💡 5 Quick Questions for … policy analyst Brink Lindsey on techno-optimistic socialism — and the new pro-abundance left
"In the broader center-left, meanwhile, I do believe that abundance thinking is making a genuine comeback."
Quote of the Issue
“What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.” - Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
Some self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! 🆙↗⤴📈
5QQ
💡 5 Quick Questions for … Brink Lindsey on techno-optimistic socialism
Recently, policy analyst Brink Lindsey wrote a series of posts about the insights of conservatives, socialists, and libertarians for the present moment. I highly recommend checking those out, especially “Thoughts on Techno-optimistic Socialism,” in which he writes that “the center-left is now in the midst of a wrenching reappraisal of its knee-jerk antipathy toward moving atoms around at large scale.” That got my attention. Check out our Q&A below.
Lindsey is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center and author of The Permanent Problem on Substack.
1/ You highlight the work of a few optimistic, pro-progress socialists. Is abundance thinking making a real comeback on the left?
The techno-optimistic socialists I discussed in my essay are pretty unrepresentative of the contemporary far left, which these days is overwhelmingly focused on social justice radicalism and generally indifferent or even hostile to technological progress. Still, it’s noteworthy that this current of radical opinion exists at all.
In the broader center-left, meanwhile, I do believe that abundance thinking is making a genuine comeback. The change of heart is being driven by events: in particular, climate change and runaway housing prices in metro areas around the country. In both cases, responding effectively to the problem will require massive building — of clean energy infrastructure and new housing, respectively. And although many progressives remain stuck in NIMBY mode, a growing number now recognize that artificial constraints on supply are a big issue and are calling for bold reforms. Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic are probably the most prominent advocates of this point of view, and they’ve now teamed up to write a book together titled, appropriately, “Abundance: What Progress Takes.”
2/ In a world of cheap energy and ubiquitous automation, are we faced with a choice between maintaining our living standards with less labor or maintaining our work habits with greater wealth? Or is that incorrect framing?
It’s an interesting framing, but this choice has been with us since industrialization and the ensuing wealth explosion. Up till now, the response has been “why not both?”: as we get richer, we use some of our income to buy more stuff and some to “buy” more leisure. So, over the course of the 20th century, consumption exploded while working hours generally declined. The work week stopped getting shorter after the 1930s (and indeed, it’s actually longer now for people in the top income brackets), but between more years in school at the front end and more years in retirement at the back end, lifetime working hours have continued to drop: according to Nobel laureate Robert Fogel’s 2000 calculations, from 182,500 hours in 1880 to 122,400 hours in 1995, a one-third decrease even as life expectancy expanded dramatically. I expect this general trend to continue for the foreseeable future: higher living standards and less time spent working for pay. The huge challenge as this process goes forward is to find the “moral equivalent of jobs”: projects outside the labor market that call on us to develop our talents and work together for mutual gain.
If the current state of affairs is not remedied, I fear that ongoing advances in AI will end up doing more to create megafortunes for a few than to enrich and empower and liberate all of us.
3/ Intellectual property, you argue, "has degenerated into a vehicle for upward redistribution of wealth and income that actually worsens the climate for innovation by making protected ideas less accessible to downstream innovators." How should intellectual property rights be rethought in the age of AI? How do we determine the right amount of IP protection to maximize innovation?
Up until the 1970s, patents and copyrights played a useful if modest role in stimulating American innovation and artistic production. Since then, the legal privileges extended to patent and copyright holders have exploded: copyright terms have lengthened dramatically, and the scope of patentable inventions has mushroomed even as standards for granting patents have plummeted (the number of US patents awarded annually has jumped fivefold since the early 1980s, with no corresponding increase in innovation and productivity growth). As a result, I believe that patent and copyright laws now act as net deterrents to innovation, as temporary monopolies restrict downstream innovators’ ability to make use of restricted technologies. If the current state of affairs is not remedied, I fear that ongoing advances in AI will end up doing more to create megafortunes for a few than to enrich and empower and liberate all of us. The proper role of patents and copyrights is to ensure that investments in innovation are recouped, not to generate “rents” or huge windfall gains. This gentle, decentralized stimulus goes along with corporate research funding, privately and publicly funded prizes, and direct government research support as one element in the larger system of encouraging technological progress.
4/ In your piece, you describe a sort of decoupling between what is useful and what is profitable. What do you mean by "useful"? How do you measure that outside of the context of what people are willing to pay for?
By “useful,” I mean useful for wellbeing, which we can measure in all sorts of ways — life expectancy, suicide rates, prevalence of substance abuse and mental disorders, percentage of people who are obese or lonely or in physical pain, and so on. Because of the existence of market failures long recognized by economists, we know that what’s useful and what’s profitable aren’t always the same. It can be highly profitable to produce goods while releasing toxic pollutants into the air and water, but it’s not useful for wellbeing; basic scientific research is highly useful for wellbeing, but generally isn’t profitable. At least in theory, we know how to address these problems of misalignment: by regulating activities with external harms and subsidizing activities like scientific research with big external benefits. But getting these interventions right is hard — as evidenced by the flagging federal support for R&D.
Is an uncoupling occurring between the useful and profitable? Yes, I believe so, for two different reasons. First, scientific progress gets harder over time as the low-hanging fruit gets plucked, and that means the government’s role in funding the basic research that powers innovation is growing over time. We didn’t need large-scale federal R&D support in the 19th century; we do now. Meanwhile, many of the things most important for wellbeing can’t be bought at all (at least not reliably!): good friends, a loving spouse, a tightknit family. It’s my sense that as we get richer, our higher living standards consist largely of additional comforts, conveniences, and diversions — bells and whistles for a well-lived life, but not the actual vehicle that will get you there. The problem is, our pursuit of commercialized enjoyments has tended to crowd out the more important noncommercial stuff. Home entertainment options are better than ever, so are food choices and travel opportunities, but marriage, childbearing, friendships, and community involvement are all down — that’s a net negative for wellbeing in my book.
5/ Is a post-work world actually a desirable one to live in?
I believe that there is a range of possible post-work worlds, from idyllic to dystopian. I worry about the latter, as I fear that the current path of least resistance leads in that direction. Specifically, the dystopia I worry about most is one in which a small, extravagantly wealthy elite lords it over atomized, idle masses, keeping them in line with the combination of electronic bread and circuses and panopticon-style surveillance. To avoid that grim outcome, we will need to structure the rules of the game so that the wealth created by widespread automation is widely shared, and we will need to develop cultural alternatives to consumerism’s cult of maximum convenience so that people choose to engage in effortful, productive activities even when it isn’t necessary to keep the lights on. It’s my sense that some version of a post-work world (or, more precisely, a world in which wage employment is no longer the norm) is where technology is taking us, so we’d better get ready.
Micro Reads
▶ AI Accelerates Ability to Program Biology Like Software - Steven Rosenbush, WSJ | Synthetic biology, a broad term, is often used to describe the practice of taking existing proteins or biological material and reprogramming or repurposing them to achieve a new function or goal. “You are coding and programming a cell to spit something out,” said Jennifer Lum, co-founder of Biospring Partners, a growth-equity firm that invests in life-sciences technology. The rise of the cloud and distributed computing have boosted that effort, allowing for the processing of larger data sets. Scientists can perform genetic and DNA sequencing at a more rapid pace and scale, according to Lum. With a better understanding of the DNA composition and functions of cells of specific types, scientists can manipulate and redesign those cells to drive a particular outcome, from biofuels to disease-resistant plants.
▶ How AI can help us understand how cells work—and help cure diseases - Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, MIT Technology Review |
▶ Rare mutation hints gene editing could prevent Alzheimer’s disease - Jason Arunn Murugesu, NewScientist |
▶ 5 Big Ideas for High-Temperature Superconductors - Tom Clynes, IEEE Spectrum |
▶ Crispr Pioneer Jennifer Doudna Has the Guts to Take On the Microbiome - Jennifer Kahn, WIRED |
▶ Artificial Womb Trials in Humans Could Start Soon - Max Kozlov, Scientific American |
▶ Many Gen Z Farmers Will Never Touch Dirt - Amanda Little, Bloomberg |
▶ Performance of ChatGPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on the United States Medical Licensing Examination With and Without Distractions - Myrian Safrai and Amos Azaria, arXiv |
▶ Unleashing Fusion Energy With the Help of AI - Julianna Mullen, SciTechDaily |
▶ The space industry's looming workforce problem - Miriam Kramer, Axios |
▶ Blumenthal-Hawley AI Regulatory Framework Escalates the War on Computation - Adam Thierer, Medium |
▶ The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next? - Dean Spears, NYT |
▶ Some Politicians Want to Research Geoengineering as a Climate Solution. Scientists Are Worried - Alejandro de la Garza and Justin Worland, TIME |
▶ The Social Media Panicmongers Have Pivoted to AI - Louis Anslow, Daily Beast |
▶ Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence - Michael Nielsen |
▶ Human trials of artificial wombs could start soon. Here’s what you need to know - Max Kozlov, Nature |
▶ This is the decade in which we get drugs directly for longevity into the clinic - Laura Demind, Longevity Fund |
▶ It’s Time to Engineer the Sky - Douglas Fox, Scientific American |
It would be awesome if, when people make wild assertions like this one - "the number of US patents awarded annually has jumped fivefold since the early 1980s, with no corresponding increase in innovation and productivity growth" - you could ask for some supporting evidence. When I look around my house, workplace, and life in general, I see there has been a ton of innovation relative to the 1980s. I really like having access to the many new drugs, medical devices, computing power in my hand, improved cars, better airplanes, better homes, better TVs, wireless speakers, wifi generally, etc., etc. I know you are being a good host and so probably trying hard not to seem rude to the folks you interview, but "could you explain why you think there has not been much innovation since the 1980s given the highly visible appearance of electric cars, safer cars generally, personal computing, smart phones, huge advances in medical technologies, etc. that we observe? would be a great follow up question. Indeed, it's hard to think of an area of technology that has not improved since the 1980s.
Also he's confused about the "proper role of patents" - it's pretty clear the founders thought they were to incentivize inventing more useful stuff. They are limited in time, which limits the rents, but the more rents a patent generates during its life, the more incentivized people are to invent stuff. And it's not a "windfall" if it is the result of one's efforts (alone or in a team).
Love the substack, keep having interesting people, but please push them to support particularly wild and counter intuitive claims.