There are a few books that will lead you to the same conclusion, but for me it was GEB. GEB really drove home for me that these systems aren’t doing anything “new,” they’re just codified versions of our understanding of the world.

Truth is a higher concept than Provability. There are some things that a system, or even an ideology will never understand. Because you can describe that system / decision making process in numbers and words, that system will inherit the same problems our numbers and words have when describing our universe. However many words you make for black, white, and gray, the universe will always be capable of producing a color that is not described by one of those words.

There are things about this world and human nature that capitalism just can’t capture. You know this, it’s why you’re here. Capitalism doesn’t know there’s finite amount of land, or that some people want to be marine biologists and others are scared of the ocean. Even the most subtle inconsistencies can have deep implications for the system. In 2006, we thought everyone who owned a house would keep making payments on it.

On top of that, a system can’t reason about it’s own correctness. If a given system is expected to describe everything, then it will necessarily contain internal inconsistencies. Two mutually exclusive things will appear as true to a given system:

A farmer needs to buy his own food A farmer needs to grow food to sell Many cash crops exist, cocoa bean slavery is the first thing that comes to my mind. What happens now? Does the farmer starve? Does the farmer start growing their own food? Does it depend on the farmer? Capitalism is abstract enough to be a system similar to prepositional calculus. In this sense, we feed it different truths about our reality, and capitalism will describe the behaviour. But we don’t know all of the truths of our world, and some things that were once true might not be true anymore. There is a short term incentive to lie even if you know something is false, and maybe even to believe in something you know is false.

The point is that we can only know about how these inconsistencies are handled after the economic system runs into them like a bullet train hitting the side of a mountain with a painted on tunnel. We see road runner go in the tunnel, and we think we can go in too. The ONLY reason our current economic system is complex is because the last crash had a complex reason. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and with them we lost any liquidity assurance on stock trades. Companies used survey people on what they wanted, people used to buy magazines to know what to want. Now Algo traders trade through FPGAs dedicated fiber lines to make sure that they see the trend first and capitalize on it first. They read in all of the tweets in real time, and look at how people feel about travelling, buying new homes, selling old laptops i.e. the consumer economy. They push ads to people’s phones, place ads on the websites they visit, impersonate opinions

All of the deep dark algorithms this guy is talking about aren’t doing anything fundamentally new because the inputs are fundamentally the same, and the system is still fundamentally flawed.