Slashdot Mirror

1956 Sturgeon story about mobile/wearable computing's potential that inspired Ted Nelson and others leading to the web and so the iPhone: https://archive.org/stream/gal...
https://archive.org/details/pr...

Let's hope the upside is realized -- not a surveillance/control downside.
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

Still trying to help when I can -- just so little time:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

Hope others can carry things forward in their won way -- and many are! :-)

Half-way through reading the "The Jennifer Project" new sci-fi novel by Larry Enright, which almost seems like a Skills of Xanadu remake in some ways. Nor sure how it ends. :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Jennife...

Hopefully not the same as "With Folded Hands". :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities)."

Even just to cope with the implications of what Google is doing in AI... Still working on them, slowly...

My feeling is that our trajectory coming out of any AI singularity will have a lot to do with out moral and social trajectory going into one. So, we should do all we can now to make the world a better place for everyone, to hopefully improve that outcome.

I used to do AI in the 1980s, with my undergrad work at Princeton related to the Pointrel system maybe helping a bit to inspire Wordnet (started by my undergrad advisor as I was graduating), and (accidentally) making probably the world's first simulation of self-replicating cannibalistic robots... But in hanging around CMU's Robotics Institute in the mid 1980s, I got the disturbing feeling that it might be too easy to make "Mind Children" good enough to destroy us humans, but not good enough to "replace" us. After all, an aggressive enough self-replicating robotic cockroach could probably do in the human species, and that does not take much intelligence. As I said at a talk I gave at a conference on AI and Simulation, it is very easy to make AI and robots that are destructive (as I learned unexpectedly from my own simulations); it is much harder to make robots that are cooperative (either with each other or humans). Someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after that talk and said "keep up the good work" -- which gave me a lot of pause, but I'm not sure which aspect he emphasized (the destructive or constructive). But that sort-of cemented my feelings, and I have not worked much on "AI" since (in an independent AI sense; one might argue any knowledge management stuff has a flavor of AI, including my Pointrel system work).

Still, as with any arms race, and that is what the current push to AI has become, and arms race whether in commercial or military terms, it can be hard to figure out some way out of it before total destruction. So, better sensemaking tools might help with that. There are other problems we wrestle with as well that they could help with, like human health issues. Such tools, as they get smarter, will hopefully be designed as cooperative platforms, for each interaction between the machine and a person, and between people, and between machines.
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
"These words written [praising competition] by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition. Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."

In gen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

By me on that theme:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

So, plenty of room for at least another 1000 years of exponential growth. After that, it's someone else's problem, and there are more minds to think of solutions (like tapping zero point energy to create energy and matter in the void of space, creating new dimensions, etc.).

See also:
https://overpopulationisamyth....

The rollout of holocaust 2.0 will use Facebook to roundup political opponents, dissidents and the like."

Sadly, all too likely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data.[1]"

Thus I wrote, in the true spirit of "never forget":
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

4 years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

From there:

My suggestion for a "Game Changing" project is that NASA (possibly in partnership with NIST) could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore (developed under free and open source non-proprietary licenses as progress towards "open manufacturing").

NASA showed the basic technological feasibility of this with work in the late 1970s on space habitats, and also in a 1980 study called "Advanced Automation for Space Missions".

In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on Earth due to long supply lines and the inaccessibility of key manufacturing data (because it is considered proprietary) is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. Addressing such fragility would have immediate benefits to improve intrinsic and mutual security globally, and would help humanity survive in the face of plagues, wars, global climate change, asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and whatever other disasters might strike unexpectedly. As the loss of New Orleans showed, Mother Nature remains a formidable adversary even when people are not fighting amongst themselves over perceived scarce resources.

A NASA-coordinated effort to organize manufacturing information and use it to design such habitats (or seeds that would grow such habitats), as well as improve the state-of-the-art in collaboration software, could thus help meet needs both currently on Earth and in the future in space.

Nothing NASA is doing now compares with this at all in terms of gaining the excitement and participation of the world's technologists and technically-minded youth, given this project would have the scale of the entire FOSS movement applied to manufacturing (and simulation). Achieving this goal of a self-replicating space habitat could justify literally trillions of dollars in effort to create a technological infrastructure that could support quadrillions of human lives in space, making nonsense of current worries of "Limits to Growth" or "Peak Oil" or "Overpopulation" or whatever else.

While NASA could coordinate this effort, many other organizations including NIST (and its SLIM program), DARPA, universities, and manufacturers globally could also participate in this effort.

As a whole, this project would help increase US security as a sort of public outreach by helping the global security community transcend ironic and outdated visions of what security means, given that so much abundance is possible through modern technology and this NASA effort would demonstrate that:

"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

See here for more details:

http://groups.google.com/group...?

This effort could also be done in conjunction with this other proposal I made:

"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA "

http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

4 years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

From there:

My suggestion for a "Game Changing" project is that NASA (possibly in partnership with NIST) could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore (developed under free and open source non-proprietary licenses as progress towards "open manufacturing").

NASA showed the basic technological feasibility of this with work in the late 1970s on space habitats, and also in a 1980 study called "Advanced Automation for Space Missions".

In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on Earth due to long supply lines and the inaccessibility of key manufacturing data (because it is considered proprietary) is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. Addressing such fragility would have immediate benefits to improve intrinsic and mutual security globally, and would help humanity survive in the face of plagues, wars, global climate change, asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and whatever other disasters might strike unexpectedly. As the loss of New Orleans showed, Mother Nature remains a formidable adversary even when people are not fighting amongst themselves over perceived scarce resources.

A NASA-coordinated effort to organize manufacturing information and use it to design such habitats (or seeds that would grow such habitats), as well as improve the state-of-the-art in collaboration software, could thus help meet needs both currently on Earth and in the future in space.

Nothing NASA is doing now compares with this at all in terms of gaining the excitement and participation of the world's technologists and technically-minded youth, given this project would have the scale of the entire FOSS movement applied to manufacturing (and simulation). Achieving this goal of a self-replicating space habitat could justify literally trillions of dollars in effort to create a technological infrastructure that could support quadrillions of human lives in space, making nonsense of current worries of "Limits to Growth" or "Peak Oil" or "Overpopulation" or whatever else.

While NASA could coordinate this effort, many other organizations including NIST (and its SLIM program), DARPA, universities, and manufacturers globally could also participate in this effort.

As a whole, this project would help increase US security as a sort of public outreach by helping the global security community transcend ironic and outdated visions of what security means, given that so much abundance is possible through modern technology and this NASA effort would demonstrate that:

"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

See here for more details:

http://groups.google.com/group...?

This effort could also be done in conjunction with this other proposal I made:

"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA "

http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

As I discussed here (~25years ago): http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction. "

And: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

And here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

But many others have discussed similar things, so just another voice in the choir in that sense. If Musk really reflects on these issues (other than being another Mars fanboy) he will see that there are many possible avenues to decentralization and resiliency, of which Mars is just one. As we gain knowledge and experience in creating such systems, then we can disperse farther and farther to deal with bigger and bigger possible disasters (including the ones you point out about gamma ray burst or wandering neutron stars).

More ideas in that direction: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

And by others:
http://www.luf.org/
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Mai...
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
http://openluna.org/

Also something I've been involved with, but has since became more broadly "Open Manufacturing" and the maker movement: http://openvirgle.net/

So, generation ships etc. are interesting ideas, and they all fit into a large general picture of possibilities.

Still, for all that, making the Earth work well for most everyone (zero emissions cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, better healthcare and nutrition, a global basic income, better education for all, indoor agriculture, new power sources like dirt cheap solar and hot and cold fusion, and so on) is a good first step towards knowing how to live in space, especially given we are already on what Bucky Fuller called "Spaceship Earth". So, I see no big incompatibility between trying to make the Earth work for everyone and preparing for a future where there are quadrillions of people living in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system and ultimately the galaxy and beyond -- perhaps even into other dimensions and realities and simulations? Of course, there are philosophical issues still about all this about meanings in life and so on.

As I suggested here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

Or here: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities"
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"

Or various other places...

Lately I've been thinking about such a system fo

"just people applying 20th century ideas to 21st century conflicts."

All too true. Although the results may be far worse than becoming a "quaint has-been". To expand on your point:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

And also on intelligence specifically:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"A failure to realize this irony will produce ever greater problems down the road as we develop ever greater technologies that can become ever greater amplifiers of destructive impulses (including self-replicating nanotech and biotech) or ever greater inhibitors of constructive impulses (like pervasive surveillance to enforce arbitrary unhealthy norms as a "war on the unexpected"" [see Schneier]). So, how can we have an intelligence community in the 21st century that is truly worthy of the name? How can we have an intelligence community that truly helps prevent misadventures that waste trillions of US dollars while millions of US children grow up in poverty and tens of millions of US citizens lack access to health care or even adequate nutritious food?"

And:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."

"Good will" is an important resource. Slowly the USA has been squandering what goodwill it including from WWII. Fortunately, good will can be a renewable resource depending on the political choices the USA makes going forward.

For example, imagine how much goodwill the USA would have right now if we had given the people of Iraq US$6 trillion dollars (US$300

As I'm too often involved in myself sometimes: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."

But more seriously, there are a lot of fine dedicated well-meaning people who work at three letter agencies. There are no doubt a lot of not-so-fine ones too. Any big bureaucracy has complex and often self-perpetuating social dynamics. If such places are to improve, IMHO one needs to support and encourage the fine people there and hope their actions can outweigh the not-so-fine ones. For example, IMHO Tom Armour was one of the finer ones:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

Saying the KGB, the NSA, the Russian Oligarchy and so on are empty husks is a bit like saying capitalism is full of contradictions and unfairness and so it will fall apart on its own. I've said such things myself sometimes:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"

Yet capitalism is still here and seemingly stringer than ever (as far as control of the US political machinery). And may well be for some time as the underlying power system morphs into new forms. Ancient China went hundreds of years at a stretch with peasants suffering all sorts of things, especially famine, and not much changing. Yet, something like a "basic income" might be a step towards improving capitalism even if it would not fix everything about it (the worst of consumerism, addictions, waste, short--term planning, systemic risks, externalities, etc.).

Short-term power in human societies also translates itself into sexual access and the spread of genes (e.g. Bill Clinton, theoretically). The best we can perhaps due as a society is structure how the competition for mates plays out in our society, as in what is valued. James P. Hogan wrote about that in his sc

By someone else: http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...

By me on the need for better intelligence tools for the public: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...

By me on the security clearance process reduces cognitive diversity in three letter agencies: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may [ironically] have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."

And see also stuff by Charles Tart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.

Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...

One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),

Related things I've written:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...

And also, on trying to think more deeply together about health and other issues:
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://opengov.newschallenge.o...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not

Not to dispute your insightful point in the short term, but taking this one step further, won't the "vigilantes" eventually also have their actions recorded? If so, presumably they would be subject to easy prosecution for assault, which presumably would be a deterrent or at least prevent it from happening repeatedly? That said, recordings could always be faked or erased I guess, so some sort of "cyber arms race" might continue at the community level.

See also Brin's Transparent Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

And the end of Marshall Brain's Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

I'm not saying I'm especially looking forward to such a future, but If universal surveillance is indeed where we are heading, at least we can try to make the best of it. A generalization on that I suggested three years ago:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulating equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

"citizens killed by their own government on bogus pretexts"

If so, isn't essentially everyone on the planet is in some sense living under the USA government to some extent? And even if not, then certainly they are living under neoliberal capitalism to some extent. If so, then couldn't one argue that anyone killed anywhere in the globe by the USA was, to some extent, killed by his or her own de-facto government?

You might say, well they did not vote for the US president. But it used to be that black people, and natives, and women living in the USA could not vote for the US president either.

Maybe the global spread of neo-liberal economics has implicitly redefined what it means to be a global citizen? If global economics (including possible collapse or nuclear war) affects everyone's lives, then are we not, to some extent, all under that form of neo-liberal governance?
http://steadystaterevolution.org/neoliberalism-as-a-waterballoon/

Perhaps "Elysium" (a movie coming out next month) is *optimistic* in that sense, that there are still people around in a century?
http://www.nerdist.com/2013/04/elysium-takes-class-warfare-into-space/

In any case, my opinion is that if the internet is not used to "free" us all in some sense, and soon, then it will no-doubt likely be used to enslave us or worse.
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

One other meme on this: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
"As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
    Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

Some attempts by us at such FOSS tools:
http://www.rakontu.org/
https://code.google.com/p/rakontu/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20130202
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623

We've built other stuff in the past, but sadly it is proprietary. Hopefully people can go beyond all this in their own ways.

A billion dollars could see a good start on this project. :-) Or a "basic income" for all, to give coders who want to do this the time to do it.

My post 3 years ago: http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049
"Why Is This Idea Important?: This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all. So, why 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion? To understand that, consider a few historical trends. ..."

Too bad the opengov software munged the formatting.

Also mentioned here:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/openmanufacturing/sAqgfZ9291A/ZQKlJXBNIAcJ

My post 3 years ago: http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049
"Why Is This Idea Important?: This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all. So, why 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion? To understand that, consider a few historical trends. ..."

Too bad the opengov software munged the formatting.

Also mentioned here:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/openmanufacturing/sAqgfZ9291A/ZQKlJXBNIAcJ

More ideas: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

On self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

The grad plans were about "Elysium" but for all. Contrast:
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
with, from me:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/

Related attempts, but not very successful so far:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/

David Brin on the Transparent society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society

Related suggestions by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.

Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ..."

Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.

See Marshall Brain's Manna for a fictional example with both a basic income and a transparent society.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.

Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way? :-(

James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a good example of people not being willing to embrace "X" when it is staring them in the face.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Another "X" is vitamin D and good nutrition to prevent or reverse much chronic disease.
https://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

But that's been know for thousands of years. It just gets forgotten now and then.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62262-let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-f

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality. ..."

A further elaboration on that theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html

The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now. Other ones have all sorts of implications. That is why we need better open source tools to help figure things out and make better decisions about what health is and how to shape healthy behavior with (as Lawrence Lessig said in Code 2.0) rules, norms, prices and architecture.
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

Like your idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

And for related ironic humor in the news: :-)
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/14/rep-stockman-requests-nsa-logs-for-phone-traffic-between-white-house-irs/

An example in fiction of a Transparent Society is in Marshall Brain's "Manna" at the end:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

My suggestion a couple years ago to a public call for ideas by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

And I also wrote:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"So, with all the billions of dollars a years spent on âoeintelligenceâ, why not at least try to produce some freely-available âoedual useâ intelligence tools to help civilian American citizens make sense of the real things that are killing most real Americans by the hundreds of thousands every year?"

My wife and I have worked on some software used by the intelligence community in different countries. But our focus had been to try to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. Note the Snowden here is a different Snowden from the leaker:
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/4318/un-wired/
"There had been two DARPA projects, working off two very different philosophies. One (TIA) sought to obtain and search all possible data to detect the possibility of terrorist events. That raised civil liberties concerns and much controversy in the USA leading to resignations and programme closure. A parallel program Genoa II took a very different philosophy, based on understanding nuanced narrative supporting the cognitive processes of decision makers and increasing the number of cultural and political perspectives available to policy makers. I was a part of that program, and proud to be so. It also forms the basis of our work for RAHS and contains neither the approach, not the philosophy of TIA."

We tried to get the related company to open source the software, but not much luck. My wife does have some rights to some of the work, plus the core ideas are available in the public literature (which is what my wife based her research on).

We all may well benefit from an expectation of privacy, and a healthy government may well have an obligation to defend privacy the same way it might defend our physical infrastructure. I don't want to argue against those things (even if in practice in the communal extended-family villages that hunter/gatherer humans had historically, privacy may have been rare). But in practice right now, I doubt we can stop the spying, because it is too seductive, an

Some satire I wrote five years ago when Google created Knol, reposted here: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html

Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. ...

Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.

----

Maybe the same goes fro private drones in the balance between meshworks and hierarchies?
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Interesting ammendent suggestion. Also related by me: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

All that said, I think Eric Schmidt has done a lot of great things, and we could have much worse at the heart of Google. Anyone in that position would face a lot of constraints about what he could say or do; it's amazing anyone could do as well as he has. As Langdon Winner wrote about, the systems (including bureaucracies) we create shape the nature of what components are allowed to exists in them. If the components (including people) act too far out of expectations, they are replaced.

Good points on priorities. See also on privacy: http://fyngyrz.com/?p=25

I saw that link on slashdot recently in someone's comment, and it is an insightful essay on privacy. There is a sense that a certain degree of privacy is both a human right and a human requirement in our society, and government should have a duty to protect it (even for reasons beyond ensuring the government remains accountable to the people policitcally).

But failing that, we should at least have David Brin's "Transparent Society" where everyone can watch the watchers:
http://www.davidbrin.com/transparency.html

See also my suggestion:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

There are also chilling effects. My house has electric heat, so if I grew hydroponic vegetables instead of running the heaters in winter, I would still get the heat via the lights (thermodynamics) and I'd also get fresh veggies all winter. But I know if I buy a lot of hydroponic equipment, I'll most-likely end up on some government list somewhere to have my door kicked in (see another comment here by someone else about an example of that and our misguided drug laws). Or see:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/pinellas-hydroponic-garden-shop-has-attention-of-deputies-searching-for/1204506

So, buy hydropoincs and have your dogs shot as a result of data mining?
"Why do SWAT teams kill all dogs when serving a warrant at a household?"
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110721154445AAWtx8u

Or, see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse

Although another reasons I don't do it is concerns about humidity and mold, and also finding the space, so that is not the only concern, beyond the cost of the equipment.

Thankfully, in the USA we are nowhere near the total squashing of dissent like was accomplished using the 1930s German gestapo secret police, although they apparently mostly used neighbors turning in neighbors since it was before the internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo
"According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo wasâ"for the most partâ"made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by citizens for their information.[36] Gellately argued that it was because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a prime example of panopticism.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo -- at times -- was overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations.[38] Many of the local offices were understaffed and overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many denunciations.[39] Gellately has also suggested that the Gestapo was "a reactive organization" "...which was constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing co-operation of German citizens".[40]
After 1939, when many Gestapo personnel were called up for war-related work such as service with the Einsatzgruppen, the level of overwork and understaffing at the local offices increased.[39] For information about what was happening in German society, the Gestapo continued to be mostly dependent upon denunciations.[41] 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information prov

Something I wrote a couple years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

Good points. As I see it, the unknowns about human biochemistry and the genetic "code" have been like "security by obscurity" about an encryption algorithm that kept all human safe from intentional plagues (or mind control or suffering or whatever). Now that the obscurity is going away, for whatever well-intentioned reasons about curing illness, all humans are at ever increasing risk from engineered bioweapons. When our computer encryption "code" algorithms or their keys get compromised, we can generally replace the algorithm and/or keys. That is not possible when the human genetic code is fully understood. The risk will only continue to increase in that sense as our understanding of the genetic code increases. There may be ways to manage that risk through mutual security and intrinsic security and recognizing the irony of using post-scarcity technologies from a scarcity-biased world view, but it hard to get people raised in a scarcity-focused-culture to accept them. I discuss that at length here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Fears of bioterrorism have been one of several concerns motivating my efforts towards better information management and collective design software so that communities have some chance of transcending the threat somehow:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319

"The American people have lost control of their government."

That assumes the "people" ever did control their government? See:
    http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
=====
Q: So, who does rule America?

A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire. You can read the essential details of the argument in this summary of Who Rules America?, or look for the book itself at Amazon.com.

Q: Do the same people rule at the local level that rule at the federal level?

A: No, not quite. The local level is dominated by the land owners and businesses related to real estate that come together as growth coalitions, making cities into growth machines.

Q: Do they rule secretly from behind the scenes, as a conspiracy?

A: No, conspiracy theories are wrong, though it's true that some corporate leaders lie and steal, and that some government officials try to keep things secret (but usually fail).

Q: Then how do they rule?

A: That's a complicated story, but the short answer is through open and direct involvement in policy planning, through participation in political campaigns and elections, and through appointments to key decision-making positions in government.

Q: Are you saying that elections don't matter?

A: No, but they usually matter a lot less than they could, and a lot less in America than they do in other industrialized democracies. That's because of the nature of the electoral rules and the unique history of the South.

Q: Does social science research have anything useful to say about making progressive social change more effective?

A: Yes, it does, but few if any people pay much attention to that research.
=====

See also my essay "On dealing with social hurricanes (like the US CIA)":
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."

And also this suggestion: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

"They all still afford college and everything else because they only buy what they need. They don't buy two cars per person, they make large meals and reuse leftovers, the first two kids get new clothing and everyone else has hand-me-downs, they go to cheaper schools, etc... Their cable and internet bills are the same as yours, they go to more community activities and have enough people to play board and card games with themselves so less expensive electronic gaming, they've got multiple people to split up the chores so everything gets done faster despite there being a little more work. It really isn't that harder to wash 6 dishes than wash and dry 2 dishes (another kid will do the drying of the 6 dishes). It's just as easy to read to four kids the same story as it is to read to two kids. Eventually the older kids will start helping out the younger kids, providing you with more time and the older kid better experience compared to an only child. Assuming all the kids don't hate each other, they've got their brothers and sisters who will back them up when needed thus less prone to depression and feeling like an outcast. There are many, many more examples. I'm not sure which large families you've seen, but the one's I've seen get by by having a more sustainable life style. Tax breaks don't out weight the cost of a kid. If they did, kids wouldn't be expensive and everyone would have many. Each kid after 2 or 3 becomes cheaper than the last."

Mod parent up. With a solar system that is almost entirely empty, I'm just shocked to see all the people on Slashdot celebrating low fertility. Sure, a small cafe (the Earth) in a big city (the Solar system) may have an occupancy limit, but we don't go around telling people not to have kids because some cafe is too crowded. People generally just open another cafe...

Here is a step towards how:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319

And here is why:
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Tsiolkovsky.html
"Russian physicist and theoretical father of rocketry. Tsiolkovsky was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. Tsiolkovsky was an inventor and aviation engineer who was also an insightful visionary. As early as 1894, he designed a monoplane which subsequently flew in 1915. He also built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. In 1903, as part of a series of articles in a Russian aviation magazine, Tsiolkovsky published the rocket equation, Eric Weisstein's World of Physics and in 1929, a theory of multistage rockets. Tsiolkovsky was also the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914). One of Tsiolkovsky's many memorable and inspiring quotes is "Mankind will not forever remain on Earth, but in the pursuit of light and space will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere, and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space" (1911). Tsiolkovsky's most famous quote is, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." "

The more people, the more vision and imagination...
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

This "overpopulation" meme is so short sighted and despairing. Someday maybe we will see potential parents getting obsessed with "pleasure traps" of modern technology as perhaps a bad thing, rather than something that is now celebrated. Industrialized populations (especially places like Japan and Italy, and even the USA just about without immigration) are no longer even replacing themselves and their populations demographically will fall. Where does tha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319

From JD Bernal writing in the 1920s:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant. "

Quadrillions of humans could live in style in space habitats in the solar system. It would take another 1000 years of exponential growth to approach that. And then it is somebody else's problem -- perhaps to create virtual universes, travel faster-than-light, or create matter and energy and space from the quantum vacuum, or just migrate into a computational matrix?

As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource (whether expressed through science or otherwise):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

The more people, the more imagination. People may consume resources and take up space, but they also produce resources and make spaces worth being in.

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Never really got off the ground so far though...

See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.

Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319

Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg

A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).

This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

Still, I thi

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Never really got off the ground so far though...

See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.

Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319

Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg

A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).

This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

Still, I thi

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Never really got off the ground so far though...

See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.

Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319

Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg

A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).

This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

Still, I thi

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Never really got off the ground so far though...

See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.

Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319

Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg

A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).

This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

Still, I thi

... across the USA (my modest proposal): http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
"Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all."

This article is about an example of an organization that can collect, index, and try to make sense of 20 trillion transactions from around the globe, but they not the only one (Google is another example). At some point, quantitative differences become qualitative differences. As our society deals in all sorts of abundances, we are moving into mostly uncharted waters (even as some people like James P. Hogan in "Voyage from Yesteryear" tried to paint us a possible picture of the difference between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking). We need to think about what that "societal phase change" means (to use JP Hogan's phrasing). But very few people are doing that, and the discussion to this article is just one more example of missing the forest for the trees. Whether or not encryption makes sense in any context is completely tangential to this much deeper and broader issue of abundance vs. scarcity thinking.

See also my essays on this:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Or:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."

Or:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sens

Thanks for the comment and reading what I wrote.

Herbert Snorrason might agree with you (and this is not to disagree):
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/b9664aa1473d6d53?hl=en
"But there's another point I want to make: I'm a humanities major; history, in particular. That's a subject not exactly known for clarity or brevity. But even so, you manage to surpass everything I've read during my studies. That includes the writings of people like Karl Marx. In the original.
    Say what you will, but that doesn't seem very practical-minded to me. "

I guess that leaves lots of work for others to say what I say in better ways. :-) Which might be a good thing given stuff coming out of the lab like this: :-)
    "PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway "
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0

One attempt by me to be less verbose and more clear and simple: :-)
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

It would help to have better tools for everyone to have better discussions:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319

I guess the key point is that cheap energy, like cheap robots, can be in many cases be substituted for human labor and human intelligence and so the economy is fundamentally transformed.

Links you might like about the research-proven value of detailed diverse discussions:
http://www.amazon.com/Difference-Diversity-Creates-Schools-Societies/dp/0691128383
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing/
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Focused-Conversation-Access-Workplace/dp/0865714169

...only outlaws will have your data? :-)

An alternative David Brin-like transparent society suggestion to make data mining go both ways:
    "The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc. "
    http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319

That said, I'm not against privacy laws... But I can wonder what the unintended consequences may be.

For example, is HIPAA really helping make medicine better? Example:
    http://crazymer1.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/hipaa-laws-unintended-consequences/
"Anyone whose loved one suffers from severe mental illness has most likely run smack dab into the HIPAA laws when they try to help their loved one. The way they stand right now, HIPAA Laws (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) are a hindrance rather than a help for the severely mentally ill population."

Sometimes trying to regulate into law what should be the product of a health life-affirming culture is not a great idea in the end. Our culture has lots of problems, including with respect for privacy, but it is not clear that laws are the best way to solve these problems.

A big part of these problems, for example, relate to economic uncertainty if you are seen in a bad light. With something like a "basic income", privacy issues at least in some areas might not be as important. So there may be other more fundamental ways to address some of these issues. related:
    http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html

Another big issue is simply a broad imbalance of economic power, which might be addressed in part to a return to a 92% progressive tax rate, as the USA had a few decades ago in its boom years. Or, perhaps more corporate charter revocations when corporations do not put the public interest first, as used to be routine a century or two ago?

More on 21st century enlightenment, from the RSA:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo

http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

Compartmentalization can lead to lots of secrecy ("need to know"). Secrecy helps some things, but it also makes it easier for snakes to hide inside something, or for people to be unable to "connect the dots". I heard about one sociology professor who said, studying movies, that the "good guys" always win because they have better communications than the "bad guys". There are endless books about how organizations can improve their internal communications for greater effectiveness. Also, consider that analysis is about putting things into compartments, but synthesis is about putting things together, and both are important for creative problem solving, and the needs of our society seem to be shifting towards creative synthesis:
"RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

What good is a "secure" organization if it can't perform its primary function (whatever that is) very well?

There are always tradeoffs of security vs. effectiveness/useability. See:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/security_vs_usa.html
Which links to this:
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/when_security_gets_in_the_way.html
"The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security. Hence the prevalence of doors propped open by bricks and wastebaskets, of passwords pasted on the fronts of monitors or hidden under the keyboard or in the drawer, of home keys hidden under the mat or above the doorframe or under fake rocks that can be purchased for this purpose. We are being sent a mixed message: on the one hand, we are continually forced to use arbitrary security procedures. On the other hand, even the professionals ignore many of them. How is the ordinary person to know which ones matter and which don't?"

One might expect people at the NSA to be quite a bit more disciplined and trained than average, but certainly this point holds for other organizations.

And about another three letter agency (quoting from Wikipedia) apparently struggling with compartmentalization:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"All of this has the effect of making it hard for DI analysts to interact even with the classified outside world. The CIA view is that there are risks to connecting CIA systems even to classified systems elsewhere. Mitigating those risks sends implicit messages to analysts: that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA’s own network are secondary to the intelligence mission."

And links on open alternatives for most of any nation's intelligence needs:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
http://www.phibetaiota.net/abou

Great point.
Related section of "Human Resources": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA

Solutions (my suggestions building mostly on what others have said):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319

I'm hoping for more of a gradual non-violent evolution into these changes over the next twenty to thirty years, myself:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

But, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to do any work people don't want to do voluntarily in the first place?

If it was a "revolution", think of it on the order of women getting the right to vote in the USA,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dPF0SGh_PQ
or the UK outlawing slavery (with compensation to the owners and little violence, prompted by the Quakers, compared to the bloodbath in the USA over that),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism#Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
or the "computer revolution",
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521#
and so on.

I'm not disagreeing though with your point that the potential is there for great violence -- and not just in the streets, but also abortions, domestic violence, suicides, and so on. How can we prevent that?

I'm trying in my own nutty way to recruit the global intelligence community to help with a peaceful changeover. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319

But ultimately, some sort of change will happen regardless:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Still, it might happen with less bloodshed if more people got involved sooner and understood the basic issues better.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

The USA already spends about US$800 a citizen a year between schooling, social security, and welfare. Why not just scrap all those programs and give every citizen a check for US$800 a month as a basic income? A family of four could then just about scrape by somewhere rural, and given all their spare time, and they could homeschool or purchase tutoring or private school lessons. Public school buildings could be turned into library-like learing centers. Teachers could become private tutors or just live frugally off their basic income. People would have more free time to help their elderly neighbors, too, like bringing over stuff from their gardens, even if old people got less than their current amount. And so on. Probably this would fly best with seniors if just everyone got the current social security amounts though (no one wants to get less), which might mean more taxes.

And the USA already spends more for Medicare and Medicad per capita than other countries need to cover their entire population with better results, so health care could be extended to all with some better management and a focus on better diet, curing vitamin D deficiency, and building healthier "BlueZones" infrastructure, which would all save sick care costs, making single payer he

http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1

Imagine these sorts of things applied to, say, medical research and trying to understand how a money trail affects research results...

Or maybe we should build better systems to empower regular users towards a more "transparent society" like David Brin talks about and an improved collective IQ like Doug Engelbart talks about?

Or, as I said here about intelligence tools, but would apply equally well with a fascistic/plutocratic binding together of corporations and governance like is increasingly the norm in the USA:
    http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

That's a very insightful AC comment, including the idea for a "local community college co-op for access to labs".

I suggested something related here:
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA"
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Build-21000-flexible-fabrication-facilities-across-the-USA/44897-8319

Some other posts on rethinking schooling that I put together, including endless links within them on the bigger picture:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Yep the real solution is to explicitly define that money is not speech: http://convention.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Declare-that-money-is-not-speech/25747-7872

Here is some of what we need:

-- A robust OSI that has its act together and reduces license diarheaa and can always be depended on.

-- For that organization to work out an arrangement with FSF so there is a unified approach on libre issues.

-- For there to be just as robust an Open Standards Institute with one definition of an open standard that everybody can agree on and cite and point to in their laws or regulations, as opposed to the hundreds of varying definitions used by companies supposedly friendly to open source or by different governments.

-- For the companies who supposedly have been so helpful to open source and spent billions supporting it (yes, "HAL" I'm looking at you) to step up to the plate and articulate the problems and solutions clearly when there is a crucial venue in which to do so. (Never have I seen a bigger fail than when there was an open government forum where "HAL" and other influential organizations presented ... and the other organizations shat all over open source each day of the event ... and the rep "HAL" sent was too brain dead to even speak up in open source's favor, much less to speak persuasively about it). Open source, let me tell you, if you are expecting "HAL" to carry your water for you, well, they aren't when it matters.

-- For the whiners who want large, persuasive organizations in government or industry to embrace open source to PAY ATTENTION when those large bodies are seeking input, and actually provide some darned input. There are dozens of examples, but here is one: http://www.straighttalkny.ideascale.com/ The suggestion posted there for government to use open source http://www.straighttalkny.ideascale.com/a/dtd/23434-8033 got about 15 votes last time I checked. C'mon people it should be top of the list. Slashdot readers alone could push it to the top of the list overnight, if you really gave a damn.

If I sound frustrated I am. Stop criticizing large orgs like government for not using open source if you can't effectively mobilize yourselves and lobby effectively with offering of clear solutions instead of, well, loose scattered efforts like OSI.

Here is some of what we need:

-- A robust OSI that has its act together and reduces license diarheaa and can always be depended on.

-- For that organization to work out an arrangement with FSF so there is a unified approach on libre issues.

-- For there to be just as robust an Open Standards Institute with one definition of an open standard that everybody can agree on and cite and point to in their laws or regulations, as opposed to the hundreds of varying definitions used by companies supposedly friendly to open source or by different governments.

-- For the companies who supposedly have been so helpful to open source and spent billions supporting it (yes, "HAL" I'm looking at you) to step up to the plate and articulate the problems and solutions clearly when there is a crucial venue in which to do so. (Never have I seen a bigger fail than when there was an open government forum where "HAL" and other influential organizations presented ... and the other organizations shat all over open source each day of the event ... and the rep "HAL" sent was too brain dead to even speak up in open source's favor, much less to speak persuasively about it). Open source, let me tell you, if you are expecting "HAL" to carry your water for you, well, they aren't when it matters.

-- For the whiners who want large, persuasive organizations in government or industry to embrace open source to PAY ATTENTION when those large bodies are seeking input, and actually provide some darned input. There are dozens of examples, but here is one: http://www.straighttalkny.ideascale.com/ The suggestion posted there for government to use open source http://www.straighttalkny.ideascale.com/a/dtd/23434-8033 got about 15 votes last time I checked. C'mon people it should be top of the list. Slashdot readers alone could push it to the top of the list overnight, if you really gave a damn.

If I sound frustrated I am. Stop criticizing large orgs like government for not using open source if you can't effectively mobilize yourselves and lobby effectively with offering of clear solutions instead of, well, loose scattered efforts like OSI.

"21,000 Flexible Public Fabrication Facilities across the USA"
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049

Also:
"Revisit the Triple Revolution Memorandum sent to President Johnson"
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8402-4049

Also:
"Something I tried to post here but did not appear:
"Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation""
http://www.cnewmark.com/2009/12/making-govt-work-a-huge-step.html#comments
"""
Summary: This topic of how government funds academic research is fairly inseparable from related STEM education issues that touch on every aspect of the USA as it becomes a 21st-century society heavily dependent on science and technology while at the same time facing an employment crisis (in part from automation and better design causing structural unemployment -- even within academia and related research institutions). The essay explores problems with the current research funding model (of which open publication is just one part) with connections to all levels of the K-emeritus academic enterprise. Then it points towards some solutions like a "basic income" to help the USA transition to a full-fledged 21st century "post-scarcity" society where giving information away under open licenses would be the default in most situations.
"""

And I've posted stuff on how treating vitamin D deficiency could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year in US medical costs:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

"21,000 Flexible Public Fabrication Facilities across the USA"
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049

Also:
"Revisit the Triple Revolution Memorandum sent to President Johnson"
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8402-4049

Also:
"Something I tried to post here but did not appear:
"Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation""
http://www.cnewmark.com/2009/12/making-govt-work-a-huge-step.html#comments
"""
Summary: This topic of how government funds academic research is fairly inseparable from related STEM education issues that touch on every aspect of the USA as it becomes a 21st-century society heavily dependent on science and technology while at the same time facing an employment crisis (in part from automation and better design causing structural unemployment -- even within academia and related research institutions). The essay explores problems with the current research funding model (of which open publication is just one part) with connections to all levels of the K-emeritus academic enterprise. Then it points towards some solutions like a "basic income" to help the USA transition to a full-fledged 21st century "post-scarcity" society where giving information away under open licenses would be the default in most situations.
"""

And I've posted stuff on how treating vitamin D deficiency could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year in US medical costs:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

Please support proposals such as the proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) called "Public funding = Public viewing" (by voting for them, making positive comments, etc.). This proposal recommends that publicly funded projects must be published as open access and all data and code shared as open source software. If "We the people" pay for research and development, then "we the people" should get the results. If there aren't existing proposals for certain agencies, please add them.

As I've commented before, Government-developed Unclassified Software should be default be released as Open Source Software, and U.S. research should be open access. The current model, especially for research and development, isn't working.

Good god, that’s hard to follow. There are so many links I can’t tell which one is the main article, there are acronyms that I don’t recognise, and it’s not tied together at all. The flow of information just jumps from one thing to another with little apparent connection between them. It’s also incorrect.

Let me see if I’m understanding this, and make it easier to follow...

To power the Tools for America's Job Seekers Challenge, the US Department of Labor tapped IdeaScale, a subsidiary of Survey Analytics, which is headquartered in Seattle with satellite offices in Nasik, India and Auckland, NZ.

According to the Federal Register (PDF), an OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Emergency Review was requested to launch the “Jobs for America’s Job Seekers Challenge”, a joint initiative by the DOL, White House, and IdeaScale to help out unemployed US workers.

Now we hit the first non sequitur... how is the development and maintenance of ideascale.com related to the Jobs for America’s Job Seekers Challenge?

A Monster.com ad (cached) seeks candidates to work on the development and maintenance of ideascale.com — in India at an annual salary of Rs. 200,000 to 300,000 ($4,4000 to $6,600 US).

The connection is – apparently – that the same people developing and maintaining the IdeaScale website will presumably also be designing the platform to “allow toolmakers and developers to present their free online job tools to workforce development experts and jobseekers for discussion, rating, and voting”. That’s a bit of a stretch, but okay. (As kdawson correctly pointed out, “There’s no guarantee that Indian workers recruited by that Monster.com ad would work on US Department of Labor projects.” Wait a second... did kdawson actually get something right? At any rate that still doesn’t make up for posting this atrocity to begin with.)

Now we hit the second non sequitur... what does IdeaScale’s other contest/survey have to do with this one, other than being hosted by the same company? Does the results of a previous survey on how to “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness” have anything to do with this contest? They have no control over the results of the project: they’re just designing the system to take submissions and allow people to vote on them...

Last May, in a similar White House-sponsored, IdeaScale-powered Open Government Brainstorm to “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness”, legalizing marijuana was one of the highest-voted ideas.

BTW, an earlier White House-sponsored, IdeaScale-powered Open Government Brainstorm identified legalizing marijuana as one of the best ways to 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness.'

It is probably worth mentioning (if it was even worth bringing up the content of that site in the first place) that the current number one idea on that site is a meta-innovation aimed at giving users the ability to apply 'ignore' votes to ideas to better stifle unproductive but popular entries. Sounds like they need to throw the whole thing away and just run slashcode!

What do you guys make per year for coding this site? I can start getting the next submission ready...

I make a similar argument in "Government-developed Unclassified Software: Default release as Open Source Software" - if "we the people" paid to develop software, then by default "we the people" should get it. This was one of the proposals in the open government dialogue, and many people voted for it.

I don't think that EVERY program funded by the government should be released to the public. If it's classified for good reason (say, its purpose is to explode a nuclear bomb), then I think it should definitely NOT get to the public. But if we made openness the DEFAULT, that would eliminate a lot of nonsense.