Homo economicus: AI cannon fodder

 

Peter Strempel, 22 July 2023 

Reading about the shenanigans economists managed to foist on us all since the 1940s, it becomes easier to see how all who uncritically styled their lives as homo economicus do really need to fear being plowed under by AI, like so much economic cannon fodder.

The extraordinary, arrogant presumption with which Austrian-Chicago School economists exercised ‘economic imperialism’ to invade every other arm of the social sciences, especially politics, with economic rationalities, and the abject cowardice of those who let them, gave rise to the concept of homo economicus: human society shaped and constrained by putative market forces.  Now there’s a horseshit line: market forces.  Not much more sophisticated than Adam Smith’s invisible hand (the same one of ‘mene mene tekel upharsin’ fame?).

Economists, however, are either too ignorant or too dumb to understand that corruption and criminal behaviour will infect every for-profit undertaking that isn’t tightly policed and regulated.

In the West, of course, we have done exactly the opposite since the Reagan and Thatcher ascendancies: we’ve dismantled regulation and removed policing to give rise to gangster corporations encouraged in their criminality by empty rhetoric and vapid ideology that market forces will always achieve better outcomes than state intervention.

Exactly how this vocabulary is defined remains nebulous. 

Assigning agency to an abstract concept like ‘the market’ is sheer stupidity.  Believing it is worse, like a self-inflicted cretinism.  The market is motored by people, and people will fight and kill each other to attain their various ends.  Not regulating their behaviours is tantamount to suborning criminally unconscionable activities. 

‘Better outcomes’ is likewise a concept for simpletons.  Better for whom?  Even if the answer is ‘for already rich people’, how smart or better is it to destroy the planet for that extra short-term wealth?  How much better is it to destroy, in the process, the lives of people who are not rich? 

And finally, it is not the ‘state’ that intervenes, like some abstract and inhuman thing.  It is political representatives, voted for by real people who can and should demand better, and by bureaucrats who are paid to represent the public, but do not, and should face harsh sanctions for not doing their duty.

So, here we are.  Everyone in all political camps believes that we have no choice but to dehumanize themselves in the name of economic rationalities.  That insidious thinking underlies all ideas of even the social, which seems to be possible now only as an economic exchange, with money always changing hands to attain social lubricants and activities.  It infects our education systems, focused solely on metrics and the savage corruption of stealing public money for private purposes.  The same applies to public healthcare.  And especially to politics, which now appears to be a somewhat arbitrary competition between likeminded toffs to steal public money for slightly different purposes under the pretext of economic rationalities.

That such a system should have shaped people to regard themselves as merely agents of economic rationality is, I suppose, inevitable. 

They go to school and university to get better-paying jobs.  Not to become empowered to formulate their own ideas or pursue their own projects.

They denote their social status by what they buy, for display as much as utility, in making themselves better prospects for higher paying rôles in the economic machine. 

They value their spouses and children by the cost of their ‘economic sacrifices’ to them, or the divorce lawyers’ bills, and the alimony payments. 

They treasure art only as the cost of acquisition, the profit of dispossession, and the ticket to spectate. 

They value intellect, creativity, and insight not at all.  Because it cannot be assigned economic value.

I think it highly ironic that people so thoroughly subordinate to economic rationality should now be concerned about being replaced by AI.  If all they have become is biological calculators, churning out economic artifacts, what other way is there?  Faster, more ‘efficient’ calculators can do all that much quicker and cheaper. 

Because there really is not much humanity to replace, is there?  The one thing no AI can do is to be human, and yet people preferred to lose their humanity to become acolytes to economic rationalities.

It already doesn’t matter what the numbers underlying economic rationales actually mean.  It matters only what spin can be put on them.  People’s faith in the numbers allows them to overlook their origin and validity (how many people know, for example, the difference between the inflation ‘rate’, ‘underlying’ inflation, and ‘real’ inflation, or why economists have split out such distinctions?).

Yes.  AI will replace homo economicus.  Make it obsolete.  A bad fork in the evolutionary scheme of things.  Kill it off the way millions were slaughtered in the pointless trench warfare between 1914 and 1918.  As the entirely economically rational act of plutocrats unrestrained by policing and regulation.  

And by all those who voted for charlatans and mercenaries preaching the imbecilic rhetorics of economic rationalities.

 

If scientism is religion, mathematics becomes sorcery

 

Peter Strempel, 13 July 2023 

It’s clear to me that I’m deep inside a line of thought that is impossible to reduce to the sort of snippet suitable for social media.  Nevertheless, I’ll try.

Let’s assume for a moment that scientism, the idea that science can be made to explain all things in the universe, is the new religion of those who turned away from the theological kind a couple of hundred years ago.

Then mathematics is a secret kind of sorcery in which spells can be formulated and wielded to create and alter realities.  How irresistible to the billions drawn into fantasy worlds from Tolkien to Rowling.

Bear with me.  It’s not that science or mathematics are those things.  Only the way they are used by people to try and achieve things that cannot be achieved with real science and mathematics.

So, for example, scientism can be harnessed to the notion that psychiatry or neuroscience can tell us in a deterministic sense about what occurs when a person decides to build a bookshelf, or undertake some housework, meaning that we can learn to manipulate human, contextual decision-making arbitrarily, with words or medical procedures.  Science cannot actually do those things.  It can explain phenomena and describe their components, and it can describe methods to interfere with them, but not in the deterministic sense that the decision to build a bookshelf or do housework can be changed to a specified other activity.

There is always a human actor (or groups of them) using science to attempt to achieve specific outcomes.  Science is not an independent actor, and can never ‘do’ anything in itself.

Likewise, mathematics is not capable of explaining anything at all.  However, it can be used by people to describe concepts which are then interpreted by people to mean things that have no solid existence.  That are entirely abstract.

Think of this as the math used by the scientists working on the first nuclear weapon.  The calculations themselves did not possess any determinism, demanding the building of a weapon.  They were not radioactive or fissionable.  They were purely abstract uses of formulae by people.  And people had to interpret them to mean things in other domains of knowledge, like physics, chemistry, engineering, and so on.

So where am I going with this?

Political economy.  Our current way of talking about economics relies on underlying metricated observations or theories that are interpreted to mean specific things by specific people, without any rational proof that they mean anything of the kind.  After all, if we were certain that the meanings assigned are actually true, manipulating a national or global economy would be child’s play, wouldn’t it.

Instead, we seem to bumble along, using hit and miss interventions to maintain a political economy that has completely uncertain outcomes, implodes with alarming regularity, and nevertheless demands our absolute obedience for the benefit of a very few people and institutions.

Looking at this rationally, scientifically, how could I conclude anything but that it’s irrational, and even insane.  The way religions are when they demand obedience to arbitrary rules with no observable reality.

How could I conclude about the underlying mathematics anything but the proposition that apparently some otherwise sane, rational adults are trying to invoke magic spells with figures and formulae they just don’t understand?  Meaning that such people—economists, political scientists, bankers, business executives, and so on—are attempting to make mathematics mean something it just does not, and never can mean. 

Unless enough people wish it did, to create a kind of mass delusion that this meaning really is immanent in the mathematics rather than the wishful thinking of the people involved.

So what?

Ordinarily this kind of delusion would be uncovered pretty readily and dispatched, but it relies on the scientistic religion, which has the sort of power that has kept superstitions alive for thousands of years.  And the delusional edifice offers clear paths for power and domination, which are sought after in their own right.  The way they always were by people without any religious views, but a sense of how to use its appearance.  Or by people made insane by their sense of religion, and driven to impose their conception of it on others.

It seems to me that current political economy—call it neoliberalism if you will—is driven by religious lunatics who believe in some perverse necessity to impose the imagined ‘requirements’ of a particular conception of political economy on everyone else.  Or by perfectly sane mercenaries manipulating superstitious masses on the basis of their belief in sorcery.  Or by some of both kinds.  But whatever the case, it is an absurd, Kafkaesque conception of our reality.

We all become like the broom in Walt Disney’s Fantasia: animated as slaves to an idea that might have seemed sensible to begin with, but turns into unremitting disaster as it is slavishly adhered to.  Stopping it, in its exponentially accelerating nihilism, is beyond the scope of even the most powerful spells and wizards.  Or is it?