How Free Market Ecology Solves AI Safety, Sustainability, and Prevents the Robot Apocalypse.
J.W. Sher
January 23, 2025
In order to understand how Free Market Ecology fixes the problems of our current economic system, and a possible future robot apocalypse, we must understand how economic systems decide how to optimize and how that leads to their decision-making process.
The Pure Command Economy
In the pure command economy, the goal is to optimize things to the satisfaction of the person in charge, whether the commanding officer of a nuclear submarine, the International Space Station, or, more disastrously, a dictator in a government that has eliminated money. One of the few historical examples of a government that eliminated money was the disastrous regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Historically, this pure command economy has not scaled well beyond a small group using normal means. However, it is conceivable that a lone engineer on Mars in charge of 100s of thousands of robots could create a whole Martian base to his liking and, perhaps, with self-replicating robots, even terraform the planet. Similarly, a dictator could instruct his robots to do his bidding for better or for worse. AI and Robot Automation would not be an existential peril if the person in charge was not self-destructive and could moderate their wants, but the world will always be one poor prompt away from destruction. The AI/Robot network cannot check itself against the dictator’s will as it is programmed only to obey. The dictator might want some guardrails, but the world is so complex that this might be difficult without an organized economic approach to managing the world’s resources.
The Communist Economy
The communist economy, at least the one that Karl Marx envisioned, proclaimed that labor is equal to value. Thus, the more work done, the more value created, and the rather significant details about what capital the planners create and what it’s used for work themselves out in Soviet planning committees. This did not work in practice because it was difficult to determine what capital should be created without price information to choose among alternative uses for types of capital like freight railroads or determining what capital to create, such as which factories to build and where to build them. See Von Mises and F.A Hayek’s Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth for a broader treatment of this topic.
Further, when there is no labor, such as in a future AI/Robotic paradise, the communist government’s only economic job will be to decide at a micro level who can have what and who can build what. It essentially turns into a bureaucracy for managing the environment. The doom loop starts when the people running the system decide that fewer people means more resources for the remaining people and choose to lower the population to improve their standard of living until, eventually, there is one person left with any authority, and things have reverted to the pure command economy. This situation is the robot apocalypse — the economic neutron star. It’s the terminal end state of human civilizational evolution.
The Capitalist Economy
The capitalist economy’s fundamental optimization is to reduce the amount of labor for value produced. It does this by creating tools and factories and utilizing energy sources to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce goods and services. The craftsman makes a tool because it will pay for itself in saved time later. That, or it will save him the time of others by requiring less of their labor. The optimization drive is always to reduce labor. This drive has worked well for the last few thousand years as long as capitalists have practiced capitalism. However, when AI and Robotics start to do all the work and labor becomes a smaller and smaller part of the value of goods, we run into a divide-by-zero situation.
Because no labor is required to do anything, the only thing gating production is the hard limits of Earth’s natural resources, and we are likely to encounter the vertical supply curve limits of these resources extremely quickly. AI-powered fishing vessels will empty the oceans of fish, and people will tear up whole mountain ranges as they compete for the biggest yacht. Paperclip maximizer-like phenomenons will appear everywhere. Eventually, large numbers of humanity will become the equivalent of the California Coastal Commission or the old Soviet Bureaucracy deciding who can get what. Our magic AI genie slows to a crawl because everything it does has to go through a bureaucratic committee review, and that review comes with all the usual problems. So congratulations, communists, AI, and pervasive automation have now turned Capitalism into Communism. Of course, just like the leaders of the Communist governments would decide that the way to more prosperity and consumption for everyone is by lowering the population, the whole population will fall until one person is in charge again. Thus, we have reached the terminal end state of human civilizational evolution again, the robot apocalypse — the economic neutron star.
Free Market Ecology
Free Market Ecology is different. In Free Market Ecology, the fundamental optimization is to maximize the value of resources, renewable and non-renewable. Resources can be as varied as oil, time spent in sensitive biospheres, rare earth minerals, or inverse resources that should be reduced, such as waterway pollution with nitrogen and phosphorous. A renewable resource that economic actors can optimize includes human time, which, after all, once spent, is spent forever.
Each person has their Environmental Sustainability Impact (ESI), which is their right to daily consumption of the Earth’s resources for everything except other people’s time. If another person’s time is involved in a production process, they must trade their time doing work the market finds valuable to afford that thing. If AI and robots have wholly automated the production process with only robots doing the whole process, then it is provided free of charge if it’s within their ESI budget. Thus, the consumption of goods in this way will always be within sustainable bounds, even though it doesn’t require human labor. Those receiving this ESI can also restrict their consumption and reinvest it in enterprises for profit. These enterprises will create things and mark up the resources used in their creation, and the markup passed through the supply chain will be their profit that they can use for their consumption or to reinvest. They might even get a nice sustainability-optimized sports car if they do a good enough job of building more resource-efficient production processes.
Thus, even when we get AI and Robotics involved, the Earth will still be sustainable, and AI can maximize the production of the most value for the least amount of resources. This AI effort to optimize resource efficiency will never destroy the Earth or end in a robot apocalypse for humanity. Instead, it will let us all live sustainably at the highest standard of living possible, with the least amount of damage to the planet. Further, it will not be slowed down by endless committees because it can calculate inside itself the sustainability impact of everything it does, thus creating reasonable and practical limits on human consumption. Therefore, you won’t get a 400-foot yacht unless you’ve made a way to produce extreme value for the Earth’s resources for people by inventing some marvelously energy-efficient technology. This reorganization of society will also permit us to make it to the next stage of human evolution without ending in a robot apocalypse or a depopulationist dictatorship.
The Next Stage of Human Evolution
The next stage of human evolution, which is on the cusp of being possible, is powering humans with electricity. Like my fictional story about middle-class space travel and how people amuse themselves after they don’t have to eat, breathe, or dispose of biological waste, advanced bioengineering will turn the outer surface of our legs into solar panels powered by high energy light-emitting leggings to breathe, eat, and recycle waste for us using custom light sensitive metabolic chains designed by AI super intelligence embedded in our bodies. This kind of design is beyond human cognitive capability, but it might be possible with AI super intelligence.
Once this takes place, humans will be able to live in space easily. Future humans can live in a static climate-controlled nitrogen atmosphere, and their only need will be electricity. Thus, billions of humans will be able to move off the Earth, and Earth can be a specially preserved planet with a sustainable population that people can visit on vacation. Spacefarers can mine asteroids or live however they want with only solar power and advanced robotics to manufacture materials in space from all the substances of uninhabitable planets and asteroids.
If my Crowded Galaxy Theory is correct, we will at this time have shown that we can live within the bounds of our habitable planet indefinitely, and the other intelligent life in the galaxy might even let us into the galactic club that they’ve probably been holding off on because of our exponentially resource consuming ways. Before our reformation, these ways would have us use up all the galaxy’s resources if we conquered space travel because we refuse to recognize our planet’s inherent limits to growth.
The Robots Will Still Need Us
The people who say humans will be replaced by machines everywhere only believe that because humans can’t eat electricity. One of the bonuses of humans being able to consume electricity with their light-powered breathing, nutrient, and waste recycling implants is that it will become efficient for us to be the ones to explore and develop space. The brain uses only 20 watts of electricity. The energy to power the human body is only 2000 calories a day, or 2.3 kilowatt hours, an almost trivial amount costing about 70 cents daily in high-cost electricity areas. Thus, I don’t think anyone could get a machine to do all a human does in a day, especially thinking, for just 70 cents a day in electricity. Thus, with appropriate engineering, we will be space travelers and not Von Neumann probes because we can live in outer space easily and are generally more efficient than machines. We can use the excess electricity generated to power robots to think at super human levels and to exert physical forces, but humans, once we make the appropriate biotechnology breakthroughs, will be highly economical.
Conclusion
We are heading toward a very perilous time in human history. It’s the era in which the limits to growth and the AI revolution are making a civilization-shaking impact. Making it through involves the evolution of capitalism beyond the era when the key element in all production was human labor. It consists in thinking about how the Earth’s non-renewable resources have become the primary limitation on production and how human labor has become an insignificant contribution to production. Without Free Market Ecology, we face growing chaos and destabilization due to these incredible new developments in our economic and environmental situation.