Speculist blogger Stephen Gordon has written a very interesting essay on the Atlas Shrugged phenomenon, exploring whether Ayn Rand's novel is, in some sense, coming true in our world today. He decided to publish this piece on a different blog because of the political nature of what he wrote. But, hey, I'm linking to it from here because anything Stephen writes is worth taking the time to read.

As I have noted before, Atlas Shrugged is essentially a science fiction story. It was set in the near future at the time it was written, a world we would now consider a past-future. The plot relies on technologies that didn't exist at the time the book was written -- Reardon metal, recovery of oil from exhausted wells, the torture gizmo the bad guys use on John Galt, etc. Rand also implies that in the future the US government has been restructured, referring repeatedly to a monocameral "national legislature."

However, in Rand's fiction, the story does not arise from technological or historical developments. It is driven by philosophy. So a discussion of whether her novel is being realized in the world today naturally turns into a discussion of political philosophy, which is not Speculist material. It's interesting to note, however, that Stephen describes, in addition to the political / philosophical form, an emergent, economic form of Atlas shrugging that is somewhat orthogonal to Rand's concept. In that model, it is a different Atlas who shrugs.

Likewise, I think there are some other "Atlas Shrugs" scenarios that are well within the realm of the topics we explore here. For example Stephen writes:

Welfare recipients have two barriers between themselves and a better lifestyle. They have the first natural barrier that all people face - they have to find the energy and ambition to work harder, or get an education to work for better money. Recipients also have an artificial barrier – they would lose the largess that is making their lives fairly comfortable. A marginal improvement in their productivity could actually result in a net loss of income. So it would take a significant improvement of their productivity before they'd see any benefit to their lifestyle at all. That's a bigger obstacle to productivity than some people can overcome. So they, quite rationally, work less than they would have otherwise.

Forget the politics of welfare for a moment. What's interesting to me here is the notion that some individuals do better economically when all productive activity is outsourced. Is this a social problem that needs to be remedied or just a sneak preview of the future economic life of all of us?

Over the past couple of centuries, human economic productivity has increased in unprecedented ways, deriving from "outsourcing" of productive labor to machinery. Since the machines have, up to now, mostly needed human beings to operate them, it wasn't always clear that outsourcing was taking place. But the machines keep getting smarter, and working their way further and further up the management ladder.

The digital revolution is only now truly being felt in the productive sectors of the economy. Things get very interesting as the complexity of intelligence embedded into the machinery of production continues to grow. We could be 10-20 years away from the equivalent of a human intelligence falling below Kurzweil's magical $1000 price point. At that point, EVERY activity currently performed by human beings could reasonably be done more cheaply and efficiently by a computer -- assuming that it is possible, legal, ethical, etc. to "buy" that capability for that price.

At that point, Atlas might shrug again, this time when the truly productive sector of the economy excises its least contributing part: humans. You may think these are completely different circumstances, but maybe not. In situation A, producers reject the high cost of doing business brought about by taxation and stop producing for ungrateful consumers. In situation B, producers reject the burden of pretending that the (perhaps perfectly grateful) consumers need to be part of the production cycle at all.

Then what happens? We ALL become welfare recipients? For that to work very well, we might have to outsource the running of government to the machines along with everything else. If that image is too scary -- and it will probably seem a lot more rational when the time comes, seeing as we will have witnessed human-or-greater artificial intelligences in action at that point,rather than trying to imagine having our world be run by some massive IVR system -- consider the alternative in which each of us owns our own outsourced means of production in the form of a universal assembler. Either way, you have the same result -- a world in which none of us has any more motivation to be "productive" than Stephen's welfare recipients.

What do we do then? Take your pick. I'll probably spend a lot of time blogging and podcasting, or rather the future equivalents of those activities. Also, I'll probably do a lot of traveling -- on earth, in space, and in virtual worlds. Later on, if we get tired of amusing ourselves and decide we want to become productive again, we'll have to think about massive cognitive enhancements to enable us to operate at the level of our robot overlords. In a world run by them, true productivity will have to do with increasing knowledge, increasing capability, and creating beauty, and those activities will be occurring at a level that it is impossible for us to imagine in this world.

Most likely, those of us who want to remain productive on those terms will just join up with the machines. It will be the last chapter of the story: Atlas Embraces.

UPDATE: An anonymous reader points out that that last line should really be "Atlas Hugged." Now how did I miss that? Thanks for the new title, reader!

Note: I need hardly mention that if you want to leave a comment about how "liberals" or "wingnuts" or the president or the obstructionist republicans are ruining the world, this is not a blog where we talk about those things. I believe Stephen is accepting comments over at The Last Pragmatist, however.