Humans Who Dream Of Companies That Won't Need Us | Hacker News Reader

Humans Who Dream Of Companies That Won't Need Us

fastcompany.com

69 pointslxm45 comments

At some point we must get rid of all the humans on earth to keep up economic growth.

Not entirely joking.

Since companies are legal entities and can be run by algorithms, then it's possible that such non-human companies end up with all the capital and all the power. Of course nations and legal systems will also be automatized, with maximum growth as the objective. Then the algorithms can just starve people to death in a legal way.

Though human controlled companies weren't necessarily that humane so far either. At least they would try to keep the owners alive...

Here is that train of thought pushed out a few hundred years http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Of course, we could just not take capital accumulation to be the sole determining imperative for everything that happens in the universe. I mean, it sort of is a blinkered, pointless perspective, from that ultimate view.

Iain M Bank's culture novels are predicated on this, as an aside.

  >  At some point we must get rid of all the humans on earth to keep up economic growth.

Sure, but first we need at least few colonies to move to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Colonial_Transporter

Why does trade require growth?

It doesn't. But trade requires calm politicans. Those aren't calm if people aren't calm. And people aren't calm the moment TVs don't get bigger anymore. That's what makes them angry.

Symbiotic. Growth requires trade as well.

What I don't understand about the Blockchain hype (and I say that as a fan of Bitcoin): isn't the primary problem it solves the avoidance of double spending?

Or in the case of Ethereum, perhaps double contracts. But still, the issue seems a bit overblown to me: to double spend (or present fake contracts, or more generally, fake data), you somehow have to isolate the victims network before injecting the fake transaction into it?

Sharing data in a p2p network was possible before the blockchain. Maybe a lot of applications don't really need the bullet proof security of the blockchain to exchange data?

I don't see the real advantage for a self driving car company, for example. Why couldn't it just as well live on a server - maybe in the cloud so that it has backups? The issue of cheating could be countered with trust, just as normal businesses do (screw over your customers too often and they'll stay away).

The real problem seems to be political, I don't think it is legally possible to instantiate a business without human background?

Suppose I launch a contract on Ethereum that tries to buy a self-driving car and rent it out to passengers. How would that car get a license plate? And without it, wouldn't the police quickly remove it from the street?

Legally, creating a company without humans is impossible, but in practice, well:

Registering Planet Money's Delaware company took one day and three emails. The company that set it up for us asked for absolutely no documentation. I gave them my real name, but I could have been anybody from anywhere in the world.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/27/157421340/how-t...

Of course, opening a bank account to receive the income of those rides would be a different story.

The bank account issue at least is solved by Bitcoin.

Maybe some businesses don't need to be real businesses - especially illegal ones :-/

I wonder about the consequences of running an illegal business on the blockchain, though. Say, a marketplace for drugs on Ethereum. Worst case it would make using Ethereum illegal?

I don't understand it all either, but I can appreciate one of the key benefits is in transparency. Transparency in Bitcoin works because everyone who uses Bitcoin has a copy of the full blockchain. This makes the rate at which trades can take place relatively slow, but also gives protection against people gaming the system (it is possible to game the system, but it's hard for most to do so).

As I understand it, the advantage of any blockchain (Bitcoin's or another's) is a shared (among participants) causal ordering of events (which is legitimized via the avoidance of double-spending, the "chain" aspect of it, and a few other properties). All the potential falls out of that: proof-of-existence, signed transactions, digital currency, etc.

Sounds like the first chapter of Accelerando.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

It should be noted that ethereum does not scale any better than Bitcoin, which is to say not much at all. Unlike a lot of people in the crypto currency scene Vitalik acknowledges this and is working on upgrades to fix this. He is a very, very smart guy but this would require solving extremely difficult technical and economic problems.

They're not talking about automated companies. They're talking about distributed companies. That's entirely different. This is the micropayment dream, again - everything is making tiny micropayments to everything else. I knew some of that crowd back when Xanadu was a thing. (Xanadu was Ted Nelson's thing, a predecessor of the World Wide Web. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu.) They were all fanatical libertarians.

Somebody read "Atlas Shrugged" too many times. (Part 3 of the movie is out, and in Redbox, if anybody cares. "The weak cinematic trilogy derived from Ayn Rand's 1957 screed-cum-novel limps to its merciful end." - Variety)

There is probably already some "thing" out there running in the AWS cloud that both cashes checks and pays it's bills and is still running after the demise of its owner.

Vitalik Buterin's response:http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ai4pm/the_humans_...

I find the title to be somewhat misleading as it tries to get readers' attention.

Most of the article is related to the Blockhain, but "won't need us" makes most assume it's purely related to automation.

What would be a better title?

Companies are simply a tool that helps a group of people to make a profit. If you remove the group of people then what would be the point?

In some contexts we have nearly removed all the people in this equation already. 85 people own as much as about half the world's population [1]. So, capitalism in the form we have it today, which includes companies, are simply a way to concentrate wealth among the few. Some of these few use the money IMO vicely, but a more equitable system would probably work better. I say this after having lived and worked in the US and the UK (less equal) compared to Sweden and Netherlands (more equal).

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-ric...

Edit: clearer argument

All that statistics says is a lot of people have debt. I personally have more wealth than about half the world in my wallet - I've got about $150 in there, and billions of people have negative net worth.

Global inequality is actually declining, by the way, so can't modern capitalism get some credit for that?

http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/P...

No, you don't. The report makes clear that you need wealth of USD 3,650 to be in the top 50% in the world, and USD 77,000 to be in the top 10%.

https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi...

You are missing the point. Let me make a mathematical example. Suppose the population distribution is $[-100000 (1M people), 100000 (1M people), 200000 (1 person)]. Then anyone with $1 in net assets has more wealth than the bottom 2/3. In particular, the top person also has more wealth than the bottom 2/3.

All this fact says is that a bunch of assets minus a bunch of debts adds up to small numbers.

(Also note that I said "about half the world" - I don't claim to know the exact cutoff.)

Your point appears to be that if enough people have debt, you don't need to have much to be above them. In short, you're trying to argue that there aren't many actual poor people and that there aren't a small number of super rich people (as the report suggests). Your point is wrong.

Most people are not in debt, as illustrated by the fact that you require USD 3,650 to have more wealth than 50% of people. If most people were in debt then USD 1 would be more than required.

Your figure of USD 150 is ludicrously inaccurate. That's nowhere near half the world. That's my point.

In short, you're trying to argue that there aren't many actual poor people...

I never claimed this. I merely said the specific statistic used to argue this is a poor one.

Again, let me tweak my counterexample to precisely debunk your claim, since you seem to believe $3650 is a magic number while $100k (what I used) is not: [-3650, -3650, 3650, 3650, 3651]. This is a population with median wealth of $3650. The net wealth of the bottom 4/5 is $0 < $1 < $150.

Thus, you have not debunked my claim. Median(x) > $150 does not imply cumsum(x) > $150.

> I merely said the specific statistic used to argue this is a poor one.

No, you claimed, "All that statistics says is a lot of people have debt."

It does not say any such thing. The fact you can choose a contrived set of figures to match the median wealth figures doesn't mean that those figures are representative in any way of the actual distribution of wealth in the world. They certainly are not.

Your claim that the value of the median is mostly due to debt is flat out wrong. Your claim that possession of $150 puts your wealth above 50% of the planet is flat out wrong.

Your claim that Median(x) > $150 does not imply cumsum(x) > $150 is correct, assuming you don't know the distribution. One out of three ain't bad, I guess.

Sure contemporary capitalism has achieved some positives for the living standards of people globally (it's also destroyed others such as Amazonian tribes etc) but I think it's quite clear that it has run it's natural course and that it will be replaced by something either more efficient or more egalitarian soon. Hopefully any new system will have elements of both and probably it will also have heavy capitalist roots still.

You seem to be using a definition of equality that you haven't fully explained. Do you mean more equal in terms of ownership? If so, how is that valuable?

The way I think of it is more equal access to: schooling, healthcare, basic income, nature, and things like: equality between the sexes, less racial or other discrimination, functional democratic political system, practical equality when confronted with the law.

The legal control of a certain amount of wealth says nothing about the extent to which people have been removed from anything. For example Warren Buffett controls tens of billions of dollars worth of economic value, but that value is stored in companies that employ hundreds of thousands of humans.

Well, Norway, a country with a population of the size of Colorado, also has more money than half of the world. Does the fact that their society is more equal in itself actually help with the problem you're describe regard worldwide inequality? I don't see the mechanism.

Maybe the definition and purpose of a company is not so set in stone. Of course I can see how you could have come to this conclusion and often you are probably correct in the assumption but it would also be possible to say:

Companies are simply a tool for creating value for humans by allowing us to exchange money for convenience. Just because the running of the Ethereum mobility company (for example) is completely automated doesn't mean that people won't be able to get from A to B using it.

Not-for-profit companies shouldn't exist then?

Most nonprofits are still profitable for the staff. Sometimes immensely profitable, for the CEOs at least.

However, most companies provide value to customers. This article proposes companies that do so without any staff or owners. I don't think that's very realistic, but it is intriguing.

A non-profit which isn't profitable for the staff, i.e. pays salary, isn't going to be around for long, if it isn't primarily volunteer work and then the money to operate is subsidised through other means. Which is ok, but not sustainable in many contexts. (Attacking non-profits CEOs feels like a straw man in this context, and doesn't really add anything.)

Ethereum components are:

- cryptocurrency - blockchain - consensus mechanism - miners - virtual machine - programmability - browser client

As an open source project it leaves it open to developers, entrepreneurs and organizations to use it and create the applications they wish.

All external political and social dramatization is personal opinion and judgement.

One thing which I think could hold projects like this back a little is the cryptocurrency component. I haven't delved into developing with Ethereum yet... would it be possible to use the non-cryptocurrency components with a FIAT payment system such as Stripe or Paypal?

Sure. Think of Ethereum as a global computer that coordinates human interactions. On top of it, you encode the rules that those interactions should follow, and a mechanism for recording who has been following the rules and who hasn't.

A decentralized Uber would have logic that records how often drivers show up when they offer a ride, how often they're late, how clean their cars are, etc. It would have similar logic for riders to handle their end of the interaction like the one you pointed out: did they pay what was agreed on?

The payment mechanism is irrelevant. Driver and rider satisfaction is what matters, and that's easy to track without putting any limits on their real world interactions.

Banks don't normally give bank accounts to robots.

They do and very frequently. A big chunk of intraday trading of currencies and bonds is done by bots that connect through APIs to brokers like interactive brokers.

There a some mutual fund companies that have "black box" investment managers, which are computer programs that manage whole portfolios and trade their institutional accounts at investment banks.

Program trading on the NYSE has been active since the 1980s.

They gave the account to a company and the company delegated access to a robot. However the account is not in the name of the robot.

They do to companies though.

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