Slashdot Mirror

Me from 2000: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Me from 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Me from 2008: https://groups.google.com/foru...

Or me from 2011:
http://phibetaiota.net/2011/09...
"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 USAâ(TM)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."

Frankly, I've spent almost twenty years on Slashdot arguing with many posters who disregarded solar energy (and other renewables, as well as energy efficiency); example of me debating that from 2013:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

See also Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute's work, including from 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or John Todd and the (now defunct/spunoff) New Alchemy Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The New Alchemy Institute was a research center that did pioneering investigation into organic agriculture, aquaculture, and bioshelter design between 1969 and 1991. It was founded by John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, and William McLarney. Its purpose was to research human support systems of food, water, and shelter and to completely rethink how these systems were designed."

And Home Power magazine. https://www.homepower.com/

Solar energy has been more and more effective in ever broader niche uses which drove its growth for decades (as Home Power magazine and others predicted years ago) -- from satellites, to calculators, to homes ten miles off-grid, to generator replacements for temporary traffic lights, to one mile-off-grid homes, to on-grid homes. Finally now that grid parity has been widely reached and it is becoming foolish in most places to install anything but solar PV for electricity generation, now everyone wakes up to what has been going on. Although even now their remain deniers here and there (as in that slashdot post linked above).

=== The bigger picture: general exponential trends across multiple technologies

As I noted in the 2000 post I made, the same exponential changes in technological capacity that drive cheaper PV also apply in other areas -- even for cheaper nuclear energy (whether from uranium, thorium or hot/cold fusion). But for the same reasons most people ignored the PV trends, most people ignore these other trends.

Here is a proposal I sent to DARPA in 1999 to try to deal with the consequences of exponential technological growth (including(as we see with North Korea recently increased capacity globally for making WMDs):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"I agree with Hans Moravec on several points; one of them is the implications of this chart:

They'll BOTH send 1 hell of a shock into your system! E.G. - U.S. Naval Map = http://www.phibetaiota.net/wp-... done by iirc, a military core of engineers & scientists' studies... & they said it was INEVITABLE.

AND

Edgar Cayce Map of US Future by Prophecy = http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dFRE...

* The late Mr. Cayce's QUITE a read in & of itself about himself - I truly HIGHLY recommend it...

APK

P.S.=> They did ME @ least - it is SPOOKY shit, & eerily more than "coincidentally so" in fact... apk

They'll BOTH send 1 hell of a shock into your system! E.G. - U.S. Naval Map = http://www.phibetaiota.net/wp-... done by iirc, a military core of engineers & scientists' studies... & they said it was INEVITABLE.

AND

Edgar Cayce Map of US Future by Prophecy = http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dFRE...

* The late Mr. Cayce's QUITE a read in & of itself about himself - I truly HIGHLY recommend it...

APK

P.S.=> They did ME @ least - it is SPOOKY shit, & eerily more than "coincidentally so" in fact... apk

If we did not have weapons based on the tools of abundance like nuclear bombs as a result of harnessing abundant nuclear energy, aggression out-of-control would not be such a big global issue and threat (even if aggression could always be a local issue). Ironically, harnessing nuclear power and other forms of advanced technology that could produce abundance (including abundant destruction) like robots and new materials has removed the reasons for much aggression over material goods, but we still are stuck in our old mindset emphasizing aggression as a way to deal with material scarcity. So, for example, we are ready to use nuclear energy in the form of nuclear weapons delivered by robotic cruise missiles whose batteries were charged by solar panels to fight over oil fields on the other side of the planet from us -- instead of using nuclear energy (or robot-constructed solar panels or whatever) to generate power locally. Image what the 21st century could have been like without two Word Wars if 1910s and 1930s Germany had worked towards breakthroughs in solar power and energy efficiency and agricultural efficiency instead of trying to steal someone else's coal and land. Now Germany focuses inward on innovation and efficiency and is peaceful and the economic powerhouse of the European Union.

I wrote about this broad issue at length here:
"Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)"
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. ..."

That's the big issue as I mention in my sig, and it plays out in other ways including with food, media, addiction, and so on as human traits adapted evolutionarily for scarcity cause difficulties when confronted with some sorts of modern abundance.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.nancycarlssonpaige....
http://dianeelevin.com/sosexys...

All that said, cooperation within groups has also been a key trait of human beings.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...

But it is true that humans tend to have in group cooperation and out-group competition, something E.O. Wilson has written about. And human mating rituals also often revolve around proving something to stand out from the crowd, like James P. Hogan touches on in "Voyage From Yesteryear" depicting a culture where people compete by demonstrating excellence in some area. So, again, the biggest issue is not aggression or competition itself, but how those impulses are culturally directed. As. Mr. Fred Rogers' sang: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" That is the question.

BTW, bacteria are actually the dominant species on this planet, :-) and we forge

http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... 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. ... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ..."

Or see also: "The wombat on a global mindshift"
http://www.globalcommunity.org...

Beyond the point on AIs, as the Nazi concentration camps or any of dozens of other example show, social bureaucracies made of people are also good at exterminating humans systematically. More by me on such themes from 2000 (although, I now see more options than what I outlined there), including about how corporations are already essentially a form of machine intelligence, just with humans a component parts to a larger whole:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

How do we reign in destructive "artificial person" corporations? And how do we ensure everyone shares in the wealth produced by the organizations that monopolize so much of the Earth's resources? If we can't do that, is there much hope to reign in destructive AIs?

Still, when we talk about "genetic programming", one could argue humans are also programmed to cooperate with other humans, so the issue is more complex than what you outline. But in general, many of the issues we face in the 21st century come out of a scarcity-oriented mindset empowered by the tools of abundance. There are plenty of solutions -- improved subsistence tools (solar panels, 3D printing, personal agricultural robots), a basic income, more gift giving via free and open source software and content, better participatory government planning via the internet, and so on... But will we pursue them fast enough?

Robert Steele (ex-CIA) called this video by Michel Bauwens the most useful one he has seen in a decade; it is a video showing the great progress we have made as a culture moving from open values to open charters to open infrastructure to open organizations to open social processes to an open consciousness and so on...
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
https://lists.ourproject.org/p...

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

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

This pot smoking issue is just one more way...

All true, and a great article. Still, I already bought a couple Kyocera Hydro water-proof cell Android Smartphones for $50 or so each, and hardware costs are falling fast, so it is not clear that OS footprint matters much in the USA, although maybe in Africa and China and India it still does.

Great! So these lower costs will also reflect on Mozilla's device. Won't you be glad the day they mass-produce these and they cost less than 50USD? (by the way, 50USD can be a few days or even a week's salary in some places of the world).

That said, Mozilla could instead have focused on its XPCOM technology to ride above the OS in a cross-platform way (somewhat like VIsualWorks Smalltalk or now Qt or some others):
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...

And Mozilla could also develop democracy-empowering apps and standards on top of that XPCOM platform for everyone, including ones for collective civic sensemaking and a semantic desktop like I talk about here:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...

If I was leading Mozilla, that is what I would have focused more on. Firefox OS on a Smartphone or elsewhere is a great idea in theory, but seems like a nonstarter in practice as far as *extensive* adoption in the Western world (even if I myself might buy a phone with Firefox OS on it preferentially for FOSS and privacy reasons).

That's why they're not targeting traditional western markets, but emerging and underdeveloped ones.

Google succeeded against iOS with mobile phones from nothing to 80% Smartphone market share in a few years because Google had deep pockets and a lot of good will at the time and was at the beginning of an exponentially growing marketplace. Mozilla may have the good will (although not at the scale Google had then among consumers) but it does not have the deep pockets. It also faces an entrenched mobile Smartphone landscape at this point with Android. Plus it does not have a compelling broad service offering like Google had with search and gmail to go with the phone

That's your prespective. A lot of peope will see if from the other end "oh, good, it's not tied to google's services and I can use my existing email accounts and stuff".

What money Mozilla has is almost entirely coming from Google (about a billion dollars total over the last few years), where only about a million a year is in individual donations. While there is a lot a few sharp developers could do if funded with even just a million dollars in donations a year, if Google pulls the plug on Mozilla's funding if Firefox OS were to even hint of being a successor for any other reason, where does that leave Firefox OS? Probably not stuff I should be saying in public given I just applied for a "Software Engineer, Platform" job at Mozilla, but what the hey. :-)
http://careers.mozilla.org/en-...

I love the Mozilla mission of FOSS software to support open standards (with the exception I feel Mozilla made a big mistake on not backing WebSQL built on SQLite as a defacto standard). However, getting people to *install* anything as an uphill battle, let alone buy anything.

Yes, getting users to install stuff is imposible (unless it's virus.exe). I'm not certain they'll succeddin android-dominated markets, and least not in the short run. But there's plenty of other markets.

That's a big reason web-browser-hosted software is winning over the desktop and why I'm moving more of what I do in that direction. Even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls moved that wa

"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

My essay: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals."

An example I have there:
----
Let us contrast two candidates with different very backgrounds and ask which one would get a security clearance. Which of the two would be hired to create the social and technical systems to define US National Security?

The first candidate is a woman performance artist currently couchsurfing near New York City's Greenwich Village. She has a messed up credit history, suffers from depression, has been on psychological medication, had a terrible childhood, and has had multiple friendships and has slept with people from a variety of foreign nations who she met in NYC. She even spent a few months living in the Middle East protesting various US-related policies. She was arrested once for smoking marijuana in public outside a nightclub. She is outraged by domestic violations of privacy rights in the USA and would never submit to a security clearance screening involving lots of prying questions (if only to protect her friends). Still, she has "been there" and understands what it means to be poor and also understands what it means to see the world from multiple points of view (including the downtrodden). To her, the invasion of Iraq was an obviously stupid thing to do and she was arrested for protesting before the invasion, too. Well, it does not take much imagination to assume she would be denied a security clearance, not that she would probably ever consider a job that requires applying for one.

The second candidate is a woman with a PhD in mathematics and a master's and bachelors degree in public policy from an Ivy League university (paid for by her professional parents). She has never known a day of hunger or homelessness in her life, has excellent credit, is very emotionally stable in the past (although the limits of that have never really been tested), has never felt a need to escape from her life using drugs, and has married a reliable accountant (himself a third generation American). She thinks that a job working at the Pentagon is worth just about any sacrifice to preserve a superior US way of life (plus, she feels she and her family and friends have nothing to hide). Well, it would seem there is probably a good chance such a person would get a security clearance, even if her polygraph readings jumped when she confessed that she has in the past purchased "fair trade" coffee that came from South America and also drives a Toyota Prius that her parents gave her as a birthday present last year.

Ten years go by and our successful second candidate has risen to a position where she is assisting in using highly mathematical Operations Research to define US defense policy and weapons systems priorities to protect against those she sincerely feels "hate us because we are free". Do you feel safer as a result? Do you really think she could do as effective a job in thinking about security threats and opportunities relative to general US interests as the other woman who would never qualify for a security clearance?

As for our first candidate, perhaps she becomes a Volvo-driving soccer mom with three kids in Portland, Oregon, a successful author, and married to an organic grocery store manager, to give her story a reasonably happy ending in mainstream terms? :-)

But here is a deep question implicitly raised by Scott Page's writings. Do you think the two women, working together, along with others, might be able to do a better job at improving US national security out of their diversity of skills and experiences than either one working alone? What sort of social environment or workplace setting would it take to make that possible?

All true, and a great article. Still, I already bought a couple Kyocera Hydro water-proof cell Android Smartphones for $50 or so each, and hardware costs are falling fast, so it is not clear that OS footprint matters much in the USA, although maybe in Africa and China and India it still does.

That said, Mozilla could instead have focused on its XPCOM technology to ride above the OS in a cross-platform way (somewhat like VIsualWorks Smalltalk or now Qt or some others):
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...

And Mozilla could also develop democracy-empowering apps and standards on top of that XPCOM platform for everyone, including ones for collective civic sensemaking and a semantic desktop like I talk about here:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...

If I was leading Mozilla, that is what I would have focused more on. Firefox OS on a Smartphone or elsewhere is a great idea in theory, but seems like a nonstarter in practice as far as *extensive* adoption in the Western world (even if I myself might buy a phone with Firefox OS on it preferentially for FOSS and privacy reasons). Google succeeded against iOS with mobile phones from nothing to 80% Smartphone market share in a few years because Google had deep pockets and a lot of good will at the time and was at the beginning of an exponentially growing marketplace. Mozilla may have the good will (although not at the scale Google had then among consumers) but it does not have the deep pockets. It also faces an entrenched mobile Smartphone landscape at this point with Android. Plus it does not have a compelling broad service offering like Google had with search and gmail to go with the phone (so people will just use Firefox OS to use Google Search, Gmail and Maps?). What money Mozilla has is almost entirely coming from Google (about a billion dollars total over the last few years), where only about a million a year is in individual donations. While there is a lot a few sharp developers could do if funded with even just a million dollars in donations a year, if Google pulls the plug on Mozilla's funding if Firefox OS were to even hint of being a successor for any other reason, where does that leave Firefox OS? Probably not stuff I should be saying in public given I just applied for a "Software Engineer, Platform" job at Mozilla, but what the hey. :-)
http://careers.mozilla.org/en-...

I love the Mozilla mission of FOSS software to support open standards (with the exception I feel Mozilla made a big mistake on not backing WebSQL built on SQLite as a defacto standard). However, getting people to *install* anything as an uphill battle, let alone buy anything. That's a big reason web-browser-hosted software is winning over the desktop and why I'm moving more of what I do in that direction. Even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls moved that way with the "Lively Kernel" because they could not get many people to download Squeak. And getting people to install a full OS is an even bigger battle. Plus there are other groups making alternative phone platforms (Ubuntu, Android forks, WebOS from HP, more). So, given limited funding available for FOSS web stuff, and also given Mozilla has other great initiatives worthy of more support including "Webmaker," it is sad to see so much Mozilla resources and mental bandwidth go into something like Firefox OS that seems unlikely to gain much traction given the computing landscape we now have. And instead, the core Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird languish relatively speaking as far as bug fixes and innovation. The biggest change just recently with Firefox is it looks more like Chrome... As a "lazy" d

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. "

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. "

My suggestion: 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...
    And, as will be mentioned below, the greatest threat facing specific CIA staff is heart disease and cancer. These two threats, global and personal, are actually connected in an odd sort of way, both reflecting past adaptive behavior which is no longer very adaptive under new conditions resulting from technological change. The current economic crisis the USA is facing also results from unrecognized underlying exponential trends.
    I supply this document as mainly food for thought as people at IARPA contemplate the future of US defense intelligence and "incisive analysis".
    But this document is a sort of "meta" incisiveness, because it is about the CIA itself and related institutions and their difficulties dealing with this phase change in our society (as the late James P. Hogan mentioned in his 1982 novel "Voyage From Yesteryear"). ..."

by Eradicating Cognitive Diversity. Similar point by me: http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-how-security-clearance-process-harms-national-security-by-eradicating-cognitive-diversity/
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals. ...

From Perro's first-person account, it is clear that there are three essential personal attributes required to get a US security clearance in most cases, all of which revolve around the the need to minimize the risk a national security professional will give up a "secret":

* Practically no social contact with foreign nationals (outside of structured work-related interactions);

* A very stable psychological and economic profile; and

* A willingness to accept an invasion of that person's personal privacy in the name of national security (along with giving up a bit of the privacy of friends and family).

In the context of what Scott Page wrote about in The Difference, what are the "cognitive diversity" implications of such a selective filtering process as they relate to various forms of integrity or understanding?

It would seem likely that that such a person might have little curiosity about other cultures than the USA's, as well as little direct hands-on knowledge about them. A "foreigner" would generally be an abstraction, not a drinking buddy or domestic partner.

This ideal candidate would likely have never had a serious existential emotional crisis, never had a serious financial crisis, probably had a happy childhood growing up in a stable economic situation, and probably had loving caring involved parents themselves successful in US society. So this person would have little deep understanding of people raised otherwise and how that might effect motivations and a sense of commitment (whether to good ends or bad ends).

Cognitive dissonance is a human tendency to make beliefs align. Because of cognitive dissonance, a person who has accepted a privacy invasion for himself or herself (along with some costs for family and friends) would also probably be less likely to be concerned about domestic privacy invasions in general -- whatever their stated policy beliefs.

Now, there are always exceptions here and there, and no one is "perfect". And, to be very clear, getting a security clearance does not mean someone is a bad person. Quite the opposite -- such a person might be the best of neighbors, have a good sense of humor, be easy to manage, be a supporting pillar of a church or non-profit, be a good friend, be a great parent, and so on. They might be very intelligent and have a lot of interesting and useful suggestions to make from one point of view. It is a good thing to have a lot of people like that in government service related to national security. The issue comes down to whether it is a good thing to have *only* people like that thinking about national security? People with national security credentials are also often naturally turned to for their opinions on the local security and global security questions, so this filtering process effects many aspects of security in our world.

But what are the deep implications of staffing the USA's national security organizations with *only* 99% good well-meaning reliable mainstream people (and perhaps 1% fakers) through this filtering process driven mainly by a supposed need for "secrecy"? ...

Ironically, the USA is the world's greatest "melting pot" or really "stew pot" of cultures, yet it may have some poor national security decision making if it is afraid of the implications of that integration. That fear is primarily because any personal link to a foreign national or any deep connection to

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."

Going forward, there are many other implications of trends from "better, faster, cheaper". We should think about the positive trends and try to help amplify them. Related suggestions by me in areas of collective intelligence for mutual intrinsic security, space settlement, and health sensemaking:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking

Or, read "The Skills of Xanadu" for ideas from the 1950s by Theodore Sturgeon which helped inspire Ted Nelson and hypertext and so the world wide web:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Or look to groups like the Maker community or sustainable technology community inventing new ways of local subsistence.

Something I wrote thirteen years ago to Doug Engelbart's Unrev-II mailing list, and we are still more-or-less following predicted exponential trends:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
"Below are six "explosive" technology trends that all appear to culminate in around twenty years. Even if some of them don't pan out, the others will revolutionize our world (for good or bad). ...
You may argue the dates -- ten years for some, forty for others. You may point out Y2K didn't melt things down, that AI researchers predicted AIs by now, that fusion power was supposed to be here by now, etc. And you would be right to be skeptical. My point is that these are trends in many different areas -- any one of which would make this world radically different. Together, they spell awesome change -- in economics, politics, lifestyle, relationships, and values.
It is quite likely we are heading for a singularity in

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

Existing military technology like nukes, plagues, and bureaucracy, are so powerful that they could greatly harm most human life on the planet. What kinds of plagues does north Korea got? Do we really know? I worried about the same thing when the USA invaded Iraq. Plagues are the poor man's WMD. The USA got lucky with Iraq in that we did not see hundreds of millions of US casualties on US soil from a plague launched by Saddam when things looked bleak for him personally and billions more casualties globally among those on the sidelines.

Soon enough, cheap military robotics (flying mines), nanotech, cyberwar, and other things will add to that list of massively harmful possibilities which we have, at best, limited defenses against at the civilian level and could thus completely disrupt our infrastructure in a place like the USA. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

As in my sig, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance like nuclear energy and biotechnology and so on can be made into powerful weapons or they can be used to bring material abundance for all. The increase in powers of our technology are making the Earth seem smaller and smaller relative to the capacity for either governments or individuals to do harm. Modern technology requires us, if prudent, to both expand into space and to come up with better ways of living together on Earth.
http://globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml

Because the US military has not yet integrated this truth into all their doctrines, they still seem to think they can "defend" the USA against an (apparently) crazy person by a show of force, as with these bombers. That does not work that way if the person is crazy enough or if the local social dynamics is crazy enough to force a leader on to ever more aggressive actions. Just look at the US financial meltdown to show how individuals or collectives can deny reality for a long time or can take great risks (Enron) and so eventually destroy themselves while greatly harming the lives of everyone around them.

That is why the USA needs to rethink its security policy along the lines of mutual and intrinsic security. Thus:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"Especially in conjunction with an exponential Moore's law, it feels like there has been a systematic global intelligence failure to connect the dots about exponential change and present that information to decision makers in a persuasive way."

There may be no good way to deal with this situation. As with most disease (including mental illness) it is best to avoid it by healthier global living.
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking

One other idea by me though -- to airdrop millions of small cell-phone or tablet-sized mesh-networked solar-powered computers into repressive countries:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192755&cid=15823703

Total cost: $1 billion to transform North Korea into a connected place. Or about the cost of one of those bombers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit

Not saying it would work for sure, but at least it is a different option.

Remember: the people of oppressive regimes are generally suffering a lot too. Why make them suffer more just to get the leadership to change? That tends rarely to work anyway (for example, Cuba or Iraq). Any external threat just tends to make collectives pull together and silence dissent -- just like happened in

From 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=37016386
"Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"

Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu":
http://www.rakontu.org/

Another spin on that from this month:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

With some more code links and a video here:
http://twirlip.com/

See also:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/

From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

And also to DARPA in 1999:
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ
"We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction. ... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."

From 1987 for grad studies on improving security via self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

A long string of failed proposals. :-)

Well, at least I can still try to promote great ideas by others that have met with more success: :-)
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html

And I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.

I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades? :-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels. :-)

http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
===
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.pl?sid=2368162&cid=37016386 ...

http://www.phibetaiota.net/about/

Disclaimer: they listed me recently in their "who's who in public intelligence" section.

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

Just came across:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_David_Steele

Now that I think of it, I think I have seen something by him somewhere before... Maybe the idea lodged in my unconscious?