Becoming noble

As technology develops, most people will form a non-productive, extractive class, like the nobility of former times. What will this kind of noble life be like?

William James Müller, A View of Bristol from Clifton Woods, 1837, Wikimedia Commons.

I have a vision for the future. I guess that the normal thing to do in such a situation is to write a novel painting that vision from different angles. But I can't write novels. I hardly read them. So instead I write a blog post that explains the logical background for my vision.

A year ago, in a post called Everybody wants a piece of Marc Andreessen, I wrote about the growing phenomenon that some people produce so much and others so little. I then focused on how the rest of society is practically stealing from the highly productive few. Ostensibly, rules and regulations are invented to maintain and increase order and safety. But a side effect is that upholding and implementing the regulations requires staff. Staff who get paid a share of what the efficient producers can make.

That time, I saw the problem mainly from the side of the superproducers: They are being curtailed by host populations who not only confiscate most of the value of what they produce, but who also make production much more difficult through the way confiscation is carried out.

Hello from the other side

However, there is another side of the question. It is true that superproducers make stuff and the rest of us are finding different, mostly sneaky and dishonest, ways to access some of that stuff. But as a matter of fact, the rest of us produce something too: Security.

In modern society, security tends to be taken for granted, to the degree that many people imagine that prehistory was a peaceful place populated by noble savages. The undervaluation of security is our society's big blind spot. Marxism taught that societies are shaped by their production of material necessities - not by their security needs. Although Marxism has been heavily opposed from other angles, this one has been largely uncontradicted. Also people who are not Marxists tend to believe that history was a mostly peaceful struggle to produce the necessities of life.

I believe this is the most important mistake of our society's view of history. It takes security for granted when it really should not. Idealized pictures of human nature as peaceful devalues the extreme efforts our ancestors spent in order to reach the levels of security we currently enjoy.

Gangster life is the baseline

If there is something like human nature, there also has to be something like basic human social structure (more about that in my post called Basic Human Social Structure). Due to the combination of human nature and the laws of the game, humans tend to interact in accordance with a certain pattern.

A simpler way to put it, is that without civilization, all humans are gangsters. Because what is a tribe of a hundred people fighting or making alliances with neighboring groups, if not a gang? The main difference is that in modern society, people have at least some kind of choice over whether to belong to a criminal gang or to mainstream society. When there is no civilization within reach, everybody is a gangster. Also the most peaceful, prosocial individuals are forced into a gangster lifestyle, because that is all there is.

The noble few, the noble many

Under basic human social structure, there is little specialization except between the sexes. The men are the security specialists, extracting labor from women. Except for sex differences, there are no social classes. Enemies are simply killed - either people are formally equal, or they are dead.

Eventually, societies where warriors supported by a working class consisting of both males and females evolved. Since then, there have been both a higher class of warrior men and a lower class of non-warrior men. In most civilizations classes of women also evolved, to different degrees.

For most of history, there were much more workers than warriors. With Malthusian forces at play, that was a necessity. In the Middle Ages, only a low percentage of the population was noble (that is, warriors). The rest were workers supporting the nobility with material goods. In Ancient Athens up to a third of the men were citizens and part-time warriors. But most of the time they were farmers and thereby workers.

In pre-modern time, work simply was an important part of the war effort. The more well-equipped warriors an area could produce, the better its army. So in order to win the wars, a society should keep its population right below the limit of an area's carrying capacity. Only a population capable of working also the less desirable parts of an area was capable of holding it in the longer run. Rulers who could get a lot of taxes out of their areas got rich enough to conquer neighboring areas.

The logical continuation of this principle is capitalism. Capitalism doubtlessly is the way to get the most out of an area. So why did it take so long to reach that stage? Probably because it requires the warriors to hand over power to the producers. Capitalism requires warriors to patiently allow talented workers to do their thing, using enormous resources in the process. This development stood in direct opposition to the warrior class, which lost both resources and prestige in the process. But the warriors had no choice. If they didn't allow merchants and industrialists a certain amount of freedom, they got less taxes than their neighboring warriors and got annihilated. So step by step, the warrior class in the Western world gave away the power over most of society's resources to the capitalist class.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the capitalist system was so firmly established that people started to forget the real nature of power. Ayn Rand considered industrialists strong and independent and recommended them to be selfish. She failed to acknowledge their utter dependence on the whims of those with the power to kill.

By the 20th century, civilization was standing so firmly that people mistook it for human nature. The crimes of Nazism were analyzed over and over again from a how could this happen to a species as gentle as ours perspective. Looking at history as a whole, it is Nazism that is normal. In human history, the idea that the in-group is nobler than the out-group and therefore should conquer the out-group's land is as normal as normal can be. And the Marxist idea that the people have the right to take the resources of the capitalist class is just as normal. Whatever can be taken belongs to those who can take it is a basic law of human existence. The special thing with civilization is that it urges people not to create coalitions whenever they can and take everything they can take and share the spoils. In practice, Karl Marx urged the working class to revert to human nature and conquer by force when possible.

Human nature is to create coalitions that conquer and steal everything they can. Every form of human organization that is more advanced than this is called civilization. And civilization is both costly and brittle.

Defending a vulnerable civilization

It is in this light every discussion of fairness, justice and social redistribution has to be seen. Transfers from rich people to poor people are commonly seen as pure charity. But in reality, rich people are only rich because we have a system that allows them to be. If enough people don't consider it to be in their interest to uphold that system, it will unravel.

Thereby, what is described as charity is in reality payment to the losers of the system to stay civilized. A kind of tribute to potential warriors. Because one thing hasn't changed: Producers still pay taxes to warriors. It is just that the nature of war and production changed. The more civilized and peaceful society became, the more efficient and thereby vulnerable production could become. In such a situation, very little violence is required to do substantial damage: People can hurt production quite a bit just through blocking the entrance to a factory. This makes every person a potential warrior that needs to be appeased.

In the middle ages, war was for specialists and work was for the masses. We are now increasingly getting the reverse situation: Everyone is a potential threat to production, but fewer and fewer are actually contributing to production in any meaningful way. The more high-tech production becomes, the more dependence on a few key workers increases. When tractors didn't exist, almost everyone was capable of tilling the soil. Only a minority of people are capable of constructing a tractor. And an even smaller minority is capable of building up production of self-driving tractors that automate food production.

In this process an increasing share of the population is transforming from primarily workers to primarily warriors. The more production depends on the ingenuity of a minority, the more the rest of the population will transform into an extractive class with little power to produce efficiently but with growing power to disrupt efficiently.

A new nobility

Last year I described this extractive class mostly in negative terms. As moochers who are stealing from the productive few under the pretext of maintaining order, stifling production in the process.

On the one hand, this is true. This is what is actually happening. On the other hand, the extractive class has never been a merely extractive class: It not only extracts, it also protects. Just as the feudal lords of the Middle Ages not only extracted resources from the peasants, they also protected the peasants from other feudal lords, barbarian slave-hunters and other existential threats. The vast unproductive present populations serve the same function: For a cut of the producers’ output we stay calm and defend society against less civilized threats, letting the producers produce in peace and quiet.

It is true that today's extractive class is much less efficient than it could be. Immense resources are most probably wasted on unnecessary and damaging administration and policing. There is undoubtedly room for improvement. But it is also true that today's extractive class is much better than the baseline: Gangster society. Why can high-tech production exist here and now, when it could not exist in history and can't even exist in most of the world today? Because for the first time in history, it is protected enough against aggression. Nerds who were capable of building a machine that spits out ice-cream cones with little effort have most probably existed for the entire human history. Before capitalism, they were just not offered enough protection to be nerdy together. They weren't allowed to dictate the use of capital to that degree. Capital was overwhelmingly used for military purposes (for example, to build castles). Only gradually more and more capital trickled down to the productive population.

A social organization that allows nerds to cooperate in the service of production is not a part of human nature - it is a feat that surpasses human nature. For that reason, nerds who supply their societies with wonderful products can't expect to live tax-free. Because their societies provide them with something wonderful in return - the opportunity to be nerdy in peace.

Buying peace

When productivity was lower, most people were actually needed in the productive sector. Hitherto an illusion of this still being the case is being upheld. New excuses why people need to work are being invented. Mostly, those reasons are centered around risk and care: Another worker is always needed to reduce one or another risk. And another new worker is needed to provide better care for children, older people, ill people or people who are feeling bad.

This system can't go on forever. If nothing else, it doesn't reproduce itself. People are so busy reducing risks and caring for everyone but their own children that they don't prioritize having children. Such a system is deemed to shrink, if it can't attract a massive inflow of people from adjacent cultures. Whatever is the future of our society, it can't be anything like the current state of things.

Also, the more the gap in productivity between superproducers and the rest widens, the more difficult it will be to hide behind an extractive bureaucracy. Sooner or later this will change (not a very brave assumption since everything changes). The question is: In what direction will it change?

Will the superproducers secede?

Anders has told me this for many years: When the lower class is automated away, the producing class will no longer want to deal with them. They will secede into charter cities where only they can afford to live and leave the rest behind.

I don't think this will happen, for a couple of reasons.

1. A charter city in the middle of chaos is not a great place to be. Yes, you can build a great missile defense system so no one and nothing enters without a visa. But that is not how most highly productive, highly intelligent Westerners prefer to live. People value order to the degree that they are prepared to make quite a few sacrifices to increase order even on the opposite side of the world. As long as supporting order in their immediate surroundings is affordable, rich cities will do so, just as current rich countries support forces they like and order in general with foreign aid.

2. Superproducers will have problems reproducing themselves. Partially because of low birth rates when people are too busy producing. Partially because of the capricious nature of talent. Superproducers do not only have high IQ. They have it. And the meaning of it will change when production develops. Also charter cities filled with superproducers will soon consist of quite a share of deadweight after a few generations.

If the superproducing cities can't purge a certain share of their populations, they will not be superproducing cities for long. Because descendants of the superproducers who can't superproduce themselves will probably find obstructive ways to mooch. They will make themselves important the same way that people in our society who are not great at producing are doing, to the detriment of production.

For that reason, having nice, alternative ways ready for less promising, or less ambitious young people, should be a great advantage for superproducing cities. Also, since talent is capricious to its nature, there is an advantage to being able to pick talent from a bigger pool than the superproducing city itself. In particular if that city, like cities in general, has a low birthrate.

Islands of production in a sea of religion

For those reasons I find it unlikely that superproducers will secede completely. Supporting the surrounding countryside to a certain degree will be cheap. To some degree, superproducers will have the opportunity to decide who they want as their neighbors. If you own a machine that spits out ice cream cones at a low cost, giving away some of your ice cream is easy. Too much of it will make you sick anyway.

To take an extreme example: It is easy to say that the Amish will be useless as soon as their businesses get automated away. But that completely ignores one of their functions: They are not gangsters. Being pacifists, they in no way police against outlaws in their areas. Nonetheless, they are filling up the countryside, making less room for more disturbing people there. People who have Amish neighbors escape the fate of having a meth-lab as their neighbor. A highly productive city that invites the Amish to occupy its surroundings will have a peaceful population that is resilient against social problems as a buffer around itself. Thereby they escape the fate of having a disorderly and violent population as their immediate neighbors.

I think this will be the basic function of people who are not superproducers: To fill out the space so it doesn't get filled with gangsters. Or, in other words, to have culture.

Have children and stay out of the way

Superproducers will want to cooperate with people who are not superproducers but have some kind of culture. How will that culture be?

Ideally, a culture surrounding an island with superproducers should be

1. civilized,

2. uncompetitive and

3. genuinely grateful for scraps.

The first is a prerequisite for it to be useful. The second is a prerequisite for it to stay separate from the culture of the superproducers. If it is competitive, its members will start challenging the superproducers for status. Point 3 is a prerequisite for harmonious relationships. If members of the adjacent culture resent living in the shadows, it will not be a very useful symbiosis.

On a practical level, I think an anti-materialist culture is the best candidate. The only way to live in peaceful symbiosis with a richer culture is to genuinely not care for being rich.

In other words, I am the Unabomber once again. Or the peaceful twin of the Unabomber who wants to live in harmony with high-tech society, although also partially outside it.

Let us work!

The more exclusive high-tech society becomes, the more it needs an outside - not just a bottom. It needs an antithesis that is also a partner. A reserve of people who defend high-tech society and make up for the low fertility of high-tech society.

In practical terms, how would the superproducers pay their gatekeeper populations? A universal basic income is the most obvious solution. At low levels, that is not a wild idea. After all, numerous societies pay universal basic incomes to people below the age of 18 - so called child benefits.

Still, I don't believe that a universal basic income high enough to live comfortably on is the best idea. That would be a signal saying: Stay put! Do nothing! Play computer games all day! And although untested, nothing says that a society where grown-ups play computer games all day is a good society. The experience hitherto is discouraging: No society where people play computer games to any greater extent has managed to maintain fertility over replacement level.¹

Some populations do indeed keep themselves away from entertainment also when provided for. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel would not spend their extra time on computer games, but on studying ancient texts and having children. But in general, providing citizens with a basic income high enough to live on is an untested recipe.

My guess is that rather than paying the low-tech population in massive amounts of cash, it makes more sense to provide a welfare state to them. First and foremost, allow them high-tech medical treatment for free. Otherwise they will always be nervous that they can't afford it when they need it. Opportunities to rise through education for promising young people could also be a good idea. Otherwise the low-tech population will not be a pool of talent to the same degree.

But the most important measure, that should be taken here and now, is to allow the low-tech population to make a living for themselves as unbothered as possible by rules and regulations and taxes. Work is not only about earning a living. In a higher-tech world where goods are produced very cheaply, it will be even less so. Work is also about interaction between people. Taxing and regulating work is the same thing as taxing and regulating interaction between people. That should only be done when obviously necessary.

In very productive sectors, taxes don't matter very much. When people are superproductive, they will be well-off also if half their earnings are taken away. Some rules are also necessary because of the sheer power of technology: When big tech goes wrong, it has the potential to go wrong for real. But in less productive sectors, taxes generate little revenue and discourage a lot of human interaction. Rules and regulations are less necessary, because the less efficient an operation is, the less damage it can cause: A family building houses by hand has the potential to cause much fewer faulty houses than a robot-based construction firm automatically building hundreds of identical houses. There are good reasons to direct both the taxes and the supervision to the latter venue and allow the low-tech population a high degree of freedom to organize their own lives and communities.

I live in a society where people are not officially allowed to do anything for money without filing for taxes and complying with official regulations. People can't even sell fruit from their own garden without filing for taxes and it is illegal to sell cakes from one's own kitchen without getting an official food permit. The rational explanation behind such rules is that people should always be pushed to the most productive work possible. If people are allowed to work without paying taxes and adhering to rules, then they will compete with people who do the same job for a living. And then the gray market will dominate, outcompeting certain parts of the white market.

I think that is exactly what needs to happen: The development of a big and vibrant gray market where low-tech people are allowed to interact with each other without competing on equal terms with the high-tech sector. I think that already here and now, we need to start departing from the notion that the only thing people can contribute to society is maximally productive work. That was never true. And the more high-tech production becomes, the less true it gets. Citizens need to be appreciated as bearers of culture (that is, to the degree they are).

In a certain sense, this line of thought is a way for me to rationalize my own way of life. I'm living on small economic means in a welfare state. I have a big family. Some of my children are likely to end up in the super-producing economy. Some might be more eager to continue their parents’ way of life for another generation.

Since I'm living this way, you could say that I'm biased. But you could also say that I know a bit about what I'm talking about. Living and raising children beside high-tech society rather than in the middle of it can actually work. And children raised in such environments do not necessarily become unfit for high-tech production, if they have the right type of talent.

I wouldn't have chosen this lifestyle if I didn't believe that there is a future in it. I assume that the bulk of the first-world population of tomorrow will be formed by people living a bit beside high-tech society without antagonizing it. It could be that most of those people will be religious. Hitherto, only religious groups of people have managed to contently live beside high-tech society. But if anyone wants to start a rationalist sect that challenges the religious groups on that point, I'm ready to join. After all, the numbers of citizens detached from high-tech production are growing. For most people, the future is not in high-tech society, but beside it.

1. I don't think Israel counts, because the occasionally computer game playing secular Israelis are being inspired by the non-playing Orthodox Jews.