Will AI be our servant and save capitalism with help from blockchain?

 

Capitalism is in crisis, with way too much inequality. This is bad news because the communism alternative has failed dismally in practice.

When Karl Marx was writing Das Kapital over 150 years ago it was obvious that the “means of production” (which he believed workers should own) were factories powered by humans using the technology of the Industrial Revolution, but owned by   a few rich people.

The means of production in the 21st century will be AI machines with only a few humans involved. 

AI could make the capitalism crisis worse – millions lose their jobs while a few become very rich – or could be part of the solution. 

Like Karl Marx I believe that these 21st century means of production should be primarily owned by workers. This does NOT mean that communism (which has failed in every experiment so far) is the alternative to capitalism. It DOES mean that capitalism needs to change. Read on while I break that down for you. 

You can ask ChatGPT AI to write something in the style of Karl Marx or paint something in the style of Van Gogh. What ChatGPT cannot do is come up with new ideas like Karl Marx or Van Gogh did. This massively raises the bar for us humans and very few will do this. What most humans will do (if they are free from the need to trade time for money) is either create something or help friends & family. There will be jobs of course and we cannot forecast what these will be, as we could not in every other tech driven disruption. 

We will all have to adapt to this new reality. For example, Education will need to become less test-driven. If ChatGPT can write good enough papers to fool most teachers, those teachers will have to engage students in conversation, exposing those who cheated using AI and helping those who want to learn. 

As the Soviet Union communism experiment discovered, you have to make a product/service that people want at the right price and sell it to them in a competitive market. Bureaucrats are lousy at this; that is why capitalism beat communism at allocating resources to products/services that people want. Workers  who are owners  will be motivated to  make a product/service that people want Ownership matters. 

Decentralized value exchange via Blockchain could help AI be our servant and save capitalism.

Imagine a robotaxi service owned by workers/drivers. This is single function AI, complex because the risk of failure is high. The drivers will own this robotaxi service and will be motivated to a) manage the transition from driver assisted to fully automated and b) sell the service to customers. Every worker/driver becomes a sales person if that worker is an owner. This is technically simple with decentralized value exchange via Blockchain.

Worker owned AI services could be positioned like Universal Basic Income (UBI). The end result is the same, but with more worker “skin  in the game”. 

Worker owned AI services should be primarily owned by workers not 100%, with A MINORITY 25% going to early stage cash investors and technology and other service providers.