In order for people to participate in a full way in democratically deciding their own futures and the progress of society and progress of technology,

we have to get everyone to a level where they're not so scared and worried and focused on their survival. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Aaron Beninov.

Aaron is an assistant professor at Cornell University, the author of automation and the future of work, and this week my guest is Aaron Beninov. Aaron is an assistant professor at Cornell

University, the author of Automation and the Future of Work, and he's written a new series called

Beyond Capitalism in the New Left Review. This episode, kind of like the one we did with Dan McQuillan

a number of weeks ago, is one of those more big idea episodes. In that series of essays,

Aaron is writing about this idea he has for

something called a multi-critorial economy. I know that sounds like a difficult word, but it basically

just means that if we have this economy right now that is focused on maximizing GDP growth at all

costs, and that is the main metric that we use to guide our society, to guide our

investments, to guide what we want to achieve in our societies, then what if instead we had

an economic system and we had a series of goals for that economy that actually tracked multiple

different things and tried to achieve progress on multiple different things

rather than just being so focused on growth and assuming that that means kind of social benefits

and other good things as a result of that, that we don't, of course, always see or often

see. And so to me, this is intriguing because I think that, obviously, on the one hand, we see

the very big failures of the economic system that we have right now that obviously need to be addressed.

But on the other hand, there's also thinking about because of the nature of the show what that means for technology, right?

If we're going to set up an economy that works in this way, how would technology be used in order to make it possible, right, in order to enable it,

in order to do the tracking of those different criteria, of those different goals, in order

to make sure that we're achieving them?

And then beyond that, there's also the question of what it means for the development of technology

...