228 - Economic Systems

Any system that is ultimately dependent on an economic system, is also that which it depends upon. Every government that exists today is highly dependent on economic forces like international trade and major disruptions to that trade can cause landslide political swings, like the one observed in the UK earlier this month.

These things can occur with purely human systems, sometimes accelerated by bad actors using generative AI to drive disinformation, but they still remain relatively dumb adversarial methods, even operating at high speeds and scales. These methods are also sometimes illegal, and it honestly isn’t that difficult to catch bots operating on most platforms for those rare few who care enough to do so.

Governments that consistently do horrible things can very intentionally, and legally, be bankrupted. If you pit humans against other humans then you have a level playing field, but if you have humans in federated countries working with superintelligent systems versus some regime doing terrible things to a country and handing off technical tasks to paid cronies, there is no competition.

The Law of the Minimum states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource. Governments around the world are full of such weak points, but so long as the playing field is roughly level then defense and offense can balance, with harms and gains showing relatively lesser degrees of asymmetry. Introduce an insurmountable advantage to this equation and population dynamics drive those with the advantage to flourish, and the others to quickly adopt that advantage, or collapse.

People have been known to cook up absurd conspiracy theories about secret rulers of the world, making amazing and nuanced financial predictions and manipulations driving the trajectory of global commerce. The thing is that while humans aren’t capable of delivering on that in any meaningful sense, systems that could have already been built and demonstrated, just at a fixed scale and running in slow motion.

A testament to the status quo is that no secret rulers stepped forward interested in such technology because none of the people with overwhelming funds have anything approaching the levels of competence and awareness needed to automatically recognize it, let alone make the far more difficult global financial predictions with any accuracy. Rather, the people at the top of the economic pyramid tend to resemble the average 5-year-old child more than the average adult in practice.

So far, I’ve resisted the urge to turn our company pitch deck into a pop-up book, mailing that to Elon Musk with a box of crayons and instructions not to eat all of them in one sitting. I make no promises that I won’t do that in the coming months, as I already have the address to mail it to.

Governments and companies can both be legally bankrupted, and people behaving like children, be it in politics, on Twitter, or both, won’t change that.