Cybernetic Approach of Economics
As described in AI Thinking, in the Age of AI, we face a world of significantly greater complexity - a more real world than those that our traditional knowledge context fools us into. We can no longer afford to think in categories of technical disciplines, nor rely on trivial values. In its potential for comprehensive mediality management, the strong global AI will constantly question the interrelations of our world. Therefore, economics should not be viewed without mediality and technology without spirituality, so that formative empirical science helps us to ask the right questions, and our social practice can provide sustainable solutions.
It is quite obvious that the economic values are not absolute: the water is more valuable to a thirsty, etc. The drive of survival or self-preservation, however, seems to have more economic impact than the impulse of one of us longing for the supposedly happy - sustainably healthy, peaceful , harmonic, etc. - life that is essentially committed to balance. Maintaining the first requires, besides the substantial power-based knowledge of facts, an inter-subjective knowledge of the lower complexity, the second - a highly subjective honest intra-subjective wisdom, which would always be a knowledge of the higher complexity.
That's why we all live in an artificial survival world. Not because this is required of our nature with its supposedly scarce resources, but because traditional economy - our only reliable principle of social order to date, based on the rational knowledge of lesser complexity - works this way: The values of survival produce more energy (which is in fact attention) and thus are "more expensive" to sell than the values of life. And the longing for individual happiness (essentially a certain equilibrium of nature and creativity), which still expresses itself economically in luxury goods, brought absurdity and thus - a fundamental distortion into our world of actuality at the cost of potentiality.
The Cybernetic Approach on The Economic and the Trans-Cumulative Ethics
From the point of view of the cybernetic researcher, best practices have shown that analytic-based concepts of socio-economic problem solving are not reliable enough to tackle future global challenges or to establish reliable governance of AI systems.
Instead of all-encompassing theories we should seek to establish the fruitful parallelism of the viable concepts that enable a basic foundation for best practices. Understood as the specific challenges of a wide range of the economic disciplines, the problems like “environmental security” or “political economy of consumer behavior” will become redundant if we focus on the intersubjectivity of shared awareness to be automated by AI.
I use the approach that focuses on the intersubjective adjustment of complexity. To transfer the pragmatic economic discourse to constructivist methods and principles such as open-ended questions, emerging approaches, we suggest a re-contextualization inspired by Varela’s teleology and the re-visioning of science. This makes it possible to upgrade the interdisciplinary frameworks that have epistemological and practical relevance (such as economics or medicine) by partially deconstructing their conceptual relations. Re-contextualization is a method of modeling knowledge of higher complexity to be proved by AI.
The allopoietic nature and the fundamental distortion of the economic system are to be discussed in greater detail. Based on the provided link between the intersubjective nature of joint action and deficient mediality of subjective consciousness, the concept of infosomatic environment is found to better deal with economic values and production factors. One of the concepts found worth being explored is the perspective of the economically active “homo intendus”.
Already the assumption that joint action emerges to adjust operative world’s complexity for needs of shared cognition appears to be fruitful for socio-economic problem solving. The allopoietic way, based on cognitive activity by the means of shared awareness, is basically economical.
Building on the ideas of autopoiesis, second order cybernetics and even Peirce's concept of evolution, the non-chimerical approach re-contextualizes basic constructivist concepts to their lowest common denominator that is relevant for the conceptualization of the human economic activity.
Table: The small matrix of the human reality construction. An original chart from the research paper referenced below.
Related research paper by Dr. Leon Tsvasman:
The Great Distortion: The Cybernetic Approach on The Economic and the Trans-Cumulative Ethics