(Note: this is a summary of the lecture by Blaise Agüera y Arcas)

The Cybernation Revolution

A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs.

There is no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weapontry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”

Now it’s happening for real: rising gig economies and on-demand, just-in-time services, in which technology interestingly complicated old communist/capitalist planned/unplanned dichotomies.

Goods, labor and markets algorithmically controlled in realtime with very fine granularity (Amazon)

Human labor = training data for machine larned supplanatation (Uber)

Resources virtualized and time-shared, creating capitalist versions of the collective living the Soviet Constructivists imagined(LimeBike, WeWork)

The Weaponry Revolution
The Human Rights Revolution