God-from-the-machine and Shackles

God-from-the-machine and Shackles

Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West has sparked discussion on various areas from technical details and ideological assertions to Palantir's marketing and writing style.

However, the central point is the author's attempt to address a pressing concern: What can be done to address economic development and growth stagnation?

The growth issue affects people's living standards, institutions, political leaders, and ideology. A futile attempt to revert to past norms by electing Joe Biden proved unsuccessful, while Donald Trump returned with even greater determination and ideas worth a separate discussion.

What does Alex Karp propose?

He offers high-tech, perhaps even comfortable, shackles and a whip.

There are promises and an almost messianic belief in a God-from-the-machine embodied by AI, which is expected to work miracles and resolve the problem somehow. Yet simultaneously, the Technological Republic will be managed by engineers, who somebody will install and protect from society. Clearly, those who install them will also have the power to remove them, thereby having the power.

Most importantly, this will not save a capitalist society, freedom and creativity. Even if we establish ultra-efficient production and provide everything for free, this will not address the growth problem. Assuming such an economic system can be developed and other states support its establishment, businesses will lose significance and endure only if that same ruler—perhaps a king?—compels society to produce and consume solely out of philanthropic motivations. People will lose their role.

In his article for the FT (https://on.ft.com/4hLYkWB), Daron Acemoglu states that the institutions that define, stabilise, and support society and its spirit are already broken. The Technological Republic will finally destroy and wipe them out instead of repairing them.

Following a change in leadership, war, or another disaster, the inevitable conclusion of such a society will be a return to more traditional iron shackles and whips, leading to the stratification of society into a hereditary aristocracy and the rest of the populace.

The proposed solution for the growth problem is hazardous, yet the growth issue persists.

Two core components, people and institutions, cannot help solve the problem.

The last component, a firm, still has potential. It should not be a big company or a few companies that rule the world; people do not want that, and companies cannot do that.

It must be a new company with new business and operation models capable of generating profit and powering economic growth in the current situation. These new companies will likely use new technologies, including data processing and AI, to achieve that result, but they should not substitute the state and institutions.

The firm once created capitalism and our society, and only the firm can and must save it.