Evolutions of human organization

First came the bureaucrats, then the mega corps, then the tech companies, then the gig economy. Now we've got AI. Evolution, or devolution?

Bureaucracy enabled the unprecedented terror of World War I. Well, bureaucracy along with the machine gun and mustard gas and flamethrowers and a few other technological “marvels”. But as terrible and shocking as the mass produced mechanical killing devices really were, it was the political machinery, the thousands of clerks pushing paper behind desks which for the first time rapidly brought to bear millions of men to be put in the killing fields in the first place.

In the second half of the 20th century, the same power of paper pushing quill drivers had enabled the rise of Josef Stalin (himself a paper pusher of outstanding capacity) and formed the Soviet Union, and would also mature, perhaps finally now in at least a somewhat happier example, into the mega corporations of 1960s America.

The end of the 20th century would give birth to the first really effective amalgamation of mechanized organization of human beings with the power of computers, to form yet another and more powerful, this time transnational, series of corporations.

This was the first glimpse of something emerging that would begin to rival traditional governments in power, which depending on one’s temperament might be considered to be either exciting or unsettling or both. But regardless of how one feels about it, the fact remains that while the mid-century mega corporations had been largely able to be understood within national lines, these new corporations seemed to defy national boundaries. They did, however, remain hierarchical, and in some fairly real way, centralized.

But we are now in the 21st century, finding ourselves on the frontier of yet another means of human cooperation, for good or ill, the foretastes of which we have seen with Uber and Etsy and Airbnb, as the so called “gig economy” begins to harness the power of millions of ostensibly independent workers, unified and supervised and brought to common standard of service only by the sophisticated software through which they are all connected with consumers.

I believe that we are still far from the high point of software enabled human organization, and that AI will almost certainly accelerate its development. AI itself, in its current form at least, is in fact arguably a case of it, as the independent and voluntary intelligent work of millions of people has been programmatically collected and distilled into something which can now be reused and reshaped in new contexts and for new purposes.

This command over the verbal expression of ideas will I think soon be used in order to harness the power of workers for tasks which are less easily measured than those which were amenable to the first round of software organization. It's not so hard to determine somewhat algorithmically whether or not an Uber driver did his job. If people were picked up when they asked for rides and taken to where they asked to go and do not comment about anything terribly distasteful or illegal happening to them in the interim, then the driver has been a success. Likewise if goods are shipped as described in pictures and text and arrive on time in the condition promised, then a dealer of goods can be considered a success.

But there are many other types of transactions which continue to be negotiated between one person and another, and for which ongoing relationships and reputation between individual people, or between brands and people, continue to matter. This tends to be the case where the value delivered is somewhat intangible or complex or otherwise hard to encapsulate in a brief description.

Note that I'm not advocating for the removal of all relationship based transactions, let alone for the removal of all relationships! In fact these things are likely a huge portion of the glue holding modern society together, and in my opinion one of the major shortcoming even of the very successful platforms like Etsy or Amazon is that, when things do go wrong, as they inevitably do, there's no human relationship anywhere to be found to fall back on.

That being said it does seem clear to me that our capacity to route consumers to goods and more importantly to services is about to grow tremendously in its sophistication and scale. In parallel to this, of course, our ability to route people to each other for ostensibly (e.g. twitter, tiktok) non-commercial purposes, albeit ones which seem inevitably to often turn into commercial purposes, but also carry tremendous societal weight in their own right, this has also increased massively and will continue to increase.

As an example, I can imagine a world in which I no longer have to call five different mechanics in order to spec out an engine swap for my truck. Rather, I ask my AI agent to find the best one and input a couple of criteria and it goes and negotiates with the AI agents of each mechanics’ shop, incorporating feedback from others (e.g. reviews) with a higher impact from people who are higher in a trust hierarchy in my own network. My agent could ask about very particular desires I might have for how this could be done, e.g. “please use this particular make of motor mount,” the sort of thing which would never be listed on a mechanic’s website. This is a lot closer, I think, to how people really select services in a lot of ways in the current website based model. That is, real life people tend to ask their friends and weigh the recommendations of people whom they trust, and they often speak directly to the person who will do the work in order to ascertain particular details that matter to them about how it will be done.

Simultaneously, the way that we govern and shape our public square, i.e., the big social networks, has a long ways to go in development as well. Rather than shadowy decisions made by nameless, faceless actors regarding what content to boost or not, how to tweak the algorithm, who to censor or kick off a platform… we could actually have American style values and democracy and deliberation take place to really shape these things. While the current system attempts, in theory, to please everyone with technological wizardry and some sort of mathematical computation of what everyone wants, the reality is that there are many matters upon which society can really only head in one direction at a time, and consequently must deliberate, and ultimately exercise power.

So in both the commercial and social spheres we have rapidly developing capability for collaboration, and consequently rapidly growing need for for this collaboration to be structured and organized. My generation, the millennials, by and large have little to no interest in working for the large corporations. The multinational tech corpse with really high compensation, maybe, the old school traditional American companies, not at all. This means that many of us will be throwing ourselves into the market. But the market is not simply a platonic entity, just like the physical markets from which it takes its name, it has a shape and a structure to it. This shape and structure can be better or worse, more or less freeing, more or less in the service of those who participate in it versus merely in the service of a few who take value from it. So we need people thinking broadly about the structure of these things and how they can be configured and arranged in such a way that they actually serve the lives of those who pour there time and attention into work, and the lives of their families. For many people their interface with the market will be a sort of loose partnership mediated by primarily by software.

Exactly who does this and how they do it will matter in a tremendous way for the unfolding life of society. While it will be no doubt chaotic and unclear at first, it will finally be the case that the formation of these software-enabled loose associations will take place according to some underlying principles of order and organization.

The question to me that is most interesting as this unfolds is, what will be these organizing principles? “But it’s all obvious!” you may say. And some of it is obvious. Customers largely know what they want and will be pleased when they receive it and displeased when they don’t, at least in the short term.

But will it accumulate power into the hands of a few or distribute power? The answer to this isn’t obvious, nor even is the ideal as obvious as it might seem. What is the measure of an effective digital social network? The early metrics, most notably engagement, have proven to be not only insufficient, but in some ways catastrophic. What would it look like to create these networks in a way that moves us towards human connection and away from consumerism, and not vice versa? How does one craft these networks in such a way that participation on the whole is truly voluntary rather than semi-coerced? What does it look like to form these massive arbiters of power with due and proper respect for existing nation-states, but simultaneously with a willingness to embrace what is coming in the future?

There is a tremendous opportunity arising for the formation of a new social order.

Before World War I it was unimaginable to rapidly mobilize a million men. Through the 20th century it became increasingly common, first along national and then international lines. But the man at the desk dictating their movements remained a necessity. Here in the 21st century we find a new type of affiliation emerging. A looser and potentially more voluntary and less centrally controlled one. Alexis de Tocqueville famously commented that one of the most distinctive things about 19th century America was the Americans’ constant propensity to form associations of all kinds. But it remains to be seen whether our newfound power of affiliation facilitated by software will blossom into an even greater instance of the same spirit, or will wither into something much darker.

Fundamentally, it will either cultivate freedom, the very glory of God which is man fully alive… or it will sow destruction, slavery, surveillance and misery. While it is hard for us to grasp what we are aiming at, it is important that we attempt to do so as we form this new organization. While the eclipse of the bureaucrat seems that it could hardly be a bad thing, what comes next could indeed be much, much worse. Or much, much better.

Which way, western man?