The key is to differentiate  “free enterprise” from “corporate capitalism.” We all admire free enterprise, whether from an artisan or a shopkeeper. They put life and wealth on the line, add sweat equity, and provide society with immense benefits in return for whatever income they can generate. 

Importantly, their business remains entangled with their actual person. If an enterprising wicked witch sells a poison apple, she can be sent to jail and her property confiscated, just as if it were a crime committed by any other citizen. 

Corporations, on the other hand, are barren bureaucracies with a simple goal of surviving and growing by making money. They have no individuality, and no owner is accountable. If a wicked corporation sells a poison apple, good luck getting past the lawyers. And if convicted, the shareholders are only on the hook for the money they put in, never going to jail nor risking other property. 

So to “control capitalism” is not _ as often bleated about by their paid propagandists _  to stifle true “free enterprise.” Let the artisans and shopkeepers be. Control what are, in effect, amoral bureaucracies which have become the original existential forerunner of bad AI. 

How to control them? Well, government (simply another bureaucracy but at least nominally responsible to people and with multiple goals for greater social good) already tries. But at least there should be heavier taxes, strict regulation, and absolute transparency.

And no more foolish chatter that certain bureaucracies “really are people too.”

Any elite promotes an ideology to justify its role. The apocryphal tribal “strongest man” theory of leadership requires too much energy _ a new challenger all the time _ both to ruler and ruled. 

Now we claim not to have a hereditary aristocracy anymore, but in fact the movers and shakers of society do tend to come from the same families, or at least the same milieu. Wealth and power move nepotically from generation to generation, as they always have, with just a little leavening by “new men.”  It has been thus throughout history, and we fool ourselves not to believe it is so now. 

The myths have been varied. The aristocrats might be favored by the gods, or have blue blood, or be the most intelligent or most honestly just be necessary to society. And wealth is always associated with power, power with rulers. 

To preserve their purity, elites try to dissociate themselves from the rabble. 

They rely on family connections, or behavior, or philosophy, or simply wealth. A great show of pretensions, manners, and display to prove they are not like everyone else. 

Current aristocrats claim to be meritocrats. They “deserve” what they have because they are the “best” _ intelligent, hardworking, whatever. Of course, many have simply won the lottery of life, as in all previous aristocratic claims. 

I suppose the new crop is no worse than any of the others. But I dislike their crowing arrogance, especially when so many of us can see it is so clearly artificial.

Perhaps the greatest divide between ancient and modern thought concerns stability. The ancient world considered the natural world as something eternally unchanging, affected perhaps by a disaster here or there, the whims of gods off and on, maybe some long slow path to destruction or rebirth or recycling. Modern belief is that all stability is an illusion of consciousness. 

There is still tension between both ideas. For although we may know that scientifically the earth is spherical, rushing through space, constructed of floating tectonic plates _ it just doesn’t feel that way. We accept that the wind blows, but it is harder to understand that oxygen and other gas levels are maintained by various massive invisible life forces.

And it’s much worse than that. We think we see a picture of the universe as it is, but in fact our sight is a mashup composed of restricted wavelength streams of photons hitting a constantly moving eyeball which somehow excites specialized nerve cells to “make sense” to other billions of neurons. Even at rest, we breathe, blood moves, trillions of cells go about their frantic uncountable internal reactions. 

Future thought, should humans survive, will focus on systems and stress. Nothing is in equilibrium, all is maintained by opposing, supporting, adjusting forces. A difficult cosmology, that goes against all our basic intuitions.

It’s a common complaint of old folks that “young people have no manners.” Possibly because young people see elders as mostly irrelevant, I suppose. 

Why don’t people make an extra effort to be nice? Ah, wait right there, why does being nice take extra effort? Shouldn’t that be the normal effortless response? And that is how society has changed into rule by the rude. 

It’s probably a side effect of universal victimhood. Everyone now believes that they are afflicted by unfair forces. Winners are the meanest, most ruthless, asocial slugs. Gifted and wealthy individuals use unfair advantage. The deck is stacked.

So the response of almost anyone is to put up a barrier, assume everyone else is against them. “The hell with you!” they shout, feeling there is little other recourse. And, of course, with the often envious belief that just about everyone else is better off at my expense.

Perhaps I’m naive or betrayed by nostalgia, but I don’t remember it being so bad before the internet. Sure there was a lot of rudeness and social demonstrations, but mostly people were pretty calm with one another. Or maybe, as noted, it is simply that old age changes my perspective.

I am amazed that when I am habitually polite, the response is often a kind of shocked astonishment. Perhaps I’m one of the few remaining without a grudge. I suppose it will get me in trouble someday.

I trust technology numbers. In fact I understand that strict adherence to numbers and the rules surrounding them is what makes technology possible. Failure to properly use those numbers leads to failure and _ at worst _ explosions where they are not wanted.

But at the same time I heavily mistrust social numbers. Each human is unique, almost every human situation and event is also. Trying to tell me about the average person or the average tribe or the average society is a lesson in futility.

Yet people continue to think that can be done. After all, computers and cars work. Let’s use the same technique and build Utopia!  So far, technocracy fails badly.

Social numbers rely too much on average and statistics. That is always suspicious. If five people are dead and five are alive that does not mean that on average each is half alive. If one person has $1,000, 1 has 0, and 10 others have $1 each, they do not each have an average of $100 each. Telling me that “people who relax are more effective” is useless. The details can be presented in so many ways.

In fact, most social technology is prejudice seeking supporting evidence. 

Manipulating numbers is always fun _ medieval theologians did it with angels on pins and biblical generations. But it can be a dangerous game if applied to the other people with whom we exist.

A “culpable victim”, I suppose, is one who is somehow responsible for his injury. Mostly we fret over all the “innocent victims,” especially in war, who presumably had nothing to do with what happens to them and just were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

But it gets sticky. We are all prisoners of our fate. Most societies are somewhat cohesive, and they are led by elites that control how they react. And, like individuals, societies are also subject to outside random forces. By the rules of the universe, we are all innocent victims, affected by plague and famine, and _ yes _ war. 

It’s been a conceit of modern civilization that we are beyond all that, that someone is now in control. But that “someone” must be in the elite, and the elite are embedded in the population, and therefore the whole society is hardly “innocent.” More to the point, those innocents support the strength of the elite if only by living and contributing to the society. A “good German” was supporting the Nazi war effort even if all she did was grow a garden and sit quietly at home.

The real culprit is overreaction. It’s easy to end crime in a city by dropping a nuke. Lots of innocent victims, but also eliminate the guilty and those who even implicitly supported them.

A true civilization tries to understand and moderate the complexities of innocence.

We seem to be losing that naive hope once more.

Were I a young man, I would be rushing to develop an AI app which could give me a quick evaluation of how sane some comment or question is. Not, mind you, “truth”, but just common sense-wise. 

Ideally it would only be trained on academically accepted reliable sources, like Wikipedia or encyclopedia Britannica. Then it could be fed statements, or questions or whatever and would respond with a common sense analysis.

At one level, it would simply give a few words. “I don’t know”, “impossible”, “unlikely”, “maybe”, “almost certainly”, “definitely”. Just like your mom. 

At the next level perhaps a paragraph or two explaining why it reached that conclusion. And finally, perhaps, a reference to the sources it used. 

I’d want it to answer complex questions “can you walk barefoot on burning coals without being burned”, “will a guilty person sink in water.” As well as stupid ones “can you live forever by eating jade”, “why did the chicken cross the road.” 

Could it do it, I think.  Common sense is basically weighted logic, contradiction, and unknowables factored into reliable axioms. So why not? 

I’d sure like to see someone try as soon as possible. Common sense seems to be in short supply among the current batch of RI (real intelligence) humans. 

Logic is a handy tool to tie things together, but it can be easily misused. Such as by assuming conclusions then using all evidence to support them. Just as a Spanish Inquisitor could justify any evil by referring to his inflexible beliefs: a witch, a Jew, or Muslim could only be saved in the eternal long run by torturing and killing them now. 

A more relaxing example is Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, so like us in believing that everything happens for good reason in this “best of all possible worlds.” I am reminded of him every time the news presents us with yet another victim of a disaster who dazedly claims how lucky or blessed they are to be alive.

We’re good at constructing story narratives of the meaning of our lives. Logic ties together events real and visionary into a tough fabric of belief. But… 

At least the Spanish Inquisition had only a few models of what was “real truth” to choose from. Today there are a myriad of possibilities, still including all kinds of gods, but also conspiracies and any wild vision developed on the media. 

I’ve tried to immunize myself a little by pitting intuition against logic. Trusting intuition is out of fashion, but I refuse to believe that eating this or not eating that matters much in spite of TV news. I would also hope that such an attitude would have helped me avoid cheering torture now for the later good. 

The last few centuries have been the era of mass standardized production. Artisans were replaced by industrialization that commodified just about everything to a basic pattern. But perhaps that is about to change.

There will, of course, always be standard commodities as long as our current civilization survives. Automation can increasingly produce most of them with minimal intervention. These will no doubt continue at the core of wholesale raw materials. Flour and cotton cloth, for example.

But the final consumer product can quite likely be taken over by individualized targeting relying on individual stored preferences. Already patterns can be transferred onto most goods automatically by machine monograms, pictures, etc. Clay can be shaped to make, for example, individualized pottery sets based on historic AI specifications. 3D printing can vary almost any product in the same way. 

Even though it may not be as instant as we have become used to, I suspect most of these individualized orders will be completed in a few weeks. 

Not that it will make more than a faddish difference to anyone. Just another creeping change that will make our descendants wonder why we were always willing to live with the same identical, boring, purchases.

Entranced as we are by scientific technology, numbers have taken on the aura of holy writ. “Numbers don’t lie,” supposedly profound thinkers chant. We often plan to base decisions on numerical analysis.

But numbers are, in fact, imaginary. The number “one” has no more existence than the “root of minus one.” Because numbers only have power when applied to objects or concepts. Our definition of those attributes can be fuzzy indeed.

“Wait! If I say I have one apple it means something, right?” It’s one less than two, at least. But well what about one piece of fruit, or one shiny red delicious apple as opposed to one good and one rotten one. We need to define and define and define, often beyond the bounds of common sense.

And that is where “by the numbers” becomes unglued. It is great for general estimation, as long as we remain aware of the definition pitfalls. But as a culture most people find that too hard, and the ones who need to sell something are quite willing to fudge to the point of lying.

I’m obviously not against the concept of numbers. I just think their “truth” in any given situation should be open to severe questioning.

And as soon as anyone tries to influence me with social analysis “by the numbers” I become suspicious. It’s not only “statistics” _ numbers themselves can lie convincingly.