.

What does a world look like where people have no value to each other?

> Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap...

Just a pet peeve of mine: making labour (and life in general) cheaper, is not only a matter of technology progress (in the sense of human knowledge getting richer and richer) but also of what energy sources nature provides.

As an example, the steam engine was a huge breakthrough and James Watt did change the fate of humanity, but it would not have been possible without coal veins. Our economy is based on oil, but how long will it last?

We can invent more and more kinds of machines, but we'll need new sources of exploitable energy. We may learn to recognize currently-unknown kinds of sources, but we'll never be able to create them.

That's a great point, of course. More technology typically requires more energy, which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Although newer technology tends to require less energy per unit of work/computation, in aggregate the amount of technology in use increases rapidly enough that net energy requrements increase as well.

I'm hopeful that solar power will play an increasing role. Our sun won't last forever, but barring catastrophe it'll be there on any timescale those of us living now care about. Of course, solar's effectiveness depends on how much the energy captured by solar panels exceeds the amount of energy requred to manufacture them. I get that sense that solar power's efficiency and cost effectiveness continue to improve rapidly, but most of my information on the topic comes from mass media. It's an area I'd like to know more about, but I don't currently have enough time to do the research needed to properly understand it in depth.

But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more.

When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance.

The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.

How do physical resources factor into this?

Suppose we practically eliminate labor and manual production processes using machines. Consumers won't be able to trade their own labor for resources as most of them do now (since automated labor will be cheaper).

It seems that he who owns the resources is king in this world. What could any else bargain to resource owners with?

That's been the "theory" for a long time - say, the threshing machine will mean that farmers will be unemployed, the powered sawmill will put all the sawyers out of work, the spreadsheet program will put all the accountants out of work.

The trouble with that theory is that people invent and move into new services and jobs. Sure, the old work was automated, but that just means that people can redeploy their labour into an work that simply wasn't being done before.

Why doesn't this mean that resource-owners will control everything? Because "resources" are transformed by technology in the same way. Things that were previously not thought of as resources, become so. Secondly, one still imagines competition. There is no "he who owns the resources", there's many, and as long as they have to compete for the custom of the other 95% of the economy, they can't control, or coordinate to control, much of anything.

Newer jobs have always replaced older jobs, and the shift in job titles disguises this.

When we say "farmer" now, we mean someone who uses electronics-enhanced tractors to plant and harvest at high yields on 1000 acres. But it used to mean someone who produced food from 5 acres with only human-operated tools. Later, it was someone who used ox-powered tools to produce on 20 acres. As the tech advanced, the job responsibilities changed.

Accountants are no longer responsible for adding the numbers correctly in handwritten ledgers. They use computer spreadsheets. But they are still accountants. The market can either use less of them for the same work, or require that they do more work for the same number of laborers.

The problem that is arising now, which did not arise in the industrial revolution, is that more employers are choosing the former option, simply because they cannot imagine more work for the same number of people to do that could not also be automated away.

If the only way for cab drivers to compete with self-driving hire-on-demand cars is to become tour guides as well, it only takes a few more years to add a synthesized voice recanting trivia to passengers about nearby points of interest to the cab-driver-replacing software. As long as anyone has the intent to replace expensive human labor with cheap machine labor, no offer of additional added value is sufficient to save everyone's jobs.

If no job is safe, how do you know which field to move into when your old one goes obsolete?

I'm sticking with software development. If the robots ever get better at writing their own software than us then we'll have other problems to worry about besides work :)

Plus there's a chance that it will open up a market for artisanal hand-written software (when people long for the little bugs and imperfections that make if feel authentic).

If the robots ever get better at writing their own software than us then we'll have other problems to worry about besides work :)

I wouldn't sleep on that. It's coming.

To be fair, writing code better than the median software quality is not a tremendously high bar to pass. There is some truly awful code out there, and plenty of mediocre CRUD apps to add bulk around the middle.

It is far more worrisome if software can write better software than the best software-writing humans. After that point, there is no job any human could do that would be competitive with AI.

At that time, meat-humanity will just have to retire from the workforce, move in with its AI grandchildren, surrender its drivers' licenses, and eat discounted ramen.

It is far more worrisome if software can write better software than the best software-writing humans. After that point, there is no job any human could do that would be competitive with AI.

I don't agree with this.

From an industry perspective It should be worrisome even if it's not better than the best because as you know, it's not required to be the best to take over an industry.

From an AGI perspective, you are generally correct that there will be no job that a human does better than an AGI, however between the point at which it kills programming jobs and when it dominates everything there will still be bespoke jobs. Even though Nike dominates, there are still cobblers.

Exactly. I'm sure there will be room for a locally produced software stand at the farmers market.

Generally we don't, and really can't, know ahead of time which new work will be invented and done in the future. That is the point of entrepreneurialism, and of a market more broadly. What I'm pointing out is that it has consistently been the case that people have declared that, because they could not imagine what new kinds of work would exist in the future, that therefore automation would throw people into permanent unemployment. This has consistently been mistaken.

Much work could be automated - but automation is not free. Sure, you can imagine all sorts of work being automated away - but is it worth the cost? In what locations? For what applications? All the time or just some of the time?

The most common way of adjusting to automation is not just to add new value to an old "job title", but to move into new fields entirely. A farmer today has very different responsibilities to a farmer a hundred years ago - but there's also far, far fewer people farming at all. Most people who do things that have been automated will do things that simply weren't done before, or were done very little.

Consider also that in the past, many of the jobs shifts took place on a generational scale. A farmer--instead of having 10 children that were farmers or farmers' wives, and one that was a non-farmer--would have one child (or less) that became a farmer, and the rest would become non-farmers.

The economy changed slowly enough that you could have the same job your entire life and not be suddenly unemployed or unemployable when the technology changed.

After the industrial revolution, the pace of economic change accelerated. You can now make an entire job obsolete in a shorter period of time than the ~50 years it would take for a new worker to reach a socially acceptable retirement age. And what is that person going to do for a living? Can they afford to restart their lives from the second-lowest rung on the ladder?

It's not necessarily always easy or painless. I certainly didn't claim it was. But you can't really grow the economy without introducing labour-saving devices that change the composition of jobs. Economies didn't have 90% of people working on the farm because they preferred it to anything else; it was that way because it had to be - the productivity of labour was so low. Likewise, if we want the economy to continue to grow at reasonable rates, it must be understood that job change is part of that.

> Markets exist irrespective of whatever the formal mechanism of trade is sanctioned by the state.

Yep. One of the most amazing things about "1984" is that there is a very visible market, dismissed by Orwell as "the proles". ("Orwell's Revenge" by Peter Huber is a great analysis of 1984.)