The question was posed in a Facebook thread:
"Unfortunately eliminating property taxes would just be a recipe for even more severe wealth concentration, as there would be no cost to hoarding land. Have you ever played Monopoly®? Studied English feudalism?"
It's a good question to which I'd not previously provided a detailed answer, that answer now follows:
Yes, assuming restricted apportionment of land laws are not generated wealth concentration would continue to occur, however ; in a world where having the land sufficient to survive and thrive for one and ones family can be had property tax free, acquisition of lands beyond *need* will be a practice shunned, for several reasons. First, environmental (this isn't our planet to grab land and do with as we wish willy nilly, though we've behaved that way in this era of limited infrastructure resources, when resources are easily extracted at low or no cost to us and then demand tightly coupled to that extraction (by automated metering of need keyed to production) land apportionment will be determined not by the imagined need of a rich land owner but by known demand. It will become more and more seen as socially responsible to not live beyond ones means, we see this already happening in the calls from extremely rich people to give up much of their wealth toward enterprises that better man. I predict these types of altruistic actions will have more pressure to be performed as the rich will be the very first to be able to completely pinch off of the labor pool by building their own private SHI infrastructures .
Second, the purpose for grabbing land these days involves what? Using it for some purpose, either to extract rentier fees from those that lease it, use it to grow plants or use it to extract resources. Each of these reasons will become either increasingly costly (away from dollar cost and toward time costs) to perform OR pointless to perform (once you've got your own *self healing* infrastructure providing you with the means to thrive then you need no longer to extract such means from labor/fee interactions with other human beings).
The end of the rentier class
As we approach SHI, I predict rentiers will have long before generated sufficient wealth to have emancipated their wealth in the form of SHI resources. The creators of the SHI elements will do this indirectly first by actually selling the means to construct the SHI, to every one ...by they corporations, individuals home owners or small businesses and farms. The rising tide of automation (as it is happening now with computer software) will raise all boats of production capability, moving it further from human agents and firmly on automated ones. As more people have such means they will be able to secure their own plots of land more easily and once had will be able to maintain that land (as they will have their own piece of SHI to help them do it...as well as the growing SHI of the land helping them as well). So the rentier class will basically go obsolete as it will be more work to extract income from renters than it will be to just derive income from ones own SHI, in short people who "rent" will go extinct as they pinch off and generate their own SHI driven bubbles of self sufficiency. So keep in mind the key elements that will be in place to make this possible.
1) Deep deployment of artificial intelligence, machine learning automation of the type that learns from watching a given data set and then optimizes performance by redirecting observed actions such that they can be performed more efficiently. This is precisely what Action Oriented Workflow (ADA-action delta assessment) algorithm does for business work processes. It's also what Boston Dynamics learning robots do to perform dynamic state estimation that is efficient for walking, it is also what the University of Pennsylvania and ETH Zurich quadrocoptors do to make those learning processes efficient. It is behind how Google translate "learns" to speak different languages. It is behind the driving capability of Google's and other car makers self driving car programs. The realization that statistical approaches to learning are extremely efficient is being deployed across many data sets (Note link below to use of Google's "page rank" algorithm for aiding in water processing to be convinced of this) using algorithms of this nature. These will be critical in enabling the first pieces of SHI, the reduction in distribution costs that I mentioned in this post. Already Google has seen the usefulness of a driving infrasturucture that for the most part conducts itself even while people are inside the vehicles. These types of hidden AI will be flattening cost structures in many types of industries but they will also be the main source of near term economic turmoil as displayed workers from areas taken over by this soft AI as I'll call it mount. AOW, itself involves automated learning algorithms and aids in this latter problem of displayed workers by allowing people to maximize their value...but the true efficiency of SHI will be realized only when entire production industries are taken over by SHI elements (robot/ai:design + robot/ai:construction + robot/ai:labor + robot/ai:repair).
2) Construction of the first learning and autonomous robots. Once the artificial intelligence being designed is able to emerge dynamic cognition, we will be able to fully replace humans in the last area that requires their need...physical labor in small roles. This will enable us to SHI enable many tasks that have massive human costs to their production today. All the labor and service roles in hospitals, repair shops, air ports can be replaced by agile robots doing the same. All labor on farms for planting and picking can be enabled and reduce a massive cost center in the way of production cost reductions in food production. All the human labor roles in mining and construction of all types (roads, buildings, bridges) will all be able to be replaced. Again, massive costs lay in the human resource needs of these areas today, once the final energy puzzle piece is in place (it will actually be first to be in place in my view) then these areas can be fully SHI enabled and the building of necessary infrastructure will be automated and optimized to the needs of humans but only tenuously constructed by humans (as designers along with AI).
3) Unlimited and SHI designed and operated energy production is a prerequisite of a wider deployment of other SHI elements. The facile availability of power to run the robots that build the different aspects of the SHI is critical. These technologies are being rapidly accelerated as we speak as very efficient solar, hydro-solar and hydroelectric systems come online. As well the last 5 years has seen a massive increase in the development of bio-solar techniques and these will become increasingly efficient in the coming decades. Energy directly produced from living agents on plant matter is another huge future industry that will provide the necessary fuel (and once production for those is SHI enabled with automated robot agents they'll be self sufficient) I believe the solar technologies are the most advanced and also the most efficient and will form the bulk of power needs in the SHI future with electricity running most aspects of the SHI over liquid fuels which will linger only for the formal airline industry and even there future technologies may remove that sector. In any case all will be SHI enabled removing humans entirely from the loop in terms of production and thus eliminating the costs of labor provided/ payment demanded that drives economies today.
Optimal production for farming achieved
The same will happen with those that engage in agriculture on the land, as SHI elements are deployed...automated tractors, robot planters and pickers, automated processing plants with robots where needed, automated distribution and delivery. Production can be coupled directly to demand and land apportionment for necessary production can also be dynamically and automatically calculated. Farms don't grow any larger than demand needs them to grow, nothing will change about that post SHI, save that those farms will be even more efficient than the very efficient semi automated farms of today, the ability to extract more food from smaller areas of land will continue. As long as demand doesn't rise on a continuous scale (and there is no reason to think it will once we get all regions in the planet on a 0 or negative moving population growth rate) farm sizes will reach optimal land apportionment for necessary demand at peak population in a given region and from then on *fall*. Just as it is doing in local parts of Europe and Asia today.
When gold "mines itself"
Finally, extraction of resources. Again, once the barons of industries that perform that tasks today have fattened their coffers, implementation of SHI like elements (robot miners, robot extraction trucks, diggers, robot processing plants of minerals, ore, sand...etc) will enable the businesses to run free of the current corporate requirement of "make more money this quarter than last quarter" ironically the value of corporations to potential investors will *fall* over time as investors (people) increasingly pinch off to their own bubbles of self sufficiency by building their own SHI and tying in to the SHI being built by the local and wider government in which they are embedded. This will happen across all areas of society. Production sources like smelting plants for ore will also have tight correlation to demand and corporate profits derived from these businesses will become more or less constant and in so doing making that production commodity. Commodities today trade usually in a short range of pricing and over long periods of time earn their investors wealth through compounding...this future will see the return time frame stretch out into infinity as production will be tied (through automation) to demand closer than was ever before possible. The profit motive will dissolve as humans pinch completely out of the loop and the former owners of the business emancipate the production infrastructure (now all SHI enabled) completely to the needs of society.
Links:
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/action-oriented-workflow-maximize-your.html
https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/google-pagerank-water/
Previous articles on SHI:
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/07/coming-age-of-shi-self-healing.html
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-approach-to-self-healing.html
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/meat-production-local-versus-export-and.html
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/10/self-healing-infrastructure-means-end.html
"Unfortunately eliminating property taxes would just be a recipe for even more severe wealth concentration, as there would be no cost to hoarding land. Have you ever played Monopoly®? Studied English feudalism?"
It's a good question to which I'd not previously provided a detailed answer, that answer now follows:
Yes, assuming restricted apportionment of land laws are not generated wealth concentration would continue to occur, however ; in a world where having the land sufficient to survive and thrive for one and ones family can be had property tax free, acquisition of lands beyond *need* will be a practice shunned, for several reasons. First, environmental (this isn't our planet to grab land and do with as we wish willy nilly, though we've behaved that way in this era of limited infrastructure resources, when resources are easily extracted at low or no cost to us and then demand tightly coupled to that extraction (by automated metering of need keyed to production) land apportionment will be determined not by the imagined need of a rich land owner but by known demand. It will become more and more seen as socially responsible to not live beyond ones means, we see this already happening in the calls from extremely rich people to give up much of their wealth toward enterprises that better man. I predict these types of altruistic actions will have more pressure to be performed as the rich will be the very first to be able to completely pinch off of the labor pool by building their own private SHI infrastructures .
Second, the purpose for grabbing land these days involves what? Using it for some purpose, either to extract rentier fees from those that lease it, use it to grow plants or use it to extract resources. Each of these reasons will become either increasingly costly (away from dollar cost and toward time costs) to perform OR pointless to perform (once you've got your own *self healing* infrastructure providing you with the means to thrive then you need no longer to extract such means from labor/fee interactions with other human beings).
The end of the rentier class
As we approach SHI, I predict rentiers will have long before generated sufficient wealth to have emancipated their wealth in the form of SHI resources. The creators of the SHI elements will do this indirectly first by actually selling the means to construct the SHI, to every one ...by they corporations, individuals home owners or small businesses and farms. The rising tide of automation (as it is happening now with computer software) will raise all boats of production capability, moving it further from human agents and firmly on automated ones. As more people have such means they will be able to secure their own plots of land more easily and once had will be able to maintain that land (as they will have their own piece of SHI to help them do it...as well as the growing SHI of the land helping them as well). So the rentier class will basically go obsolete as it will be more work to extract income from renters than it will be to just derive income from ones own SHI, in short people who "rent" will go extinct as they pinch off and generate their own SHI driven bubbles of self sufficiency. So keep in mind the key elements that will be in place to make this possible.
1) Deep deployment of artificial intelligence, machine learning automation of the type that learns from watching a given data set and then optimizes performance by redirecting observed actions such that they can be performed more efficiently. This is precisely what Action Oriented Workflow (ADA-action delta assessment) algorithm does for business work processes. It's also what Boston Dynamics learning robots do to perform dynamic state estimation that is efficient for walking, it is also what the University of Pennsylvania and ETH Zurich quadrocoptors do to make those learning processes efficient. It is behind how Google translate "learns" to speak different languages. It is behind the driving capability of Google's and other car makers self driving car programs. The realization that statistical approaches to learning are extremely efficient is being deployed across many data sets (Note link below to use of Google's "page rank" algorithm for aiding in water processing to be convinced of this) using algorithms of this nature. These will be critical in enabling the first pieces of SHI, the reduction in distribution costs that I mentioned in this post. Already Google has seen the usefulness of a driving infrasturucture that for the most part conducts itself even while people are inside the vehicles. These types of hidden AI will be flattening cost structures in many types of industries but they will also be the main source of near term economic turmoil as displayed workers from areas taken over by this soft AI as I'll call it mount. AOW, itself involves automated learning algorithms and aids in this latter problem of displayed workers by allowing people to maximize their value...but the true efficiency of SHI will be realized only when entire production industries are taken over by SHI elements (robot/ai:design + robot/ai:construction + robot/ai:labor + robot/ai:repair).
2) Construction of the first learning and autonomous robots. Once the artificial intelligence being designed is able to emerge dynamic cognition, we will be able to fully replace humans in the last area that requires their need...physical labor in small roles. This will enable us to SHI enable many tasks that have massive human costs to their production today. All the labor and service roles in hospitals, repair shops, air ports can be replaced by agile robots doing the same. All labor on farms for planting and picking can be enabled and reduce a massive cost center in the way of production cost reductions in food production. All the human labor roles in mining and construction of all types (roads, buildings, bridges) will all be able to be replaced. Again, massive costs lay in the human resource needs of these areas today, once the final energy puzzle piece is in place (it will actually be first to be in place in my view) then these areas can be fully SHI enabled and the building of necessary infrastructure will be automated and optimized to the needs of humans but only tenuously constructed by humans (as designers along with AI).
3) Unlimited and SHI designed and operated energy production is a prerequisite of a wider deployment of other SHI elements. The facile availability of power to run the robots that build the different aspects of the SHI is critical. These technologies are being rapidly accelerated as we speak as very efficient solar, hydro-solar and hydroelectric systems come online. As well the last 5 years has seen a massive increase in the development of bio-solar techniques and these will become increasingly efficient in the coming decades. Energy directly produced from living agents on plant matter is another huge future industry that will provide the necessary fuel (and once production for those is SHI enabled with automated robot agents they'll be self sufficient) I believe the solar technologies are the most advanced and also the most efficient and will form the bulk of power needs in the SHI future with electricity running most aspects of the SHI over liquid fuels which will linger only for the formal airline industry and even there future technologies may remove that sector. In any case all will be SHI enabled removing humans entirely from the loop in terms of production and thus eliminating the costs of labor provided/ payment demanded that drives economies today.
Optimal production for farming achieved
The same will happen with those that engage in agriculture on the land, as SHI elements are deployed...automated tractors, robot planters and pickers, automated processing plants with robots where needed, automated distribution and delivery. Production can be coupled directly to demand and land apportionment for necessary production can also be dynamically and automatically calculated. Farms don't grow any larger than demand needs them to grow, nothing will change about that post SHI, save that those farms will be even more efficient than the very efficient semi automated farms of today, the ability to extract more food from smaller areas of land will continue. As long as demand doesn't rise on a continuous scale (and there is no reason to think it will once we get all regions in the planet on a 0 or negative moving population growth rate) farm sizes will reach optimal land apportionment for necessary demand at peak population in a given region and from then on *fall*. Just as it is doing in local parts of Europe and Asia today.
When gold "mines itself"
Finally, extraction of resources. Again, once the barons of industries that perform that tasks today have fattened their coffers, implementation of SHI like elements (robot miners, robot extraction trucks, diggers, robot processing plants of minerals, ore, sand...etc) will enable the businesses to run free of the current corporate requirement of "make more money this quarter than last quarter" ironically the value of corporations to potential investors will *fall* over time as investors (people) increasingly pinch off to their own bubbles of self sufficiency by building their own SHI and tying in to the SHI being built by the local and wider government in which they are embedded. This will happen across all areas of society. Production sources like smelting plants for ore will also have tight correlation to demand and corporate profits derived from these businesses will become more or less constant and in so doing making that production commodity. Commodities today trade usually in a short range of pricing and over long periods of time earn their investors wealth through compounding...this future will see the return time frame stretch out into infinity as production will be tied (through automation) to demand closer than was ever before possible. The profit motive will dissolve as humans pinch completely out of the loop and the former owners of the business emancipate the production infrastructure (now all SHI enabled) completely to the needs of society.
Links:
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/action-oriented-workflow-maximize-your.html
https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/google-pagerank-water/
Previous articles on SHI:
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/07/coming-age-of-shi-self-healing.html
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-approach-to-self-healing.html
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/09/meat-production-local-versus-export-and.html
http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/10/self-healing-infrastructure-means-end.html
Comments