I've become increasingly suspicious of the phrase "It's good for the economy." Whom does this Economy represent? It is not individuals who benefit directly when the Economy does well, yet most feel their livelihoods depend on the Economy being looked after first and foremost, no matter how indirectly (how low one is on the ladder) one's own well-being is impacted by Its well-being.
The Economy seems to be an artificial being, created by humans, and increasingly given greater importance over its creators. Sacrifice yourselves; protect the Economy! I imagine this is what it must have felt like for single-celled organisms to begin organizing into multi-celled organisms, and to increasingly give up their own interests for the sake of the collective Being. And I'm sure that those single cells thought about it and realized what was happening, about the same amount that humans seem to. Perhaps these cells increasingly gave up their individuality until some moment when they were no longer functional alone. At that point the collective becomes a necessity, and doing what's best for the Being is what is best for the individual. Are we there yet with the Economy? Are we able to live completely care-free and ruled only by individual will, or must we put the Economy first in order to make survival as an individual possible? We are still individual cells, but we cannot survive without the collective we've become.
2. A metahuman is not a human.
Cells come together to form a Being, which will have some goals similar to the cells and some goals that are completely new. Similarly, the metahuman that is formed by a collection of humans will have its own goals that do not apply to individual humans. In the case of the Economy, unrestrained and unrelenting growth is an example of a non-goal of a human body.
We expected the metahuman to be something created in our likeness. Namely we expected it to be The Singularity. We pictured it very human-like---a brain in a computer that thinks the way we do, and perhaps takes over from its creators by scheming the way we do. And it would be like this because we were to design it. It would be like us because we would make it that way. But as we all know, beings are evolved, not designed. A metahuman, whether a Singularity or an Economy, will not have human goals because we made it so, but rather it will possess evolved, metahuman, inhuman goals.
I don't think we can plan it. I don't even know if we could kill it. But I think we can observe it, as cells, and watch or even steer to a degree the evolution of the metabeing that will make us obsolete except as interchangeable parts.
What goals might the Economy be evolving on its own? Unsustainable growth is unsustainable and would need to be evolved out one way or another, but what other goals might be imagined using the multi-celled Being as an analogy?
- The collective is more important than the individual. Our lives are secondary to the health of the Economy.
- The collective may need to sacrifice groups of cells. No need to go into morbid details; safe to say this already happens.
- The collective has goals that the cells are incapable of understanding. The Economy might have plans that we could not even possibly understand.
- The collective becomes the individual, but then may become just a cell in another collective. If we end up creating multiple individual economies, will they begin to interact and form a Meta-economy that we couldn't even fathom at this point? And so on, until we're no longer cells in a Being, but only quarks in an atom in a molecule in a cell in a Being.
And so... ?
I hadn't yet figured out where I was going with this...
