CHAPTER TEN
SACRED VALUES
Novi Coeptus
AS TECHNOLOGY AND THE AUTONOMOUS REVOLUTION race forward, we are being inundated with substitutional equivalences and new institutional forms. In the process, the gap between the culture that was formed in the Industrial Age and the cultural requirements of our new age are widening.
In chapter 2, we briefly discussed William Ogburn and his theory of cultural lag. Just to review, cultural lag occurs “when one of two parts of culture that are correlated changes before … the other part does.”1 In the case of the Autonomous Revolution, the parts that have changed are the institutional forms associated with the information, intelligence, and spatial equivalences that define our new age. We are spending more and more of our lives in virtual environments and entrusting more and more of our labor and decision-making to intelligent machines. Yet we still live by the rules, systems of governance, beliefs, habits, cultural norms, values, and economic assumptions that developed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.
We are truly at a novi coeptus—a new beginning. And we are falling victim to cultural lag. How do we begin to close this gap? The first thing we must do is to start calling things what they are and not what we wish them to be.
We can begin by calling the Autonomous Revolution what it is. It is not the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” as many insist on calling it. If we call it that, we will think of it that way. If we believe that we are experiencing the next phase of the Industrial Revolution, we will respond by attempting to rejigger industrial-age processes to deal with the new forms. We will fail to address our new challenges at their roots and we will miss out on great opportunities. Worse still, we will apply obsolete solutions to our most pressing problems.
The three Industrial Revolutions were driven by power equivalences—the First by steam power, the Second by electricity, and the Third by computing. Despite those changes, institutional forms stayed pretty much the same, and they were embedded in a cultural system that was very stable as well. We believed in liberty and democracy, the free market, and the value of hard work in 1787 and we still believe in those things today.
When the steam power of the First Industrial Revolution was replaced by the electric power of the Second, it became possible to put small amounts of distributed power at individual workstations rather than locating workstations in a line that drew their power from leather belts driven by overhead shafts that were powered by steam engines. Factories were still factories—they just became more efficient. When computer power replaced mechanical computation, the factory was still a factory, but the spreadsheets used to control production were no longer produced by clerks with slide rules and accounting pads. Computing power now took over the job.
Throughout the 250 years of the Industrial era(s), our system of governance has remained remarkably stable. While we may debate its size, most of us would not want to return to the minimal national government of the past. Most of us would still want Social Security, Medicare, and some degree of market regulation.
Our habits, beliefs, and cultural norms have been fairly constant as well. Even though we have had a secular government since our founding, Christian values, beliefs, and holidays are still dominant. The Protestant work ethic has shaped government policies and our perceptions of human worth. We look down on people who cannot hold jobs and are suspicious of those who need government assistance.
The structural transformations that characterize the Autonomous Revolution are changes of kind as well as form. We are moving into a future in which millions, through no fault of their own, will not have jobs, and in which machines will be more valued as workers than humans. We are experiencing a societal phase change, and as such, many of our new forms are fundamentally incompatible with our old rules and norms.
A HARD TURN
The dry words of history books do not do phase changes justice. The hard reality is that these transformations are wrenching. The struggles of workers, children, and families in the early years of the Industrial Age are perhaps best captured in the novels of Charles Dickens, Courbet’s painting The Stone Breakers, stark black-and-white photographs of industrial slums and cities clouded in smoke, and Charlie Chaplin’s classic movie Modern Times.
But perhaps the most powerful account of a phase change can be found in allegorical form in humanity’s oldest known work of written literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk, civilization’s first major city. Cities represented a major change in societal form, and their growth was driven by the Agricultural Revolution. Like us, Gilgamesh was experiencing a rapid change in forms and norms and he was struggling with cultural lag. To build his army, he forced boys to become disciplined soldiers, whereas in a tribal culture they would have aspired to be freebooting warriors—a change in values.
Gilgamesh himself was a poor excuse for a monarch—self-indulgent, corrupt, and violent, he abused his power. He took the virginity of young girls and slept with his citizens’ brides on their wedding nights. The people of Uruk were so oppressed that they prayed to the gods Anu and Aruru to protect them.2
The gods, as they must, decided to teach Gilgamesh a lesson. They created a wild man, Enkidu, an emissary from the old, pre-agrarian life, and sent him to Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh to a test of strength. Gilgamesh defeated Enkidu, and they became friends. Together they then journeyed to the dangerous, supernatural Cedar Grove. Driven by their lust for fame, Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down the virgin stands.3 Gilgamesh himself toppled the Sacred Cedar. But then they went too far and killed the sacred bull of the goddess Ishtar. Gilgamesh had already gotten on Ishtar’s bad side by spurning her advances. Now, furious, she punished him by having Enkidu killed. The old life—the old world—was now gone forever.
Shattered and for the first time truly cognizant—and fearful—of death, a desperate Gilgamesh traveled the earth in search of immortality, his last hope. Of course, his quest was a failure. In the end, the chastened but wiser king returned to Uruk as a mortal.
Early in Gilgamesh’s journey, the tavern keeper Siduri gave him some timeless advice:
Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek. When the gods created mankind, they also created death, and they held back eternal life for themselves alone. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight…. Let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace. That is the best way for a man to live.4
Today, as we rush headlong into the Autonomous Revolution, we too are cutting down sacred cedars and killing sacred bulls. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, we have gone too far. The victims of our virtual slash-and-burn activities are things like privacy, face-to-face interactions, and thoughtful disagreements with our peers. Porn sites (and soon robots) are replacing sex, and trolls are replacing objective sources of information. Like Gilgamesh, we wander without direction in virtual space, looking for the Plant of Immortality. We Tweet, take selfies, become trolls, join affinity groups, and pride ourselves on our thousands of contentless friendships, all in a fruitless quest for enduring self-esteem.
It is fitting that civilization’s first work of literature addresses the dizzyingly disorienting experience of phase change. We too will struggle as we leave the old and familiar behind and begin to try on our new identities. In the process, we will redefine our lives and institutions to mesh with virtual space. But the enduring lesson of The Epic of Gilgamesh is that, if we go too far, our wanderings will be futile. Even as we adapt to phase change, we are going to have to pay heed to Siduri’s advice and hold on to those things that are too sacred to lose.
ONLY ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
The primary focus of this book has been to examine the changes in form and rules that are already under way. We have identified many of them and speculated about others, from the potential effects of autonomous vehicles to trends under way in the financial services industry. We have identified the types of rule changes that might accompany these new forms and in the process have advanced ideas about the control of free speech, consumer ownership of personal information, how to reduce the power of monopolies that seek to control our behavior, and the potential of building infrastructure to provide new jobs.
In most cases, we can exercise less control over the changes in form than over the rules that govern the behavior of those forms. One reason for that is the pace of change in the virtual world. Think how quickly Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb happened. A second reason is that we see the good in a change first and have a hard time envisioning its bad side effects. Initially many of us thought that Facebook would be a great way to keep families together. Who could have anticipated that it would become a tool for foreign governments to manipulate our elections? We are reluctant, as we should be, to attempt to exercise control over a form that is doing wonderful things, based on an apprehension that something bad—we know not what—might happen.
Finally, these new forms will be extremely efficient and convenient to use. Many will be so appealing that they will win in the free market and rapidly crowd out the old ways of doing things. Think of how quickly WeChat Pay assembled a network of 300,000 stores and 200 million users in China to replace credit cards.5
But time is also the reason that we can shape new rules. Once the new forms are locked in, they will be with us for a long time. We will have time to craft our responses to them. But the longer we wait to start, the more difficult it will be to shape them to our liking. Like the freemium business model, once a rule has been established and widely accepted, it becomes extremely difficult to change.
In prior chapters, we have suggested some possible new rules for the Autonomous Revolution. But we also recognize that we are so early in the process that these suggestions are necessarily incomplete—and may ultimately prove misguided. Still, they are a stake in the ground, a beginning from which we can start the critical conversation. There will still be—there must be—considerable debate about what these new rules should be. We are sure that others will come up with different approaches, and many of them will be better than ours.
We expect the changes we have suggested to spark considerable criticism and resistance. As always, some will want to stick with the increasingly unworkable status quo. When the Industrial Revolution came, some people stayed on the farm and in rural villages, even as the jobs went away and the once vibrant local stores vanished from Main Street and ghost towns rose in their stead.
By the same token, many technocrats will want to race ahead and let the brutal free market set the rules. Allowing its winners untrammeled access to the tools that shape public opinion, giving them unlimited latitude to find out what is going on in our minds, granting them the power to decide what we can read, giving them great power to influence our actions and what we should know is something that would be unacceptable to many.
Of course, making the right rule changes will help to reduce cultural lag. But rule changes will not be enough in and of themselves. The other correlated parts that have to change to reduce cultural lag are our systems of governance, beliefs, habits, cultural norms, and values.
Almost a century ago John Maynard Keynes foresaw many of the economic and cultural challenges we are now facing. Keynes was deeply worried about a new societal dysfunction—technological unemployment (what he called job loss due to automation).6 He knew then, just as we know now, how difficult it would be for people who were threatened by change to adapt to it, and he accurately foresaw the stresses that rapid increases in productivity would exert on our value system.
In 1930, in his now-classic article, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes postulated the end of the Protestant work ethic—one of our most basic values—and imagined a time when the accumulation of wealth would no longer be of high social importance:
[T]echnical improvements in manufacture and transport have been proceeding at a greater rate in the last ten years than ever before in history. In the United States factory output per head was 40 per cent greater in 1925 than in 1919…. In quite a few years—in our own lifetimes I mean—we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed.
For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve…. We are being afflicted with a new disease … namely, technological unemployment….
… I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day….
… This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race….
The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes….
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.7
An increasingly jobless future isn’t such a terrible thing to contemplate if everyone shares in the general prosperity.
The changes that Keynes foresaw in morals and values were driven by process changes that were taking place during the Second Industrial Revolution. Think of what he might have envisioned if he had anticipated the equivalences that are today changing the nature of space and replacing humans’ minds.
Unfortunately, Keynes did not give us much practical advice on how to create those new values and make his fifteen-hour workweek work. As we see it, the key ingredient that will be needed for reducing our cultural lag will be leadership.
To adapt to the Autonomous Revolution—and keep it from going off the rails into nightmare scenarios—our national, local, business, religious, institutional, and educational leaders will have to model a new set of values. The alternative is to continue down the road of extreme political and economic polarization that we are on now.
If we stay on our current path, we will build a new social structure that’s based on continual conflict between winners and losers. This will have some very undesirable consequences. Progress will be defined not in terms of problems solved and forward movement, but in undoing whatever solutions the prior group put into place. Because of the constant changes in direction, businesses will become fearful of making long-term investments or taking bold risks. Inevitably, economic growth will suffer.
The consequences of having an economically and politically dominant group of “winners” are also unattractive. When one group stays in power for a long time, it inevitably falls into corruption. And since there will be more losers than winners, social unrest—and ultimately social collapse—are inevitable.
There is another reason why opting for our present, deeply polarized approach will not work. Today’s polarized groups are defined by hardline philosophical positions that are based on 250 years and three Industrial Revolutions worth of experiences. They exist to defend those distinct philosophies. Thus, their approaches to the challenges of the Autonomous Revolution will tend to be based on outdated beliefs, thinking, and understandings—and not upon the search for new solutions that will work with new forms.
For these reasons we both hope and believe that Americans will reject polarization.
We hope that Americans will select and follow leaders who will be wise enough to embrace the correct changes while preserving those things that are too sacred to lose. Those values will have to include democracy, freedom and liberty, privacy, and tolerance. They will place a premium on truth and honesty. They will have a healthy skepticism when it comes to extremist positions. They will view technology holistically and attempt to understand not only its operational and economic effects but also its psychological and sociological implications.
They will also realize that, while rules can mitigate cultural lag, they are an imperfect solution. Rules, laws, and technological fixes will not work unless they are supported by values and cultural norms that are thoroughly internalized.
Income taxes are a case in point. The U.S. system depends on voluntary compliance: though it has its auditors, the government essentially trusts its citizens to accurately report their income.8 That’s not naïve. One recent study, based on a sample of two thousand taxpayers, found that only 6 percent of Americans knowingly cheat on their returns.9
By comparison, a very large number of taxpayers cheat in Greece. To save on taxes, only 324 residents in one community reported ownership of a private swimming pool—while satellite photos showed that in fact 16,794 existed. Greece has a large underground economy. Because receipts can be used to track unreported income, many professionals choose not to issue them. One customer reported that his auto mechanic charges him quite a bit more if he asks for a receipt.10
It is extremely difficult to make a voluntary compliance system work in a culture where large numbers believe it is acceptable to cheat. Tax evasion runs between 6 percent and 9 percent of GDP in Greece. Government revenues would be 20 to 25 percent higher if Greeks were as honest about their taxes as Americans.11
Adam Smith understood that moral authority served as the thumb of the invisible hand. If moral authority broke down, the invisible hand would lose its grip.
In Smith’s day, business activity was predominantly local. One thing that ensured that market participants remained well-behaved was that most people conducted their business affairs in the communities in which they lived. As a result, control rested with one’s neighbors, the people one saw in church, and at meetings of local business organizations.
Smith argued that:
In the race for wealth and honours and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should jostle or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.12
Rules, laws, and cyber controls can help us keep the game fair. But trolls, fake news, cyberbullying, hacking, unethical businesses hiding in virtual space, and groups that encourage tribal cultures and intolerance will continue to exist. Soft solutions may turn out to be the most effective. Charismatic business, government, church, and social leaders are going to have to set and model standards of behavior that turn trolls, cyberbullies, and those who spread fake news into social misfits rather than the heroes that some of them are today.
We must confront two other extremely important issues as part of our adaptation process. The first has to do with the general level of economic insecurity that currently exists. Many have lost well-paid jobs. Some of us have spent years developing valuable skills that will no longer be valuable. If you are fifty and spent twenty-five years as an expert and have just been replaced by a stupid robot and some computer program offers to retrain you for a job at half your prior salary, it is pretty easy to become both cynical and disillusioned. Large numbers of parents are concerned about the economic futures of their children. When people see change as a zero-sum game that they cannot win, they resist it and attempt to preserve the past. If we are going to adapt well to the Autonomous Revolution, we are going to have to confront this issue head on.
The second issue is that things are happening fast. Therefore, we need to create new rules to accompany the new forms as quickly as possible.
Hopefully we can find free-market solutions (or private/public solutions), such as investing proactively in the infrastructure of the future and in greater entrepreneurship. If those solutions do not lessen inequality, we are going to have to use other systems for redistributing wealth, such as higher taxes, free universal health care, and universal basic income (UBI). One consequence of all of this is that we may end up with even bigger government. Countries like Sweden spend about 10 to 15 percent more of their GDP on government than we do.13 Not coincidentally, Sweden’s Gini coefficient—the lower the number, the greater the income equality—is 0.259, less than a third of that of the United States.14
If the solution to income inequality comes in the form of high tax rates, universal health care, and UBI we will have moved closer to socialism—a very big value change.
To many of us believers in the Protestant work ethic, who sometimes put in fifteen-hour days and think hard work is good not only for business but also for the individual, the economy, and society as a whole, Keynes’s fifteen-hour workweek seems almost unthinkable. For those who believe that the best government is the smallest government, moving closer to a socialized system is a suicidal form of heresy. But what seems like heresy on this side of the culture lag may seem like normalcy on the other.
One of the biggest obstacles we have to deal with is our slow reaction to change. In general, there are good reasons for being cautious when we make big changes. When we attempt to solve new problems we do not fully understand, we are sure to make mistakes. Purported solutions can be worse than the problems they are meant to address.
But time is a luxury we no longer have. While the Agricultural Revolution transpired over ten millennia and the Industrial Revolution over 250 years, much of the Autonomous Revolution will be happening in the next decade. We have to react faster.
There are two possible ways to do this. The first is to make our laws less prescriptive and more focused on broad goals and objectives, delegating the details to the regulatory agencies that will enforce them. The less detailed they are, the faster they can be written and put into effect. Of course, if you do this, you are giving the deep state carte blanche to get deeper—another cultural and value issue. There would be more of the agencies that conservatives love to hate, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
This, of course, goes to the heart of the biggest value/cultural issue that our leaders will have to grapple with in the near future, which is whether we want to adopt a laissez-faire free-market approach or a big-government approach to the adaptation problem. We suspect—and are not entirely happy about it—that we will end up selecting some form of the big-government solution. But how to do this without devolving into kleptocracy, and authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government? High taxes and onerous regulations can stifle economic growth and shrink the pie they’re meant to share. If we must grow government, can we restrain that growth in responsible ways? And what of our liberty? Is this a risk we’re prepared to take?
Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? We come down on the side of optimism for five reasons. First, because we believe that we can preserve the things we hold sacred. Second, because we further believe that those things will bring us together and enable us to adjust to phase change in a peaceable way. Third, because we have solved Keynes’s “economic problem.” That is, because our tools are making us so productive, we have a future of abundance. Fourth, is that our new technologies are making existing products and services better, providing us with new and wonderful services, from virtual travel to having the world’s information at our fingertips, making society more efficient, and helping us deal with many environmental issues. Finally, we know there are new rules that will enable us to mitigate the challenging effect of phase change and enable us to enjoy many of its benefits.
We also believe our commitment as a nation to our sacred values, such as democracy, equality, and liberty and freedom for all, will enable our leaders to bring us together in pursuit of common goals. We are hopeful, despite some of the more distressing trends that we read about in the daily headlines, because Americans in increasing numbers are actually rejecting the extremes. Since 2008, the fastest growing group of voters have been Independents—to the point that in sixteen states (where data is available) they make up a quarter of registered voters.15 We predict this trend will ultimately put pressure on politicians to moderate their positions.
We are also hopeful that in coming years strong leaders will emerge who will ensure both the future of those things we hold sacred and create a shared vision that will enable us to meet our challenges in a constructive way.
What makes us most optimistic is that we have solved the abundance problem. Having done this, we will have the resources to deal with the most challenging issues of phase change.
In a recent article, W. Brian Arthur argues that we have reached what he calls the Keynes Point. Arthur writes, “If total US household income of $8.495 trillion were shared by America’s 116 million households, each would earn $73,000, enough for a decent middle-class life.”16
In other words, there is plenty to go around—something humanity has never seen before. We now have a distribution problem, not a production one—and the former is a lot easier to solve.
Our current technologies are so much more powerful than those of the past. The last two phase changes produced not just incremental, but quantum, improvements in human health, child survival, education, and life expectancy. There is every reason to believe the Autonomous Revolution will do even better.
Humanity has discovered not just a new world, as Columbus did, but a new universe—a virtual one. If we learn from Gilgamesh, listen to Keynes, and play the game using phase change rules, humanity will live better in the physical world as a result. At the same time, we can experience the thrill of discovery as we explore this vast new universe, mining its intangible resources and enhancing our lives with its virtual experiences.
If we polarize, argue, fight, call one another names, and stand idly by and watch while phase change destroys all that is sacred, all of us will be the worse for it. Much worse. But if we choose to solve the challenge of the Autonomous Revolution together, we can live better, more meaningful, and abundant lives. It may not be Utopia, but it may be as close as we imperfect humans will ever get.