Tempe AZ, May 24, 2016
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
A Hegelian Complexity Theory of
Abundance Economics
Part of a Series on Cryptophilosophy
cryptophilosophy
Melanie Swan
Philosophy & Economic Theory
New School for Social Research, NY NY
melanie@BlockchainStudies.org

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 1
Melanie Swan
 Philosophy and Economic Theory, New School
for Social Research, NY
 Founder, Institute for Blockchain Studies
 Singularity University Instructor; Institute for Ethics and
Emerging Technology Affiliate Scholar; EDGE
Essayist; FQXi Advisor (Foundational Questions Inst)
Traditional Markets Background Economic Theory Leadership
Source: http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491
Book: Blockchain:
Blueprint for a New
Economy

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Thesis Statement
Abundance Economics
2
A new philosophy of economics is
needed that is adequate to the
contemporary moment, configuring a
mindset shift from 1) survival to fulfillment,
2) scarcity to abundance, and 3)
centralization to decentralization

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
 Successful societies recognize that economics is shifting
to the greater production and consumption of “social
goods” in complement to “material goods”
 Social goods such as trust, dignity, abundance, opportunity,
creative expression, fulfillment, challenge, collaboration, status,
certainty, availability, contingency, willingness, cognitive surplus
 Claim: societies with less income inequality have greater
cohesion and trust, and are better poised to move more
quickly into the abundance economics of the future
 Blockchain technology is a key mechanism for building new
forms of societal shared trust
 Modern society arrived with trust beyond kinship groups; similar
expansion now beyond hierarchical models with decentralization
Thesis Statement
Trust-based Social Goods
3
Source: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20151101

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 4
http://www.robotandhwang.com/attorneys/
Law Firm,
San Francisco CA
Algorithmic Reality
Developing
empowering
human-machine
collaborations

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Algorithmic Reality
 Proliferation of Computing
Platforms
 Increasing presence of technology
 Everything is a math problem
 Drones, self-driving cars, personal home
robots, quantified-self gadgets, Siri-
commanded mobile phones, blockchain
smart contract DACs, tradenets, deep-
learning algorithms, big data clouds, brain-
computer interfaces, neural hacking
devices, augmented reality headsets,
deep-learning, gaming worlds
5
Source: Swan, M. Rethinking Authority With The Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment. Response to The Edge Question 2016: What do
you consider the most interesting recent news? What makes it important? John Brockman, Ed., 2016.

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Algorithmic Reality: Gridworld, Cloudworld
 Each technology class is a platform, network,
and app store…the implication is cloudworld
 Any platform can run any other
 Every network is a Turing-complete general
computational substrate for every other
 Any technology can immediately ‘grok,’ simulate,
and run any other
 Cloudworld is the notion of a deep multiplicity
of networks as a compositional element of
new algorithmic realities
 What does this mean for humans?
6

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Modern Relations with Technology
7
The Prosthetic Relation The Drone Relation
L’Intrus (The Intruder) – Jean-Luc Nancy Théorie du drone (Drone Theory)
– Gregoire Chamayou
Impoverished relation:
roving invisible Panopticon, never
safe from unseen eyes
Intimate relation: Accepting the
foreign into our own body

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
The Data Relation
 Cloud, background, crunching away,
silent tracking, continuous uploading
 Algorithms predicting and even defining
our preferences
 What is our relation? Impoverished:
neither side has full mental model of
the other (the very basis for
conducive interaction with another)
 Data models humans as a sketch:
purchasing agent not aspirational being
 Humans have no way see, grasp or act
on big data, it acts on us (drone relation)
8

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 9
Think through the problem of human-machine
collaboration in one of the most vulnerable cases:
opening our brains up to big data in BCI Cloudminds
(cloud-based thinking collaborations)

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
What is a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)?
 A brain-computer interface (BCI), brain-
machine interface (BMI), or neural
prosthesis is any technology linking the
human brain to a computer
 A computational system implanted in the brain
that allows a person to control a computer
using only brainwaves; for example reading the
electrical signals from the brain as a person
focuses on a computer screen
 Used to repair human cognitive and
sensory-motor function
 Over 219,000 worldwide cochlear implants
10
Source: http://www.asha.org/public/hearing/Cochlear-Implant-Frequently-Asked-Questions/

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Future Applications of BCIs
24-7 connectivity to the Internet and other minds
 Pathology resolution; cognitive enhancement;
platform for human-machine collaboration
 The BCI functionality of typing on a keyboard
with the mind suggests the possibility of having
an always-on brain-Internet connection
 Cell phones connected every individual, BCIs connect
every brain? (cloudmind, telepathic noosphere)
 Ubiquitous BCIs, on-board smartphones (‘better
horse’); new possibilities like cloudminds (‘car’)
 Key functionality: 24-7 connectivity
 Human cognitive processing continuously linked to the
Internet and other minds in cloudminds via BCI, VR
headset, QS wearables, smart contact lenses, etc.
11
Source: http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
BCI Governance Concerns
 The potential advent of brain-
computer interfaces (BCIs) that
are ubiquitous and widely-
adopted, where humans might
be continuously connected to the
Internet and other minds in
cloudmind formats
 Adoption risk solutions
 Privacy, security, reversibility, credit
assignation, and personal identity
retention
12

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Reality (Physical & Algorithmic) is Complex
 Complexity is a state or
quality of being that is
nonlinear, emergent,
open, unpredictable and
unknowable at the
outset, self-organizing,
and interdependent
 General or reductive
 Examples of complex
adaptive systems
include an anthill or a
weather system
13
Source: Morin, Edgar. (2007). "Restricted complexity, general complexity." Trans. C. Gershenson. In Worldviews, Science and Us:
Philosophy and Complexity, ed. C. Gershenson, D. Aerts, and B. Edmonds, 5–29. World Scientific, Singapore.

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Reality is Indeterminacy: Composable Possibility
 Reality is complex and
exists in a “raw material”
state composable per
action/observation
 Light: wave-particle duality
 Time: simultaneously
discrete and continuous
 Schrödinger's cat: dead or
alive?
14
Source: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html, http://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-first-ever-photograph-of-light-as-both-a-parti
The bottom 'slice' of the image
shows the particles. The top
image shows light as a wave.
Particle
Wave

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Not all Reality is Thinkable
 Thinkability
 Becoming aware of and coming to terms with
phenomena that are “bigger” than humans
 Features of the world that are outside our
perceptual and experiential domains
 Existing situations
 Quantum physics, black holes, global
warming, the Florida everglades, the
biosphere, derivatives, capitalism,
neuroscience, big data, blockchains
 Radically-different future-tech situations
 Life extension, digital societies, cloudminds
15

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Thinking Thinkability
16
Source:
 Need new models for conceiving the
correspondence between internal experience
and the external world like radical contingency
 Ancestrality (Meillassoux), hyperobjects (Morton),
superjects (Hansen), object-oriented ontologies
(Harman), black swans (Taleb)
 Result: human existence decentered

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770–1831)
 Phenomenology of Spirit
 Development of individuals; continual
progression and awareness, emergence
 Shapes of Consciousness
 Self-consciousness
 Free Concrete Mind
 Absolute Knowledge
 Science of Logic
 Philosophy of meaning, logic
 Philosophy of Right
 Social and political philosophy
 Abstract Right and Morality
 Ethical Life: Family, Civil Society, the State
17

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Hegel: FutureTech Philosophical Principles
 Bildung – (education, self-formation) continuous life-long
learning, always learning, growing into a new shape
 Humans in “adolescence” – (thinkability) we don’t know what we
don’t know until we progress; how can we know if we want life
extension technologies?
 Freedom expressed through bildung (Neuhauser)
 Progressive shape-changing
 Abstract to concrete
 Sublation – distill useful truth kernel from previous state
and bring it along with you as you move on; helpful way
of incorporating yet departing from the past
 Complexity - parts-whole, emergence, beyond baseline
18

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Agenda: Economic Abundance in 3 Acts
 Current Situation and Problem: Algorithmic Reality
 Complexity, Emergence, Thinkability
 Technological Unemployment, Income Inequality
 Solution: Abundance Economic Theory
19
1.
Scarcity to Availability
2.
Survival to Fulfillment Centralization to Decentralization
3.

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Technological Unemployment
 “Technological breakthroughs endanger up to 47% of
total employment in the US” – Carl Frey, Oxford, 2015
 “Robots might take 50% of America's jobs” – Marshall
Brain, 2011
20
Source: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Next to Automate? Commercial Driving
 “Autonomous Driving Long-
Distance Trucks Will Be A
Reality In Ten Years” – 2014
 Vehicle-To-Vehicle "V2V"
Communication networks
21
Source: http://truckyeah.jalopnik.com/autonomous-driving-long-distance-trucks-will-be-a-reali-1603746933

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Technological Unemployment (Pew study)
 Potential Benefits
 Tech advances have been a net creator of jobs
 Adaptation through inventing new types of work
 Technology is freedom from drudgery, and defines
“work” in a more positive and socially beneficial way
 Potential Costs
 Automation impacting white-collar and blue-collar
employment
 Highly-skilled workers poised to succeed; others
displaced into lower paying service industry jobs or
permanent unemployment
 Educational system inadequate for future work
preparation
22
AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs, Pew Research Center, 2014
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
No Shortage of Human Ingenuity
23
“If people have the talent to invent new machines
that put people out of work, they have the talent
to put those people back to work.”
- President John F. Kennedy, 1962
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Top 10 Jobs of the Future
1. Neuro-Implant Technician
2. Urban Farmer
3. Virtual Reality Experience Designer
4. 3-D Printer Design Specialist
5. Smart-Home Handyperson
6. Remote Health Care Specialist
7. End-Of-Life Planner, Senior Carer
8. Professional Triber
9. Freelance Professor, Coach, Tutor
10. Personal Brand Coach and Manager
24
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046277/the-new-rules-of-work/the-top-jobs-in-10-years-might-not-be-what-you-expect

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 25
Life of the
Future
Now
Jobs of the
Future
Reorientation to Jobs and Life of the Future

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 26
Life of the
Future
Life of the Future – Potential Categories
 Jobs of the Future/Productive
Engagement
 Education/Training/Learning
 Recreation, Teams
 Exercise, Movement
 Community Participation
 Creativity/Artistic Expression
 Music, Singing
 Coaching/Teaching/Mentoring

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Economic Shift - Success Stories
 Pittsburgh: from steel to “eds and meds”
 Baltimore: from mills to townhomes
 Middle East:
 Dubai: oil to financial services; Abu Dhabi: Masdar
energy city of the future; Saudi Arabia: KAUST
27

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Agenda: Economic Abundance in 3 Acts
 Current Situation and Problem: Algorithmic Reality
 Complexity, Emergence, Thinkability
 Technological Unemployment, Income Inequality
 Solution: Abundance Economic Theory
28
1.
Scarcity to Availability
2.
Survival to Fulfillment Centralization to Decentralization
3.

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Maximum possibility is open-ended and unbounded
in both structural trajectories (form) and content
emergent, complex, novel, creative
Abundance is a social good
29
BaselineMaximum possibility is recouping baseline
(a pre-specified and externally-imposed ideal)
Scarcity is a social pathology: To count as
flourishing requires not just alleviating suffering
and surviving (i.e.; recouping baseline), but
emergent abundance
Philosophy of Abundance
Abundance
Sources: Philosophical support via Spinoza, Deleuze, Simondon

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Social Goods created by Abundance
 Not just availability of material goods resolving the
social pathology of scarcity but that new social goods
are created through abundance
 Social Goods of relief, contingency reduction, peer
willingness, stress-easing, and cognitive surplus
 Psychology of Certainty and Availability: A reliable ongoing feeling
of certainty that material survival needs will be met (unprecedented)
 Efficiency: much current cognitive and physical effort is tied up
in anti-scarcity measures: hoarding, manipulation, and other
anti-scarcity measures; ascertaining future availability of
resources
 Up-leveled focus: Relief of having a whole class of cognitively-
exertional activities drop off the reality of what has to be
considered for basic living
30
Sources: Social Goods, Social Pathology: Rousseau, Descartes, Augustin, Honneth, Neuhauser, Jaeggi
http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Agenda: Economic Abundance in 3 Acts
 Current Situation and Problem: Algorithmic Reality
 Complexity, Emergence, Thinkability
 Technological Unemployment, Income Inequality
 Solution: Abundance Economic Theory
31
1.
Scarcity to Availability
2.
Survival to Fulfillment Centralization to Decentralization
3.

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Rethinking Economics and Governance
 Recasting governance as abundance not extraction
Actualization economy focuses on (1) sustainable
material survival and (2) the social goods of liberation:
 Self-respect, self-esteem, self-realization
 Destabilize non-value-added elites, esprit of Rousseau,
Rawls, Hegel: “When liberty is mentioned, we must be
careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of
private interests which is thereby designated.”
32

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 33
The sense of duty of
the citizen to serve
the republic
Civic Duty Civic Collaboration
Ancient Greek Statesman Self-directed Cryptocitizen
The sense of meaning and
purpose in participating in
community sustainability
http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491
Vision
New Polis is the Self-sustaining Micropolis

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Cryptosustainability Micropolis Example:
Peer-to-peer Microgrids
 Transactive Grid, President
Street, Brooklyn NY (Mar 2016)
 Grid Singularity (Vienna
Austria), SolarCoin (MIT)
 Peergrid local energy
exchange
 Citizen-owned solar panels
 Blockchain-based peer-to-peer
buying and selling (Ethereum)
 Energy and money goes into
local economy
34
Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2079334-blockchain-based-microgrid-gives-power-to-consumers-in-new-york/

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Cryptosustainability Micropolis Example
Neighbor.ly Self-directed Community Bonds
 Modern Public Finance, P2P municipal bonds
 $1 billion / day public finance market
 Low accountability, corruption, waste, multiple layers of
unnecessary transaction-fee taking without adding value
 Community project funding (school, road, bridge)
 Self-directed investment in civic projects of affinity
 Transportation, energy, schools, parks
35

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 36
Conclusion:
Welcome to the New
Economy!

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics 37
“Siri, could you have
Amazon drone me a
beer?”

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
DIY Biohacker Labs
Example: citizen science microbiome sequencing
38
Source: Counter Culture Labs

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Cafeteria of the Future
Hydroponic microgreens for lunch?
39

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Thesis Statement
40
A new philosophy of economics is
needed that is adequate to the
contemporary moment, configuring a
mindset shift from 1) survival to fulfillment,
2) scarcity to abundance, and 3)
centralization to decentralization

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
 Successful societies recognize that economics is shifting
to the greater production and consumption of “social
goods” in complement to “material goods”
 Social goods such as trust, dignity, abundance, opportunity,
creative expression, fulfillment, challenge, collaboration, status,
certainty, availability, contingency, willingness, cognitive surplus
 Claim: societies with less income inequality have greater
cohesion and trust, and are better poised to move more
quickly into the abundance economics of the future
 Blockchain technology is a key mechanism for building new
forms of societal shared trust
 Modern society arrived with trust beyond kinship groups; similar
expansion now beyond hierarchical models with decentralization
Thesis Statement
Trust-based Social Goods
41
Source: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/swan20151101

May 24, 2016
Abundance Economics
Hegel inspires a new way forward
42
“The owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of the dusk”
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 23
Meaning: traditionally, we have only learned from
events after they have happened; where the
implication is that some means of prescriptive
wisdom is needed to prepare for events

Tempe AZ, May 24, 2016
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
Melanie Swan
Philosophy & Economic Theory
New School for Social Research, NY NY
melanie@BlockchainStudies.org
A Hegelian Complexity Theory of
Abundance Economics
Part of a Series on Cryptophilosophy
cryptophilosophy
Thank You! Questions?