Post-capitalist society

What Hacker News says

1. ThomPeteDec 2012
   I read a lot of books this year but these are my favorites:

   The Post Capitalist Society - Peter F. Druckert

   The War of Art - Pressfield, Steven

   Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (Bradford Books) - Braitenberg, Valentino

   The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Hamming, Richard W. (this book is even better if you are good with math, which I am not) it's still fairly inspirational.

   Re-read:

   Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas Papert, Seymour A.

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2. parasubvertApr 2026
   Peter Drucker identified this phenomenon as the rise of knowledge work as "the means of production" in the 1950s and 1960s. Management (of people, tasks, responsibilities, and disciplines) and knowledge work were the two sides to organizational performance. Drucker felt that "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw at a problem, if you can't retain people that know what you're doing, you won't get far.

   Knowledge is a unique resource compared to the other traditional factors of economic production (land, labor, and capital). It is often invested in with capital (education and tools), but it is carried with the human, and leaves with them. It is always decaying - knowledge workers should be in constant learning mode, and stale knowledge eventually becomes a drag on performance.

   I'd argue the future is about knowledge workers all becoming managers. When you use agentic AI, it has the flavor of the skills of management. Management is "a practice and a liberal art", according to Drucker, one that has been in poor supply for some time. LLMs are have somewhat stale knowledge and require the human, tools, and RAG to freshen it. And LLMs will always regress to the mean. It is pretty good at pattern analysis and starts to get shaky and mediocre with synthesis. It requires very nuanced, and elaborate prompting to shape its token output towards insightful results that aren't a standard answer. For coding exercises, that can be fine, but at high complexity levels, or when dealing with issues of strategy or evaluation, it is a platitude generator and has no unique competitive advantage.

   In other words, competent, talented management mixed with knowledge work is the scarcity we are heading towards. This is arguably why you're seeing the rise of "markdown frameworks" that people swear improve performance, it's the beginnings of management scaffolding for AI.

   Technical folks struggle with valuing management skills, and I expect this will increase its value and scarcity.

   As for "Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks." I think the robots will be replacing that pretty shortly.

   "Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values."

   Ehhhhh not really? What about Christianity, where the meek shall inherit the Earth, and love is the core value (putting aside modern day Pharisees and Charlatans that twist the underlying value system)? Or Islam, whose core value is submission to God? While there have been Societies that valued parentage and birth order, that's far from universal.

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