Scams Through the Ages

A recent posting on Facebook asked the hive mind what scams have been practiced so long that nobody remembers they are scams. And, in this political season, one person predictably answered, “Capitalism.”

Oh, laddie! Think bigger—and harder. Capitalism is not a hoax that rich people thought up to get more of other people’s time and money. Capitalism is the way things get done in a modern, dissociative, non-small world, and it’s been operational since ancient times. Capitalism is the cobbler taking out a loan to buy leather. It’s the shipbuilder asking his friends—and sometimes strangers—to put up the money to buy land and wood for his venture, with the promise to pay them back when he launches his first vessel and sells it.

The concept of the corporation goes back to ancient Rome, and the word comes from the Latin for “body.” The first corporations were the collegia, where for example groups of single men who had come to the city to find work pooled their money to fund and operate dining halls so they would not have to cook for themselves and would have a place to eat. In the Middle Ages, the word came to mean groups of hopeful scholars who came together to acquire space and hire teachers so they could study academic subjects.

To think of capitalism and corporate activity as a scam is like thinking agriculture and technology are scams. One would have to decide it was a delusion to plant seeds and expect them to grow, or to build machines and expect them to function as intended. These are not scams—purposeful designs by one group of people to snare the imagination and gain the cooperation of another group—but simply the way things have worked out in human history.

So, what would be a scam so old and encompassing that nobody noticed? And think big here!

Scams are created and offered by people who put together a vision, a hope, an interpretation of reality in exchange for other people’s support, allegiance, love, or money and then return to them … nothing.

One of the oldest human scams is the belief that certain classes of people are better than others, more knowledgeable, more fit to command—and born that way. These would be the kings, lords and nobles, patricians, landed gentry, old families, old wealth. They have only as much respect and political power as people will give them—which was a lot in old Europe and not so much in modern America. In this country, we’ve seen the wealthiest families—think of the Astors, Morgans, Kaisers, and Kennedys—slowly drift back into obscurity. The first generation makes the wealth, the second generation administers it, the third spends it, and the fourth remembers it. But if you can get people to believe that your name alone is worth the price of a drink, then welcome to it.

A more modern scam is the selling of various kinds of utopias. These range from the hippie communes of the Sixties back to the original communalistic theories of Karl Marx. Communalism presents itself as caring and giving and sharing—and that works in small groups operating under potentially hazardous or adverse circumstances. Think of the nuclear family that is your “hostage to fortune,” or a small tribe in the wilderness, or an Israeli kibbutz. Without the adverse circumstances, the cooperative milieu falls apart. The Transcendentalist communes of the 1830s and the hippie communes of the 1960s failed because some of the Transcendentalists thought they were contributing to the common pot just by writing bright essays instead of slopping the pigs, and some of the hippies thought they were contributing by smoking dope and selling weed instead of milking the cow.

And communism simply doesn’t work on a national scale. It can’t work as an economic theory, because it’s not really about economics. Economics, for anyone who’s ever taken a basic course, is about establishing the value of and engaging in the exchange of goods and services among strangers. There you are dealing with supply and demand, the valuation of substitute markers like money, and varying levels of effort over time. That is how groups of humans arrange their activities. Giving everything you can and getting back only what someone else determines that you need are not economics. Anyone who tries to sell you on a utopia of caring and sharing—follow our prescriptions and you will achieve nirvana—is really selling you on willing submission to the control of others. That, for most people, is both inhuman and antihuman.¹

Other political theories can also be scams. Think of the National Socialists in Germany between the wars, who sold their population on ideas of racial purity, the banishment of an ancient and evil oppressor, and the glory of a vibrant political consciousness, all for their willing submission to whatever the party decreed—which turned out to be both inhuman and antihuman. And the result was horror and global war.

Speaking of nirvana, perhaps the oldest scam in human history is what happens to us after death. Here I am revealing myself once again as an atheist. It’s not that I think I’m better than you if you are a believer. I simply lack the gene or nerve impulse to believe for myself. And as much as I value human life, I—ahem—do not believe we are either eternal or immutable. I believe that we human beings—like all other life on this planet—are the product of undirected evolution, with mutations in our genetic inheritance governing our adaptability to changes in our environment, and with the test of any genetic modification being its usefulness under current conditions. No great spirit made me, is watching out for me, or is directing my steps—except in so far as I hold notions of goodness, propriety, and wisdom in my mind and intention. And no such being stands ready at my death to welcome me home to any kind of eternal bliss, paradise, or heaven.

Nirvana was the Buddha’s response to the eternal return, the cycle of continual rebirth that was embedded in his ancestral Hindu culture. He found the constant juggling with karma—do good in this life and be reborn on a higher plane in the next life; do evil now and suffer for it next time—as oppressive. The whole point of Gautama’s original teaching was that by living as neutral a life as possible, accumulating neither good nor bad karma, you can get off this cycle. And then, when you die, you will simply go out, like a candle. That would be the Buddha’s nirvana—not a place but a release. It makes sense if your cultural tradition was an eternity of coming back to human suffering and judgment under an uncontestable and inhuman rule.

But I don’t look forward to being reborn as anything. And after twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, or even ninety years as a human being on this Earth, I don’t expect to take my mind and memory, my innate personality, and go off to an eternity in a heaven or hell, eternal bliss or eternal suffering. I think that, at the end of a useful life, making my way in the world and caring for friends and family, at my death I will simply go out, like a candle. My mind and knowledge, my personality, will dissipate in the disruption of my neural synapses. My body will cease moving, and the lysosomes embedded in each cell will begin enzymatically breaking down the cell’s chemical structure, helping the ever-present bacteria dispose of my physical being. Much as I value human life, at the end of my time on Earth I will have no more usefulness, consciousness, or awareness than a dead squirrel smashed flat on the road. That’s not a nice image, I know—but at that point, I will be beyond caring.

It may be offensive to classify the various competing visions of an afterlife as a scam. Certainly, many people fear death, cannot imagine their own sudden absence, and take comfort in thoughts of eternal bliss and reunion with their departed loved ones. The notion of an afterlife—which usually adheres to some kind of moral teaching and proposed course of thought and belief—can be considered the ultimate carrot enticing you to follow this religion or that. And certainly, the idea of a person having no moral understanding and no personal guide to thought and belief is the grim depiction of a soulless, possibly hedonistic, likely cruel and dangerous human being.²

But yes, in my terms—private and privileged as they may be—belief in any kind of existence beyond this single life is one of the oldest scams, so old that most people don’t think of it as a scam at all. Sorry about that.

1. For those who say that true communism or true socialism hasn’t been tried yet … well, true perpetual motion hasn’t been tried yet, either—because it doesn’t exist in the real world.

2. And yes, I know—and freely acknowledge—that I follow the embedded values of the Judeo-Christian civilization into which I was born and raised. I just don’t happen to believe in the supreme and eternal being who supposedly sits at the center of it.

Predicting the Future

Everyone wants to predict the future. They want to know what good things are in store, so they can anticipate them. More often, they want to know what bad things are coming, so they can prepare for them—or at least worry about them.

That’s why people take out insurance policies: so that at least they don’t have to worry, too much, about the bad things. The first policies were written in the 14th century in Genoa, a seafaring town, and presumably the policies covered cargos in transit. The business really took off in Lloyd’s coffee house¹ in London three hundred years later. Insurance was a way to get one-up on the gods of misfortune, and it worked.

Insurance as a hedge against disaster has helped make the modern world. But that will be as nothing compared to the widespread use of computers, especially once artificial intelligence gets into the game. AI isn’t exactly a genie, and it’s not smart and sensitive like a generally intelligent person—or not yet. But it is good at looking over mountains of data, far more than any one human being can absorb in a day, a week, or a lifetime, without getting bored or distracted. AI is self-programming in the sense that you don’t have to ask specific questions with known parameters about your database. You just give the machine a general prompt—say, to look for trends, or find anomalies, or spot the most likely or least likely result of a certain choice—and the genie goes to work.

Current uses of AI to write advertising copy, legal briefs, and term papers from existing language models, or to create fanciful images or amusing videos, again from existing sources—all that’s small potatoes. The real use of AI, which is still in development but peeking out at odd corners even now, is in analytics. IBM started this with their Watson platform. This was the computer that took to the air on the game show Jeopardy and became a champion. As IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna later explained, programming Watson took six months. They had to feed it on popular culture, history, sports, music, word puzzles, and a host of other likely topics. Winning at a game show was a trivial exercise, but it taught them so much. IBM now offers Watson Analytics as a business tool.

That’s where the money in AI will be: automating the back office, the customer database, factory operations, inventory and supply chains, and every other part of the business with a superhuman intelligence that doesn’t get tired or bored, doesn’t blink … and also doesn’t get greedy and embezzle from you. It’s like having an absolutely honest wizard run your business. One that will predict the future, foresee the bad times, hedge your bets, and keep everything on track. Now and forever, amen.

Oh, and if it’s good for business, imagine what an analytical engine will do for government. Turn it loose on the tax base, the economic indicators, the money supply, court records, traffic and surveillance cameras, the prison population, and the general population. Put an AI on every node in the internet, looking for trends, anomalies, and any bad thing—“bad” in terms of whoever happens to be in control of the government, of course. Ask it to offer advice, correction, and eventually coercion. The dream of social control through “credit scores,” rewards and punishments for adhering to or deviating from acceptable behavior, is just a few data centers, intelligent chips, and mouse clicks away.

Aside from the chilling notion of putting 1984 on steroids, think what this will do to people’s livelihoods. Right now, robots are taking over a lot of factories²—and that trend will grow as America “on-shores” the manufacturing that we once gave away to China and other low-cost, labor-intensive suppliers around the world. Human beings—the “blue collar” workers—are left to feed the machines and sweep up after them.³ With AI intruding on every business and government function, the need for managers and analysts—the “white collar” workers—likewise surrenders to the machines.

Where does this all end up? I don’t know, but I suspect nowhere good. Since we humans came down out of the trees and started scratching the dirt for a living, work has been a large part of people’s purpose in life. I’m not against making things easier for people, and certainly having robots and intelligences run the world, predict what every person needs, and make it for them would be easier. It would let us all relax in the sun, drink margaritas, write our poetry and paint our pictures. Except not all of us have such talents and ambitions. And lying on the beach all day, every day, forever … gets boring after a while.

And the question still remains: who will be responsible—whom will we hold accountable—for the decisions, actions, and judgments of the artificially intelligent machines? The person who authorized execution of their decisions? The person who input the prompts? The people who wrote the code or loaded the platforms with this or that piece of data? But soon enough, the machines will be executing each other’s decisions, sending each other prompts, and writing and loading their own code. When this all comes together, it will be the Singularity that John von Neumann and others have warned us about. But it won’t be Skynet deciding our fate in a microsecond and starting World War III. Instead, it will be teams of machines playing pitch and catch with people’s lives, and no one knowing who did what, or how to control or stop it.

In the Dune series, an element that doesn’t get much play in the movies is the actual basis of the far future as it’s depicted: the development of human skills instead of technology. The result is the Mentats, who are human computers conducting business operations and offering strategic insight; the Bene Tleilax, the amoral—in everyone else’s terms—and radical-thinking scientific innovators; the Bene Gesserit, who became adepts at physical and emotional manipulation and managers of the human bloodlines; and the Spacing Guild, which developed human prescience in order to find safe passage among the stars at superlight speeds. These “Great Schools” came about only after human beings almost went under because computers and robots took too good care of them, with debilitating physical and mental effects. Then an uprising against the machines, the Butlerian Jihad, saved humanity with the commandment “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

I’m thinking of starting such a movement myself.

1. My late wife Irene was a librarian at the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley’s rare book and manuscript library. She put together the exhibits in their reading room, and one year she was showing off a collector’s rare books on the history of coffee and tea. It turns out the habit of drinking coffee and tea didn’t come to Europe until the 17th century with regular trade routed to the Far East. Before then, people drank mostly small beer and wine during the day, because the alcoholic content killed off the bacteria in their water supply. Nobody drank plain water because it made you sick—something about putting the wells too close to and downhill from the privies. So, it was sip, sip, sip all day long, from breakfast to bedtime, and this explains a lot of Shakespeare. But with coffee and tea, the water is boiled, which also kills the bacteria. And while the caffeine boosts energy and alertness, reducing everybody’s daily dose of alcohol explains a lot about the Enlightenment. This was also the time of Lloyd’s coffee house as a burgeoning center of commercial activity.

2. Just to be clear: robotics is not only the machine to make the product, but the design and manufacturability of the product itself. Remember when cars had dashboards with separate dials mounted in different holes in front of the driver? Robotics as an artform is not just having a machine drill the holes in metal and placing the gauges but redesigning the instrument system in the first place into a module that’s made and tested elsewhere, can be plugged into the driver’s position with one click and a multi-connector—and eventually will be replaced by an AI that controls all the functions of the vehicle itself. New manufacturing systems imply new design choices, and so the technology moves ahead.
    In the same way, most processed foods these days incorporate packaging into the manufacturing stream. Nobody bakes up a million Oreo cookies, joins them with the filling, and then puts them in cold storage until it’s time to sell them. No, the ingredients go from mixing to ovens to filling to tray to airtight sleeve to cardboard box to shipping carton, all in one streamlined process. Oh, and in case you wonder why the cookies don’t go bad for six months or a year, that process includes not only making the food under sterile conditions but also hitting the packaged goods with a hard dose or radiation—usually gamma rays—which kills any bacteria. What a fascinating age we live in!

3. Don’t believe me? Watch any episode of the Canadian documentary series How It’s Made.