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3.64 AVERAGE
3.64 AVERAGE
tl;dr: this book is 1/3 good, 1/2 enraging and 1/6 meh.
INTRO
Before I get into this analysis, I'd like to express what this book does do well. The analysis of the politics driving investment and the shortcomings of systems of capital in operating without oversight seems fairly competent at a surface level, but I'm not qualified to judge whether it reflects a deeper understanding or even the modern perspectives of political science. I enjoyed those parts of this book, which constitute about a third of its contents. It's written persuasively and takes a matter-of-fact tone that I must begrudgingly admit is often very compelling. Just thought I should say the good part before going into what didn't work about this book for me.
CONCEPT & EXECUTION
This book's thesis is that technology, rather than a complex industry of discovery and investigation, is a market trend, controlled by the pressures of politics and societal preference. It rules that innovation and invention are inevitable, unpreventable forces disconnected from any one individual practicing them, and from this ruling extrapolates what a semi-distant future may look like based on trends in technology investment and market dominance.
What is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? The idea is that humanity is slowly but inescapably approaching an age of post-scarcity, in which, if nation states treat one another fairly, humanity need never compete for survival again. In this post-competitive age, the book argues, we must prepare for the first time for human equality, which is not only achievable but inevitable.
As a piece of speculative non-fiction, this book is fine. The issue comes with the execution. In short, the book does not sufficiently justify the assumptions it makes about the future, on which it bases its political and economic predictions.
The problem with seeing science as a trend rather than a collection of trial and error attempts is that it's easy to assume the most popular concepts among investors are going to be the technologies of the future. Think of flying cars, the archetypal example of future-thinking science-fiction fans overestimating the abilities and necessities of technology.
Here is a template for this book's justification of its predictions for the future (made up example, not a real one):
In 1800, people would take boats around the world to get from place to place, and those boats used XYZ resources to make and ABC resources to run. Then, planes became the predominant form of international travel, and while they use more than XYZ resources to make and more than ABC resources to run, they are so much faster that they completely outclassed sea travel. We can therefore see that flying cars, which Bill Gates estimates would cost less than XYZ to build and less than ABC to run, while maintaining the full speed of an airplane, will become the ultimate form of international travel within the next forty years.
What's wrong with that?
Well, for a start, a billionaire investor is not a real source. This example was taken from an early chapter's discussion of AI - the justification of the argument that AI will take all middle-class jobs rested heavily on the fulcrum of a quote from Mark Cuban, a man who has no qualifications to talk about the future of AI outside of the incredible amount of money he's made investing in other technologies.
Even if his estimate was accurate, the mere fact that a technology is better than another on some fronts (in this case cost to run, cost to build, speed) does not mean it is good enough for consumers to adopt - other factors will always come into play. In this case, for example, people would have to learn to fly a mini-plane. Obviously this wasn't from the book, but it often assumed that just because one technology had one or two theoretical advantages it was automatically going to be preferable.
Even if this was true, and the technology was fully preferable to the consumer, that doesn't mean it will be preferable for the industry, it may be that these things require massive maintenance, or who knows what else, but this possibility is simply not considered.
Even if it was preferable for everyone, guaranteed to be better in every metric, the fact that one technology led to another does not on its own mean that the new technology will also be replaced. Plenty of technologies are replaced every day, abacuses to calculators and steam engines to internal combustion engines, but I have yet to see a replacement for the shoe be adopted en masse. The rule that all technology will eventually be replaced is not inherently based on a lie, technology is constantly innovating and developing, but the claim's universality is misleading, and cannot be used to justify any and all claims with no other reasoning.
Notice that, in this example, there was no mention of how a flying car might come about, the challenges its development faces, the likelihood that it would live up to the theoretical expectations hypothesised for it, or even the odds that it will be adopted. It simply 'will'.
This is the larger problem with this book: its language. Throughout the entire text, nothing 'could' happen, nothing 'might' happen, it all simply 'will'. Building off of assumptions is fine in some circumstances, but then labeling your assumption-laden predictions as inevitable is infuriating.
The example of the ship -> plane therefore plane -> flying car is derived from the chapter on self-driving cars, which holds that, by the law that all things are innovated on, since all horse-and-buggies were replaced with an automobile, all cars will be replaced with self-driving cars.
WHY will self-driving cars replace normal ones? It's not enough to say that they simply will, that plenty of people are developing them, that Google is spending money on them, that they can do more now than 20 years ago, WHY will they REPLACE normal cars?
The issue isn't that this can't happen, that this won't happen or that this shouldn't happen. I'm not commenting on self-driving cars as a possibility for the future here. This is about the way the argument is expressed.
When you build your prediction on a historical trend, no matter how stable and certain, you build that prediction on the further prediction that said trend will continue. And the more trend assumptions you balance your prediction on top of, the less stable that prediction will be. When you predict that A -> B -> C, you have to make sure those arrows are each very thoroughly investigated, or the whole thing falls apart.
Think of the housing crash of the 00s, where market forces were specifically wrong because they built all their models on the prediction that housing will continue to increase in value forever and ever and ever without considering that people won't afford it and simply won't pay. This led to housing very significantly not rising in value. The trends weren't wrong (housing is still going up in value), they were just incomplete, in that they didn't account for mortgage delinquency, and predictions made based on those trends crashed the global economy.
Now I'm not blaming this book for the housing crash, what I'm saying is that building on unsteady foundation is dangerous and fundamentally flawed. The idea of a solar-power belt around the equator countries being a massively efficient way to power the world because the sun is strongest on the equator isn't inherently wrong, but the prediction that once funded this WILL be the future of power ignores both the possibility of another technology replacing it (this book's entire thesis) and that the infrastructure to support this shift in power supply may simply be too difficult or harmful or ineffective to support.
Again, I'm not saying these things WILL happen, it could be that the book's predictions all come true. What's wrong here is that there is no thought given to the possibility that these assertions may be overlooking anything, may be incomplete or founded on bad sources or simply wrong.
This isn't the end of the world, it's just a book, but man is it annoying reading chapter after chapter of massive leaps of logic, conclusions jumped to based on assumptions made based on those same leaps, all building to a theory that's supposedly founded in politics and economics.
These chapters of the book were so hard to read I often had to jump back because I'd simply zoned out thinking how annoyed I was with the argument presented.
CONCLUSION
I don't blame the author too much, he's a journalist writing about trends from headlines and using facts and figures presented in the news, if I had gone into the book with lower expectations it may have been much more enjoyable. This is definitely a book full of Some Guy's Opinions, and I never got the impression that he really understood any of the subjects he was making predictions about.
I think I was looking for an economic analysis of the processes of automation or a political manifesto expressing the need for automation to be leveraged by the workers rather than the investors. Instead, I got some low sci-fi presented as non-fiction.
Who knows, if you come into it with that expectation, maybe it'll be really enjoyable.
INTRO
Before I get into this analysis, I'd like to express what this book does do well. The analysis of the politics driving investment and the shortcomings of systems of capital in operating without oversight seems fairly competent at a surface level, but I'm not qualified to judge whether it reflects a deeper understanding or even the modern perspectives of political science. I enjoyed those parts of this book, which constitute about a third of its contents. It's written persuasively and takes a matter-of-fact tone that I must begrudgingly admit is often very compelling. Just thought I should say the good part before going into what didn't work about this book for me.
CONCEPT & EXECUTION
This book's thesis is that technology, rather than a complex industry of discovery and investigation, is a market trend, controlled by the pressures of politics and societal preference. It rules that innovation and invention are inevitable, unpreventable forces disconnected from any one individual practicing them, and from this ruling extrapolates what a semi-distant future may look like based on trends in technology investment and market dominance.
What is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? The idea is that humanity is slowly but inescapably approaching an age of post-scarcity, in which, if nation states treat one another fairly, humanity need never compete for survival again. In this post-competitive age, the book argues, we must prepare for the first time for human equality, which is not only achievable but inevitable.
As a piece of speculative non-fiction, this book is fine. The issue comes with the execution. In short, the book does not sufficiently justify the assumptions it makes about the future, on which it bases its political and economic predictions.
The problem with seeing science as a trend rather than a collection of trial and error attempts is that it's easy to assume the most popular concepts among investors are going to be the technologies of the future. Think of flying cars, the archetypal example of future-thinking science-fiction fans overestimating the abilities and necessities of technology.
Here is a template for this book's justification of its predictions for the future (made up example, not a real one):
In 1800, people would take boats around the world to get from place to place, and those boats used XYZ resources to make and ABC resources to run. Then, planes became the predominant form of international travel, and while they use more than XYZ resources to make and more than ABC resources to run, they are so much faster that they completely outclassed sea travel. We can therefore see that flying cars, which Bill Gates estimates would cost less than XYZ to build and less than ABC to run, while maintaining the full speed of an airplane, will become the ultimate form of international travel within the next forty years.
What's wrong with that?
Well, for a start, a billionaire investor is not a real source. This example was taken from an early chapter's discussion of AI - the justification of the argument that AI will take all middle-class jobs rested heavily on the fulcrum of a quote from Mark Cuban, a man who has no qualifications to talk about the future of AI outside of the incredible amount of money he's made investing in other technologies.
Even if his estimate was accurate, the mere fact that a technology is better than another on some fronts (in this case cost to run, cost to build, speed) does not mean it is good enough for consumers to adopt - other factors will always come into play. In this case, for example, people would have to learn to fly a mini-plane. Obviously this wasn't from the book, but it often assumed that just because one technology had one or two theoretical advantages it was automatically going to be preferable.
Even if this was true, and the technology was fully preferable to the consumer, that doesn't mean it will be preferable for the industry, it may be that these things require massive maintenance, or who knows what else, but this possibility is simply not considered.
Even if it was preferable for everyone, guaranteed to be better in every metric, the fact that one technology led to another does not on its own mean that the new technology will also be replaced. Plenty of technologies are replaced every day, abacuses to calculators and steam engines to internal combustion engines, but I have yet to see a replacement for the shoe be adopted en masse. The rule that all technology will eventually be replaced is not inherently based on a lie, technology is constantly innovating and developing, but the claim's universality is misleading, and cannot be used to justify any and all claims with no other reasoning.
Notice that, in this example, there was no mention of how a flying car might come about, the challenges its development faces, the likelihood that it would live up to the theoretical expectations hypothesised for it, or even the odds that it will be adopted. It simply 'will'.
This is the larger problem with this book: its language. Throughout the entire text, nothing 'could' happen, nothing 'might' happen, it all simply 'will'. Building off of assumptions is fine in some circumstances, but then labeling your assumption-laden predictions as inevitable is infuriating.
The example of the ship -> plane therefore plane -> flying car is derived from the chapter on self-driving cars, which holds that, by the law that all things are innovated on, since all horse-and-buggies were replaced with an automobile, all cars will be replaced with self-driving cars.
WHY will self-driving cars replace normal ones? It's not enough to say that they simply will, that plenty of people are developing them, that Google is spending money on them, that they can do more now than 20 years ago, WHY will they REPLACE normal cars?
The issue isn't that this can't happen, that this won't happen or that this shouldn't happen. I'm not commenting on self-driving cars as a possibility for the future here. This is about the way the argument is expressed.
When you build your prediction on a historical trend, no matter how stable and certain, you build that prediction on the further prediction that said trend will continue. And the more trend assumptions you balance your prediction on top of, the less stable that prediction will be. When you predict that A -> B -> C, you have to make sure those arrows are each very thoroughly investigated, or the whole thing falls apart.
Think of the housing crash of the 00s, where market forces were specifically wrong because they built all their models on the prediction that housing will continue to increase in value forever and ever and ever without considering that people won't afford it and simply won't pay. This led to housing very significantly not rising in value. The trends weren't wrong (housing is still going up in value), they were just incomplete, in that they didn't account for mortgage delinquency, and predictions made based on those trends crashed the global economy.
Now I'm not blaming this book for the housing crash, what I'm saying is that building on unsteady foundation is dangerous and fundamentally flawed. The idea of a solar-power belt around the equator countries being a massively efficient way to power the world because the sun is strongest on the equator isn't inherently wrong, but the prediction that once funded this WILL be the future of power ignores both the possibility of another technology replacing it (this book's entire thesis) and that the infrastructure to support this shift in power supply may simply be too difficult or harmful or ineffective to support.
Again, I'm not saying these things WILL happen, it could be that the book's predictions all come true. What's wrong here is that there is no thought given to the possibility that these assertions may be overlooking anything, may be incomplete or founded on bad sources or simply wrong.
This isn't the end of the world, it's just a book, but man is it annoying reading chapter after chapter of massive leaps of logic, conclusions jumped to based on assumptions made based on those same leaps, all building to a theory that's supposedly founded in politics and economics.
These chapters of the book were so hard to read I often had to jump back because I'd simply zoned out thinking how annoyed I was with the argument presented.
CONCLUSION
I don't blame the author too much, he's a journalist writing about trends from headlines and using facts and figures presented in the news, if I had gone into the book with lower expectations it may have been much more enjoyable. This is definitely a book full of Some Guy's Opinions, and I never got the impression that he really understood any of the subjects he was making predictions about.
I think I was looking for an economic analysis of the processes of automation or a political manifesto expressing the need for automation to be leveraged by the workers rather than the investors. Instead, I got some low sci-fi presented as non-fiction.
Who knows, if you come into it with that expectation, maybe it'll be really enjoyable.
I'm skeptical of tech-utopianism, and I think Bastani is too starry-eyed in some places, but I think that this book and books like this are essential and valuable, if for no other reason than as a reminder of the great possibility of the future and the sheer abundance of the world we live in, if we are willing to re-frame the way that we approach it and a demand a more just reality.
Mr. Bastani's wonderful book starts out more about fully automated luxury than it does about communism. He deftly describes the burgeoning technological processes that could have the potential to change, and possibly save, the world. One only has to look at our current political situation to understand where communism comes in. These technologies - the vast majority of which were funded from the public purse - seem more likely to be "privatized" than they are to be used to truly solve humanity's problems. From calling climate change a hoax to outright blocking green technology progress, the oligarchs currently in charge are happy to sit and watch the world burn, literally, while their pockets get fatter.
Why then is communism needed? It is clear that our current system, one of crony capitalism, does not care about the future of the planet - whether for the poor or even seemingly the rich (its hard to imagine what the rich will do when climate change hits well before their ability to escape to Elysium). Our crony capitalists and corrupt bureaucrats use the public purse to socialize their losses while privatizing their gains. They have a vested interest in preventing disruptive technologies, whether in energy, food production, healthcare, or information. Frankly put, those in charge have abandoned us (along with abandoning democracy). The current United States government has a budget deficit of over a trillion dollars in 2020. What have we seen from that? Trillions of dollars to prop up businesses that are destroying the planet. Imagine if we instead used that money to support green infrastructure, renewable energy, healthcare. We could build systems of technology, energy, healthcare, food, and myriad others that are so advanced that they would be practically free. Of course, this is impossible in our current system which prioritizes making a profit above all else.
It will take a different system to fix our desperate situation. One in which technology is used not only for the good of all humans but for the good of earth. One in which we provide cheap, limitless energy and decide that we don't have to make a profit doing so. One in which publicly financed advances are used for the benefit of the public instead of being locked up by corporations seeking to make obscene profits. One in which we shift away from corporate bailouts and trillion dollar wars to building sustainable housing for all, powering our societies through 100% renewable sources, fixing our farming to provide nutritious food and fresh water to every human being, and creating vast healthcare systems to provide world class care and disease prevention to all citizens of Earth.
But Bastani does not stop there. He sets forth the way to reach this fully automated luxury future: populism. For Bastani, this means a society without our current ruling class. One could see why Bastani thinks that the correct system to accomplish this is communism. To accomplish universal basic services, we need common ownership of the means of production. Bastani sums up well what we are fighting for: "thus the broader hope is to mitigate "unfreedom" - the dependence on economic forces beyond our control which, for nearly all of us, determine how life turns out. We need full automation to prevent the collapse of society. But, equally, we need it so that people can truly be free. There is no reason why we cannot provide food, clothing, shelter, energy, healthcare, transport, education, and information to all citizens of earth. We have the tools, built with public money, to establish this post-scarcity society. We have the means to provide true freedom to every individual. Whether it can actually happen remains to be seen.
Bastani sets forth the explanation of full automation, the reasons for its necessity and even how it can come into practice. But there is that minority of the rich that will do anything to prevent this from happening, even if it results in an uninhabitable earth. They believe, and have always believed, that the earth belongs to them, and that they can destroy it piece by piece for profit. Unfortunately, these individuals are in charge of most corporations and governments. It may seem overwhelming to implement FALC and that is because it is overwhelming. But we must fight for a future in which the Earth and its resources are used for all of its creatures, and for humanity to have true freedom.
Why then is communism needed? It is clear that our current system, one of crony capitalism, does not care about the future of the planet - whether for the poor or even seemingly the rich (its hard to imagine what the rich will do when climate change hits well before their ability to escape to Elysium). Our crony capitalists and corrupt bureaucrats use the public purse to socialize their losses while privatizing their gains. They have a vested interest in preventing disruptive technologies, whether in energy, food production, healthcare, or information. Frankly put, those in charge have abandoned us (along with abandoning democracy). The current United States government has a budget deficit of over a trillion dollars in 2020. What have we seen from that? Trillions of dollars to prop up businesses that are destroying the planet. Imagine if we instead used that money to support green infrastructure, renewable energy, healthcare. We could build systems of technology, energy, healthcare, food, and myriad others that are so advanced that they would be practically free. Of course, this is impossible in our current system which prioritizes making a profit above all else.
It will take a different system to fix our desperate situation. One in which technology is used not only for the good of all humans but for the good of earth. One in which we provide cheap, limitless energy and decide that we don't have to make a profit doing so. One in which publicly financed advances are used for the benefit of the public instead of being locked up by corporations seeking to make obscene profits. One in which we shift away from corporate bailouts and trillion dollar wars to building sustainable housing for all, powering our societies through 100% renewable sources, fixing our farming to provide nutritious food and fresh water to every human being, and creating vast healthcare systems to provide world class care and disease prevention to all citizens of Earth.
But Bastani does not stop there. He sets forth the way to reach this fully automated luxury future: populism. For Bastani, this means a society without our current ruling class. One could see why Bastani thinks that the correct system to accomplish this is communism. To accomplish universal basic services, we need common ownership of the means of production. Bastani sums up well what we are fighting for: "thus the broader hope is to mitigate "unfreedom" - the dependence on economic forces beyond our control which, for nearly all of us, determine how life turns out. We need full automation to prevent the collapse of society. But, equally, we need it so that people can truly be free. There is no reason why we cannot provide food, clothing, shelter, energy, healthcare, transport, education, and information to all citizens of earth. We have the tools, built with public money, to establish this post-scarcity society. We have the means to provide true freedom to every individual. Whether it can actually happen remains to be seen.
Bastani sets forth the explanation of full automation, the reasons for its necessity and even how it can come into practice. But there is that minority of the rich that will do anything to prevent this from happening, even if it results in an uninhabitable earth. They believe, and have always believed, that the earth belongs to them, and that they can destroy it piece by piece for profit. Unfortunately, these individuals are in charge of most corporations and governments. It may seem overwhelming to implement FALC and that is because it is overwhelming. But we must fight for a future in which the Earth and its resources are used for all of its creatures, and for humanity to have true freedom.
«We must have the courage - for that is what is required - to argue, persuade, and build. There is a world to win». Este libro no podría habérmelo leído en mejor momento, en plena pandemia y contemplando seriamente montar una cooperativa. Un libro que hace pensar mucho
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
'A few short decades from now, the seemingly terminal problems of today will appear as absurd as the London manure crisis of 1894 does to us.'
Eagerly awaiting our new, seemingly terminal problems!
Eagerly awaiting our new, seemingly terminal problems!
This was written in 2019 to anticipate the AI movement we’re currently living in. Predictive books don’t age well, but the philosophies and arguments are still strong. It’s surprisingly optimistic. Read Parts One and Three, skim the data in the middle.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced