The Transhuman State

[elfs]

I'm one of those science fiction writers who often ponders the question, "What's it like to live with a conscious entity that is wildly different from anything humanity kicks out?" The AIs and their peers in the Journal Entries is the obvious exploration of that theme; some of the preconditions of having an AI superculture that hasn't wiped out humanity is creating one in which the AI superculture, for arbitrary reasons, wants to keep human beings around.

But we already live with conscious entities that have interest in our world and power over it, and that we ordinary human beings have a hard time struggling with every day. They're called institutions. They exist in a Darwinian niche made up of human beings, they persist only through Darwinian struggles with other institutions, and the ones that cannot survive get selected out. Just as one of the big realizations of evolutionary psychology is that the evolutionary pressure of the human niche consists primarily of other human beings, the evolutionary pressures of instutitions comes from other institutions.

An obvious consequence of this line of thought is that institutions have desires and behaviors that aren't really in the best interests of human beings. An example of this was brought to me by solarbird when the state of Colorado, to discourage illegal immigrants from taking jobs Americans won't do, decided to ask for "volunteers" among prisoners to work the fields instead.

It's important to realize that if you give the state the power to collect fines or impose labor punishments, and the pressure of the purse means the state always needs more money and more labor, then it is not in the best interests of the state to limit those penalities or inform the populace of them. If you knew all of the things that you could do wrong, you wouldn't do them. Heck, you might get agitated and fight against them. You should be even more concerned when agencies have the power to make miscellaneous sublaws called "regulations," which have the same penalizing power as laws, because legislators are so overwhelmed that they turn over their responsibility to bureaucracies.

One of the points of my last point about anarchism and other governmental isms is that there comes a point in a institution when it becomes impossible for the average person to know everything he needs to know to deal with it. At that point, the institution has taken on a life of its own, a consciousness independent of the human beings of which it is made. And that consciousness, when it's the state, has the power of the gun. Turning prisoners into serfs is just one of those abuses of power about which we should be extraordinarily aware.

I remain convinced that the fewer laws the state has, the more likely it is that the agents of the state will be able to apply those laws meaningfully.

Comments

Overwhelmed?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

You wrote "legislators are so overwhelmed that they turn over their responsibility to bureaucracies."

Not any more than lions are so overwhelmed that they turn over predation to hyenas. There are just more statists than there are seats in the legislatures, and some of them are better adapted to serving as bureaucrats instead.

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[shunra.livejournal.com]

Let me add to "the fewer laws", "and the fewer databases".

The news of a state-by-state database of all prescription drugs seems to be hitting the universe (see Glenn Greenwald on this for great commentary, if you don't mind the salon ads: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/18/surveillance/index.html )and the (probable) abuses of that particular power have been making my mind reel since I heard of it.

Ummm... ...this was passed bipartisanly.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Where I work -- a military hospital -- we tie into a nationwide database of prescriptions for several years now through PDTS, the Pharmacy Data Transaction System. It was created to establish a single repository that would be able to check prescription orders to improve patient care, by being able to check drug interactions against all medications a patient may be taking, regardless of where they were ordered, or to throw up a flag if a patient tries to jump from doctor to doctor to get drugs, particularly narcotics. We don't have direct access to a patient's full prescription list; what happens is that when a doctor enters a prescription order for a patient, in addition to making checks against the patient's local medication profile, it queries PDTS with the order information and returns any interaction or overlap warnings with the patient's full medication profile.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Established to improve patient care?

I wonder how much it would cost to get the medication profile of, say, some political opponent. Or an ex-husband, in a custody case. Or a prospective employee. It's information that can be used to poison people with cross-effects (if one happens to be malicious). It's just way too sensitive to be at the disposal of anyone - especially, a gov't agency.

I don't feel comfortable with my information out there - from antibiotics to birth control (and every purchase of Plan B is probably listed already. Hmmm. How long before that's used against candidates?

The "war on drugs" is an excuse for an awful lot of unconscionable government meddling. Saying that it's for people's own good is really not particularly soothing.

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

Turning prisoners into serfs is just one of those abuses of power about which we should be extraordinarily aware.


I don't know that I would consider prisoners serfs...they are getting a place to live, 3 squares a day, clothing and cable (which is more than I get, since I can't afford to have cable) What exactly is so wrong with making them earn their 'living' too? Rather than my paying for it with my taxes?

I will concede that having the state administrate that is a conflict of interests, but I can't see that making prisoners actually do labourous tasks is a bad thing.

[solarbird]

There's this whole thing where they're displacing a workforce that consists of free people, by which I mean, not prisoners. And gosh, look at how much cheaper these prisoners' wages are - only 80c/day! Gosh! What a bargain!

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Eighty cents a day, plus the cost of their room, board, and the guards. What a bargain. The average cost per inmate for state prisons in 2001 was $22,650; in federal prisons, it was $22,632 (source: DoJ report on state prison expenditures in 2001, published in 2004). There are many people in this country who earn significantly less than that.

[solarbird]

Serfs had a place to live, too. I mean honestly, the whole concept that incarceration costs should count as wages strikes me as being sourced from some freakish bizarro world. Prisoner's quarters are not payment.

Aside from that - if you can somehow go aside from that - we've got a lovely situation where we've got state-subsidised prisoner workers replacing a free worker class - assuming this is allowed to progress - out, and giving those prisoners effectively no recompense. None, anyway, which isn't part of, you know, their prison term. 80c/day! 7.5c/hour - assuming an eight-hour day, which is silly of me, but I'm sentimental that way.

As I said on my own post about the topic, this is the kind of crap that validates Marx. And that takes work.

[rapier.livejournal.com]

(which is more than I get...)

Well, sure, prisoners have it pretty good. They also get a bonus helping of race-related violence, a shiv in the belly while standing in the chow line, and gang-rape in the showers. That's living the good life, right there.

[clemtaur.livejournal.com]

..And when you get out, you're charged the cost of your stay, by the DOC.

You're right

[(Anonymous)]

They're not serfs. After all, serfs got to keep _some_ of the fruits of their labor.

What these people are, are _slaves_.