Technological advances could herald a future without government
I HAVE never yet been a civil servant and I don’t have any immediate plans to become one. In fact, I have my doubts that I am really “employable” in that the sense of the word.
But if I was employed by the taxpayers, I suspect I would be a little miffed that Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba thinks it’s not such a bad idea that the PIC (the Public Investment Corporation) bails out ever-ailing South African Airways with the savings of ordinary working people – who have contributed a chunk of their civil servant salary month after month to a pension fund they believe will look after them in the years when they are too old to be a firefighter, or that guy who comes around to your house to make sure you have a TV licence.
But I am not angry at Gigaba. He, like many of my otherwise intelligent friends, labours under the continued belief that the only way any of us can ever fly from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, or from Cape Town to Singapore, is if we use taxpayers’ money to own and run airline to do so.
But I must admit, I struggle to get it. Is it a matter of national pride that we fly to Doha in a plane marked “South African”?
Is it a huge embarrassment if I fly from Mangaung to King Shaka International in a plane owned by Comair or some other privately owned enterprise? I don’t think so. So why then, I ask, are so many of us obsessed with the idea that we need to year after year be called upon to bail out SAA, or the postal services, or Eskom or Sanral (South African National Roads Agency)?
I’ll tell you why. It’s quite understandable actually. You see, there was a time, not very long ago, where the only way to get an airline up and running was to use taxpayer’s money to do so.
There was a time, not too long ago (before e-mail and couriers) when the only way to effectively get important messages to each other was through a postal service paid for by the taxpayers.
There was a time, not too long ago, before Skype, WhatsApp and Cell C, when the only way in which we could ensure effective voice communication was by the taxpayers investing in a telephone network now called Telkom.
The reality, of course, is that times change as great minds bring new innovation. We figure out ways in which projects can be made to happen in such a way as not to depend on violently extorting funds from the public (remember, tax would not be collected unless there was the violent threat of jail time).
There was a time when it was the accepted general consensus that the only way humanity could get into space was through the efforts of publicly funded programmes like NASA.
Now companies like Space X embrace advances in technology to make it possible to do so without any government support.
Where am I going with all this? What I am trying to do, in a roundabout way, is to open a conversation beyond the political poles of “statists” and “anarchists”.
The extreme “statists” would argue towards the state controlling everything (like in North Korea) and the extreme anarchists would argue for a “government-free” situation as we may find in Somalia.
What I am trying to argue is that as technology and innovation advance, the things we think we need government for become fewer and fewer.
Right now, I believe that we need government to, for example, see to basic education and to address the wealth gap.
I am, however, completely open to the idea that we will very soon have access to innovation and technology that is able to achieve these critical objectives without the requirement of a state. It’s just that I can’t yet imagine how this could be done.
But then again, it was inconceivable a few years ago that we could bypass the state in the creation of a reliable currency to use as a means of exchange. Now we have Bitcoin and Ethereum (Google them if you’re out of the loop).
I saw on You Tube the other day how the IBM Artificial Intelligence platform “Watson” was able to compete and win against very able human players in the US television game show Jeopardy.
That’s not very exciting in itself. What is exciting is that there are now stories of UK law firms and Japanese insurance companies buying the Watson computer and as a result being able to retrench dozens of graduate attorneys and actuaries.
I begin to ask myself then, if even these highly complex professional posts can be replaced by computers, how soon will it be until we begin to reconsider our belief that the only way to, for example, keep our toilets flushing and our refuse removed is to have 120 elected councillors overseeing thousands of unionised municipal employees?
It must be plain to us that it is only a matter of time until we come to see that the idea of government was an “interim measure”, a mere blip in history until technology caught up with our desire to live in a world where we are free, but a world where there is still order.
As technology and innovation advance, the things we think we need government for become fewer and fewer