As mentioned in this "futurist" email list:
Post-Capitalism: The End of Money - by Peter H. Diamandis
"What happens when superintelligence, humanoid robotics, and nanotechnology
drive production costs toward zero, eroding profit motives?
This is a topic discussed in The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin."
AI related tech and investment is exploding, would this "boom" end up in "bust" as usual?
What intellectual framework can sustain this change, over longer period of time?
Jeremy Rifkin promotes concepts of "Third Industrial Revolution",
and related "Zero Marginal Cost society"
making implicit conclusions about future of society based on tech trends.
And while that new energy technology is "decentralized" by nature,
decision-making and control is even more centralized
On the other side, historically, decentralized "Antifragile" evolution
So, here we have two influential university professors
explaining trends and historical patterns differently.
This is how AI summary of this "
dialectics"
Predictability vs. Uncertainty: Rifkin often proposes large-scale, somewhat predictable shifts in civilization driven by technological change (e.g., the collapse of fossil fuels by a specific date, like 2028, in "The Green New Deal"), whereas
Taleb is a profound skeptic of such long-term, specific predictions about complex systems, viewing them as examples of the "ludic fallacy" (misusing models from simple games to understand complex reality).
Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up:
Rifkin's proposals sometimes imply coordinated, global cooperation and policy shifts to achieve the "Third Industrial Revolution."
Taleb tends to favor decentralized, bottom-up systems that are robust to failure, often expressed through his critique of large, fragile, centrally managed systems.
Economic Models:
Rifkin sees potential in a "zero marginal cost" future with a rise of a "collaborative commons" where information sharing reduces traditional profit motives.
Taleb might view such utopian economic models with skepticism, emphasizing the persistence of human behavior, risk, and power dynamics in all systems.
