{"id":2611,"date":"2025-09-26T14:54:49","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T14:54:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=2611"},"modified":"2025-11-18T11:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T11:15:09","slug":"time-to-leave-flatland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=2611","title":{"rendered":"Time to leave Flatland?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Source: https:\/\/pluspng.com\/img-png\/mixed-economy-png–901.png<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Just type “mixed economy graphic” into Google and you will get a lot of diagrams like this one – note that they normally have to pick out the United States for special mention. Notice the big gap between those countries<\/em> – North Korea, Cuba, China and Russia – and us<\/em>. It is a political statement masquerading as an economic one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This same line is used to describe our political options. The Political Compass<\/em> added an authoritarian\/libertarian axis in their 2024 election manifesto analysis but the line from left to right (described as the economic scale<\/em>) is still there:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Source: https:\/\/www.politicalcompass.org\/uk2024<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So here we are on our political and economic spectrum, where tiny movements between the very clustered Reform<\/em>, Conservative<\/em>, Labour<\/em> and Liberal Democrat<\/em> positions fill our newspapers and social media comment. The Greens<\/em> and, presumably if it ever gets off the ground, Your Party<\/em> are seen as so far away from the cluster that they often get left out of our political discourse. It is an incredibly narrow perspective and we wonder why we are stuck on so many major societal problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where we have ended up following the “slow singularity” of the Industrial Revolution I talked about in my last post<\/a>. Our politics coalesced into one gymnasts’ beam, supported by the hastily constructed Late Modern English fashioned for this purpose in the 1800s, along which we have all been dancing ever since, between the market information processors at the “right” end and the bureacratic information processors at the “left” end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what does it mean for this arrangement if we suddenly introduce another axis of information processing, ie the large language AI models. I am imagining something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What will this mean for how countries see their economic organisation? What will it mean for our politics?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1884, the English theologian, Anglican priest and schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott published a satirical science fiction novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions<\/a><\/em>. Abbott’s satire was about the rigidity of Victorian society, depicted as a two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures: women are line segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. We are told the story from the viewpoint of a square, which denotes a gentleman or professional. In this world three-dimensional shapes are clearly incomprehensible, with every attempt to introduce new ideas from this extra dimension considered dangerous. Flatland is not prepared to receive “revelations from another world”, as it describes anything existing in the third dimension, which is invisible to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book was not particularly well received and fell into obscurity until it was embraced by mathematicians and physicists in the early 20th century as the concept of spacetime was being developed by Poincar\u00e9, Einstein and Minkowski amongst others. And what now looks like a prophetic analysis of the limitations of the gymnasts’ beam economic and political model of the slow singularity has continued to not catch on at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, much as with Brewster’s Millions<\/a><\/em>, the incidence of film adaptations of Flatland<\/em> give some indication of when it has come back as an idea to some extent. This tells us that it wasn’t until 1965 until someone thought it was a good idea to make a movie of Flatland<\/em> and then noone else attempted it until an Italian stop-motion film in 1982. There were then two attempts in 2007, which I can’t help but think of as a comment on the developing financial crisis at the time, and a sequel based on Bolland : een roman van gekromde ruimten en uitdijend heelal<\/em> (which translates as: Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe<\/a><\/em>), a 1957 sequel to Flatland<\/em> in Dutch (which didn’t get translated into English until 1965 when the first animated film came out) by Dionys Burger, in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here we are, with a new approach to processing information and language to sit alongside the established processors of the last 200 years or more. Will it perhaps finally be time to abandon Flatland? And if we do, will it solve any of our problems or just create new ones?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just type “mixed economy graphic” into Google and you will get a lot of diagrams like this one – note that they normally have to pick out the United States for special mention. Notice the big gap between those countries – North Korea, Cuba, China and Russia – and us. It is a political statement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,5,8,22,21,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-cartoons","category-economics","category-media-politics","category-professions","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2611"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2621,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611\/revisions\/2621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}