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.
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