A horror story starring old man Capitalism and young buck Artificial Intelligence.

We’re going to start off gently though so don’t worry. I’m going to hold your hand as we take this journey together. But you should know that it is a journey we can’t avoid. And quite honestly, there’s no going back from here. So for now, ignore the scary picture, and lfg…

There is a reasonable chance that you, dear reader, will recoil horribly at the sight of those two words, capitalism and artificial intelligence, filling you with dread, or exhaustion, or the urge to turbo roll your eyes into the back of your head. It is entirely possible that the sight of the former makes you itch from memories of that girl you were trying to hit on at dinner that time going on and on about how if Elon sold just 10% of his Tesla stock and just wasn’t so damn greedy he could solve world hunger. The latter conjuring up flashes of endless twitter threads from gurus telling you about how the only way you’re going to make it in this fast-paced, tech-forward, cutting edge world is by plugging chatgpt directly into your anus so it can automatically rebalance the flora and fauna of your delicate gut biome.

If so we are alike and you can understand why up until now I’ve attempted to entirely avoid thinking too deeply about either of these two topics but alas it can be avoided no longer. We’re undeniably here now, at the precipice of the void, at the threshold of the singularity shit-storm and we definitely are not wearing a big enough shit-raincoat. We are forced to confront it and stare straight into its cold, black eye. No time like the present, we’re all in it now. So let the journey begin. The journey to discover how fucked we really are.

I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to think of the most idealistic friends of yours from high school or college. The dreamer artists who just wanted to create, the lawyers who wanted to help the innocent, the journalists who wanted to uncover the truth, the doctors who wanted to save lives. And my question is, where are they now? I’m going to make a few guesses. The artist is in advertising, the lawyer in commercial arbitration, the journalist is writing clickbait garbage, and the doctor is peddling drugs she doesn’t fully understand to only those who have the money to afford it. I’m not going to even start on the state of education lest i digress off a cliff. The point is that all dreamers who want to save the world end up having to compromise on their dreams one way or another to first survive, and then to “be successful“. Quite simply, if what you want to do also makes money machine go brrr you’re in luck, otherwise you can get fucked. Compromise or die.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Are any of these outcomes really that bad? They’re all still doing alright aren’t they? The artist still gets to make cool stuff. The lawyer still gets to solve complex issues, the doctor still gets to help people. In the end, you can’t just sit around doing what you want all day right? You’ve got to actually contribute to society, and then you get rewarded for it. What’s so bad about that? Similarly, If you ask a “businessman” what businesses do, the answer you generally get is: “we fulfil a need for society, and we get rewarded by society for it”.

But then there’s a very obvious follow up question. What does society actually need? Doesn’t it need all of the stuff that your idealist friends set out to provide? Healing the sick, helping the poor, human to human connection through self expression…?Something doesn’t quite add up. And it’s actually just a little sleight of hand. As it turns out, we’re actually talking about desires, not needs. And well, unlike needs, desires actually have no limit, can be manufactured, and increasingly specialised. An endless playground. A subtle yet constant erosion process to channel the focus on one into the other. And lo we arrive at our first milestone, we unveil the beast and stare into its vortex eye. How can we define capitalism?

Capitalism is an optimisation engine for transforming desire into profit.

Now let me ask you another question. I want you to think of the most idealistic companies that you can possibly think of. I know, it’s not easy, but there’s one that, on the face of it, looked like they at least wanted to try. Remember Google’s “Don’t be evil“? I ask you then, where are they now? Well, at some point Google’s dad had to come in to give it the kick in the pants it needed - hey Google, get your head out of the clouds! You’ve got to face reality! You can’t support your family on “Don’t be evil“, get a real job!

In fact, think of any founder that you know, or have seen on Twitter, giving TED talks, whatever. Does a single one of them say “We want to service a desire in society and get paid a shit load for it“. No, they all say they want to change the world. And I actually believe most of them. I don’t think smart people really find the concept of just making a shit load of money all that exciting. They generally want to solve big and difficult problems to help the world in some way.

So then my question is this: how the fuck did Google turn into the world’s largest advertising funnel on Earth? The answer of course is that over 80% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Was this Sergey and Larry’s dream? Fuck no, but their new super fast search engine needed juicing up to find the optimal “product market fit”. And I say optimal here because there are other sub-optimal solutions. For example: “Why can’t people just pay for search?”

“Well that’s one solution, but surely you don’t want to deny people of less privilege access to this wonderful technology, it should be free for all!” “What a great idea, but how can we afford that?” “Simple, we’ll run ads and the advertisers will pay you“, together now, “Yaaaay!“.

Wait… what just happened here? This is pretty great on the face of it, isn’t it? Everyone gets to use search! Yes they do… but again, there’s a subtle sleight of hand here. The beast figured out that if people simply pay, they only consume a single product. This is of course suboptimal, as the second option offers something far more valuable: a doorway, a portal into infinity. For now you create the potential for the consumer to purchase an endless number of products, where they were initially looking to purchase only one. An intelligent little beast, wouldn’t you say?

So did Larry and Sergey actually fulfil their dream? Were they, the brilliant creators of the world’s most powerful company, masters of Google’s destiny? Or… did the beast manage to trick them? Who is really in the driver’s seat of Google’s destiny?

So you may be wondering, have there been those who have tried to control the beast? What if we tried to give everyone what they want? Some for you, some for me, and some for the beast. The golden cotton candy holy grail love dream of creating an incentive structure that benefits all involved. Attempts have been made. Ever heard of microfinance? A 20 year long experiment, and counting. How’s that coming along? See if you can figure out where the chips continue to fall.

Are you still with me, dear reader? Our foot is firmly through the door now, let’s take a little peek inside. We’ve spied the beast, pondered on it even. Let’s see if we can figure out how smart it really is.

Have you ever thought of a process as intelligent? Not a person or an animal, but a system. Maybe a system that can solve problems. A collection of rules to try and fail and adjust and try again, to eventually overcome and find its scrappy little way to triumph. Let’s take a seemingly simple one. What is the shortest route between your house and that of your friend’s on the other side of town? Do you know? Google seems to. How do smart machines work?

If you ever delve into machine learning, you’ll find that the learning process for an ML model is in essence parameter optimisation. You define what error is, and you get the machine to try to, bit by bit, change a set of parameters that work towards reducing that error as much as possible. Sound familiar? Remember how I defined capitalism? Let’s take on this framing for a moment. Let’s say that capitalism is a continuously learning AI model, training on the input data of our desires, and outputting ever increasing profits, it wouldn’t take much for us to claim that the model is improving at an exponentially increasing rate.

Learning machines started off doing seemingly basic stuff. At first they helped us identify handwriting, classify images of dogs and cats, guessed what we might want to search next. We never really thought about this as artificial intelligence. All of a sudden chatgpt came out and we really felt like we were encountering another type of beast altogether. Ever heard of the Turing test? Do you think chatgpt passes it?

Is capitalism also a grown up big boy AI yet like chatgpt yet? Has it surpassed that level without us even realising? Let’s probe a little. The Turing test is clearly biased towards identifying intelligence in a language model because the test is based on whether or not an AI could fool you into believing it’s human. It requires language as its test medium. If you met an alien whose language you couldn’t speak, would you able to figure out how smart it was? What about if it absolutely owned you in a predator style battle royale? Or maybe in StarCraft? In fact the way we used to judge AI previously was by how well it performed in games. Chess, Go, Starcraft.

Perhaps you don’t ever think of captialism as an intelligent system because you don’t perceive it as having intent. Does AlphaGo have intent? It just aims to win. When you watch it perform, you marvel at its intelligence. And if capitalism can in fact be characterised as an artificial intelligence, the question is, are we in control of it, or is it in control of us? Can we even begin to see where the beast in the room begins or ends? Has artificial intelligence been under our noses this entire time with us being entirely incapable of even recognising it, let along controlling it?

Highly intelligent people build complex systems which can slip completely out of their control.

Smart people are often specialists. They know what they do really well and optimise for constant incremental improvement. Heads down in the classroom getting their work done without paying much attention to the food fight erupting around them. In the blockchain world, a recent rather comical example is the Bitcoin Core team’s reaction to NFTs and other digital assets being created on the BTC blockchain (the Ordinals saga).

NFTs and fungible digital assets on Ethereum and other smart contract chains are by far the biggest use case of blockchain tech atm. These guys simply could not conceive the fact that a design which they created, tested, and put into production could be used by someone in an anticipated way to introduce digital assets used everyday on the second largest blockchain project to the BTC chain. Now that the chain is being used heavily for transactions to buy and sell these assets, the devs are likening it to a DoS attack. Rather a large blind spot, wouldn’t you say?

The consequences of large and complex systems are emergent. They’re incredible to observe and the marvel of our progress as a species. The question is about what direction it’s taking us in, are we able to ride the beast and harness its awesome power, or do we sacrifice ourselves to bend to its will? Who’s really behind the wheel?

Ooh! he did it, he said the title of the story. Aah, the neat little bow of resolution on our unnamed package. Sit back now, no need to overthink. We’ll talk more later. But for now, we’re drawing to the end of our time together. Curtains closing, stage lights fading to black. Waiting for the house to slowly brighten again so we can collect ourselves and figure out what to do next.

Waiting and watching. In the dark.

A horror story starring old man Capitalism and young buck Artificial Intelligence.

We’re going to start off gently though so don’t worry. I’m going to hold your hand as we take this journey together. But you should know that it is a journey we can’t avoid. And quite honestly, there’s no going back from here. So for now, ignore the scary picture, and lfg…

There is a reasonable chance that you, dear reader, will recoil horribly at the sight of those two words, capitalism and artificial intelligence, filling you with dread, or exhaustion, or the urge to turbo roll your eyes into the back of your head. It is entirely possible that the sight of the former makes you itch from memories of that girl you were trying to hit on at dinner that time going on and on about how if Elon sold just 10% of his Tesla stock and just wasn’t so damn greedy he could solve world hunger. The latter conjuring up flashes of endless twitter threads from gurus telling you about how the only way you’re going to make it in this fast-paced, tech-forward, cutting edge world is by plugging chatgpt directly into your anus so it can automatically rebalance the flora and fauna of your delicate gut biome.

If so we are alike and you can understand why up until now I’ve attempted to entirely avoid thinking too deeply about either of these two topics but alas it can be avoided no longer. We’re undeniably here now, at the precipice of the void, at the threshold of the singularity shit-storm and we definitely are not wearing a big enough shit-raincoat. We are forced to confront it and stare straight into its cold, black eye. No time like the present, we’re all in it now. So let the journey begin. The journey to discover how fucked we really are.

I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to think of the most idealistic friends of yours from high school or college. The dreamer artists who just wanted to create, the lawyers who wanted to help the innocent, the journalists who wanted to uncover the truth, the doctors who wanted to save lives. And my question is, where are they now? I’m going to make a few guesses. The artist is in advertising, the lawyer in commercial arbitration, the journalist is writing clickbait garbage, and the doctor is peddling drugs she doesn’t fully understand to only those who have the money to afford it. I’m not going to even start on the state of education lest i digress off a cliff. The point is that all dreamers who want to save the world end up having to compromise on their dreams one way or another to first survive, and then to “be successful“. Quite simply, if what you want to do also makes money machine go brrr you’re in luck, otherwise you can get fucked. Compromise or die.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Are any of these outcomes really that bad? They’re all still doing alright aren’t they? The artist still gets to make cool stuff. The lawyer still gets to solve complex issues, the doctor still gets to help people. In the end, you can’t just sit around doing what you want all day right? You’ve got to actually contribute to society, and then you get rewarded for it. What’s so bad about that? Similarly, If you ask a “businessman” what businesses do, the answer you generally get is: “we fulfil a need for society, and we get rewarded by society for it”.

But then there’s a very obvious follow up question. What does society actually need? Doesn’t it need all of the stuff that your idealist friends set out to provide? Healing the sick, helping the poor, human to human connection through self expression…?Something doesn’t quite add up. And it’s actually just a little sleight of hand. As it turns out, we’re actually talking about desires, not needs. And well, unlike needs, desires actually have no limit, can be manufactured, and increasingly specialised. An endless playground. A subtle yet constant erosion process to channel the focus on one into the other. And lo we arrive at our first milestone, we unveil the beast and stare into its vortex eye. How can we define capitalism?

Capitalism is an optimisation engine for transforming desire into profit.

Now let me ask you another question. I want you to think of the most idealistic companies that you can possibly think of. I know, it’s not easy, but there’s one that, on the face of it, looked like they at least wanted to try. Remember Google’s “Don’t be evil“? I ask you then, where are they now? Well, at some point Google’s dad had to come in to give it the kick in the pants it needed - hey Google, get your head out of the clouds! You’ve got to face reality! You can’t support your family on “Don’t be evil“, get a real job!

In fact, think of any founder that you know, or have seen on Twitter, giving TED talks, whatever. Does a single one of them say “We want to service a desire in society and get paid a shit load for it“. No, they all say they want to change the world. And I actually believe most of them. I don’t think smart people really find the concept of just making a shit load of money all that exciting. They generally want to solve big and difficult problems to help the world in some way.

So then my question is this: how the fuck did Google turn into the world’s largest advertising funnel on Earth? The answer of course is that over 80% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Was this Sergey and Larry’s dream? Fuck no, but their new super fast search engine needed juicing up to find the optimal “product market fit”. And I say optimal here because there are other sub-optimal solutions. For example: “Why can’t people just pay for search?”

“Well that’s one solution, but surely you don’t want to deny people of less privilege access to this wonderful technology, it should be free for all!” “What a great idea, but how can we afford that?” “Simple, we’ll run ads and the advertisers will pay you“, together now, “Yaaaay!“.

Wait… what just happened here? This is pretty great on the face of it, isn’t it? Everyone gets to use search! Yes they do… but again, there’s a subtle sleight of hand here. The beast figured out that if people simply pay, they only consume a single product. This is of course suboptimal, as the second option offers something far more valuable: a doorway, a portal into infinity. For now you create the potential for the consumer to purchase an endless number of products, where they were initially looking to purchase only one. An intelligent little beast, wouldn’t you say?

So did Larry and Sergey actually fulfil their dream? Were they, the brilliant creators of the world’s most powerful company, masters of Google’s destiny? Or… did the beast manage to trick them? Who is really in the driver’s seat of Google’s destiny?

So you may be wondering, have there been those who have tried to control the beast? What if we tried to give everyone what they want? Some for you, some for me, and some for the beast. The golden cotton candy holy grail love dream of creating an incentive structure that benefits all involved. Attempts have been made. Ever heard of microfinance? A 20 year long experiment, and counting. How’s that coming along? See if you can figure out where the chips continue to fall.

Are you still with me, dear reader? Our foot is firmly through the door now, let’s take a little peek inside. We’ve spied the beast, pondered on it even. Let’s see if we can figure out how smart it really is.

Have you ever thought of a process as intelligent? Not a person or an animal, but a system. Maybe a system that can solve problems. A collection of rules to try and fail and adjust and try again, to eventually overcome and find its scrappy little way to triumph. Let’s take a seemingly simple one. What is the shortest route between your house and that of your friend’s on the other side of town? Do you know? Google seems to. How do smart machines work?

If you ever delve into machine learning, you’ll find that the learning process for an ML model is in essence parameter optimisation. You define what error is, and you get the machine to try to, bit by bit, change a set of parameters that work towards reducing that error as much as possible. Sound familiar? Remember how I defined capitalism? Let’s take on this framing for a moment. Let’s say that capitalism is a continuously learning AI model, training on the input data of our desires, and outputting ever increasing profits, it wouldn’t take much for us to claim that the model is improving at an exponentially increasing rate.

Learning machines started off doing seemingly basic stuff. At first they helped us identify handwriting, classify images of dogs and cats, guessed what we might want to search next. We never really thought about this as artificial intelligence. All of a sudden chatgpt came out and we really felt like we were encountering another type of beast altogether. Ever heard of the Turing test? Do you think chatgpt passes it?

Is capitalism also a grown up big boy AI yet like chatgpt yet? Has it surpassed that level without us even realising? Let’s probe a little. The Turing test is clearly biased towards identifying intelligence in a language model because the test is based on whether or not an AI could fool you into believing it’s human. It requires language as its test medium. If you met an alien whose language you couldn’t speak, would you able to figure out how smart it was? What about if it absolutely owned you in a predator style battle royale? Or maybe in StarCraft? In fact the way we used to judge AI previously was by how well it performed in games. Chess, Go, Starcraft.

Perhaps you don’t ever think of captialism as an intelligent system because you don’t perceive it as having intent. Does AlphaGo have intent? It just aims to win. When you watch it perform, you marvel at its intelligence. And if capitalism can in fact be characterised as an artificial intelligence, the question is, are we in control of it, or is it in control of us? Can we even begin to see where the beast in the room begins or ends? Has artificial intelligence been under our noses this entire time with us being entirely incapable of even recognising it, let along controlling it?

Highly intelligent people build complex systems which can slip completely out of their control.

Smart people are often specialists. They know what they do really well and optimise for constant incremental improvement. Heads down in the classroom getting their work done without paying much attention to the food fight erupting around them. In the blockchain world, a recent rather comical example is the Bitcoin Core team’s reaction to NFTs and other digital assets being created on the BTC blockchain (the Ordinals saga).

NFTs and fungible digital assets on Ethereum and other smart contract chains are by far the biggest use case of blockchain tech atm. These guys simply could not conceive the fact that a design which they created, tested, and put into production could be used by someone in an anticipated way to introduce digital assets used everyday on the second largest blockchain project to the BTC chain. Now that the chain is being used heavily for transactions to buy and sell these assets, the devs are likening it to a DoS attack. Rather a large blind spot, wouldn’t you say?

The consequences of large and complex systems are emergent. They’re incredible to observe and the marvel of our progress as a species. The question is about what direction it’s taking us in, are we able to ride the beast and harness its awesome power, or do we sacrifice ourselves to bend to its will? Who’s really behind the wheel?

Ooh! he did it, he said the title of the story. Aah, the neat little bow of resolution on our unnamed package. Sit back now, no need to overthink. We’ll talk more later. But for now, we’re drawing to the end of our time together. Curtains closing, stage lights fading to black. Waiting for the house to slowly brighten again so we can collect ourselves and figure out what to do next.

Waiting and watching. In the dark.