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The Problem With Abundance
GRW writes "Peter de Jager, "a speaker/writer/consultant on the issues relating to the Rational Assimilation of the Future", asks, 'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?' He answers that 'they are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.' His article is a thought provoking discussion of the unintended consequences of technological change."
Personally, I'm happy to slaughter the sacred cow of "scarcity." Imagine fitting all your porn on a 1GB hard drive. Now scarcity is not so cool.
0'th post. It is interesting though, because I have always considered the elimination of scarcity one of societies goals. Where there is no scarcity there is no theft.
There are two types of people: those that can fill in the blanks,
traffic jams -> scarcity of alternative transportation
In Star Trek, they have replicators that can create pretty much anything anyone could desire, and they no longer have money (except when they do). So... why do some people in the Star Trek universe have bad jobs? Why would anyone pick that? I can understand explorers, scientists, even farmers continuing in their work because they enjoy it, but why is someone going to pick to be a guard on the penal colony planet for the most dangerous criminals? It can't be the pay, because the pay doesn't matter when you can have anything.
Of course, they don't compare to the problems of scarcity. As opposed to famine, plague, war, (real war, over necessities; not what we have now.) and back-breaking labor, a traffic jam is not such a big thing. Just put on some nice music, and enjoy the quiet.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
...is that I don't have enough of it.
Electric Monkey Pants
Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy -- it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
Given Peter de Jager's mugshot I think he has some authority on the matter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
but what about an abudance of happiness, or love?
Those are states, not measurable quantities.
I love my wife more than anything else. My friend Em loves his wife, AFAIK more than anything else. How do you tell which one of us has "more" love?
By this point, you've probably already bred, and thus your genes continue. Now, if you got fat and drove way too fast when you were 10 and died, it may work out.
Is this the guy who made a name for himself yelling about the sky falling at Y2K? As I recall, the sky didn't fall at all. I'm sure he'd like credit for that.
I guess he can't find another "crisis" so he's decided we have too much stuff.
Ecologists say essentially the same thing, but with different words. I attended to an Ecology class when I was in college, and I nicknamed it Apocalypse class, because every day our professor told us a different way to deplete natural resources which would lead humankind to extinction. And this usually had something to do with the fact that human population is always growing. I though it was interesting, but scary.
My neighbor's
For those calculus-savy, d*u^2/d^2*q That's been incorporated in the whole body of theory, to explain everything - from demand response to lower interest rates to risk management in capital asset portfolios.
If I get too fat, I die. If I drive way too fast, I have an accident and die.
They're sort of self limiting. For example, in theory, being stupid is self limiting. Someone is too stupid, they do something stupid, and die, however there are just too many variables to be taken into account. Some very clever people die young, just like some fat people who drive way too fast live to see 100 (albeit a smaller amount of the population than those who look after themsleves and drive carefully).
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?'
Simple. Stupid fat f**ks read spam on their cell phones while driving and cause traffic jam.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Of course, there's also the issue that if I can't get to McDonalds because I'm stuck in traffic, I'll lose weight.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto
Newsflash: society must adapt to changes in its environment. This includes technological changes that render previous assumptions obsolete. At the bottom of the article, the columnist mentions how digital paper might kill the newspaper business, or how easily copied CDs affected the music business. He didn't mention how that motorized carrage invention killed the buggy whip business. If your line of work is being made obsolete by changes in the environment, then perhaps it is time to change your line of work. It is futile to try to change the world, although that doesn't stop people from trying, at best all you can do is slow down the rate of change. I know it will be painful for the people who don't adapt, but that is the way of the world.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is like Fox News, the story doesn't tell you anything more than the headline did. Weak.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
And does one person becoming so obese that they die going to prevent another person from doing it? Experience shows us that it does not. So no, obesity is not self-limiting.
As for driving "too fast", that is also solved by technology, and not at the cost of speed. In my grandfather's day, any fool who traveled 75mph for a period of 6 straight hours was a fool. His tires wouldn't hold up under the strain, nor would the fuel supply hold out. Today, I routinely visit my mother 9 hours away on a single fueling stop and often exceed 75mph on the freeway, and barely blink. Steering is no problem either, unlike for my grandfather, who had to contend with a car with the aerodynamics of a rounded brick and a steering system unassisted by any power.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
Peter de Jager is, of course, the infamous "Y2K Guru", although he probably hopes we would just forget about that and move on...
Problem:
...
What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?
Development:
What does it mean for "family time" when every room has a TV?
What does it mean for my company when everyone has instant messaging?
What does it mean for newspapers when everyone has access to digital paper?
What does it mean for the telecom industry when everyone has a wireless network?
Conclusion:
Any technology which creates abundance poses problems for any process which existed to benefit from scarcity.
Hmmm, duh
Thanks Peter for your great insight. I'll check if I can find more of your great articles here.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What about overpopulation?
Sounds cruel, but medical technology is largely to blame for overpopulation, boosting the birth rate, raising the average life expectancy...
Plauges, STDs are all, to some extent, 'reactions' by 'mother nature' to bring us under control. Want to see a clearer-cut example? Forest fire fighting. Forests have been around for quite some time without us meddling with their natural processes. We step in, start fighting the small fires which thinned the forests out- and boom, all of the sudden, nobody can figure out why we've MASSIVE fires.
The problem is not so much technology itself as the misappropriation of it by people egged on by thel "won't someone think of the children" types. Won't someone think of the tree owls who are homeless after that last fire? We'd better meddle!
Please help metamoderate.
Any form of change will have at least some unintended or unpredicted consequences.
:o)).
While a reduction in scarcity may be unintended, I find it hard to consider it automatically undesirable. Scarcity in terms of food is bad, by and large. Even though an abundance has its own issues, obesity is arguably less of a problem than starvation (though obviously, the middle ground is probably to be preferred).
(Now, if there were a scarcity of lawyers and politicians, that could be a good thing
It doesn't appear that the author is railing against technology, but there are people who will read it that way. "Technology is bad!", they will say, and point to any number of unintended problems that have arisen. What these people seem to miss is that the solution to those problems is further progress (and technology), not stopping in one place and burying our heads in the sand (or clamoring for a idyllic past that never existed).
Given that, for the most part, the problems caused by these unintended consequences are often less harmful than the problems that the technology addresses, I'm willing to accept the consequences, assuming that a goal is further advancement to address those problems, and so on.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
If you eat right and exercise, you die too. No way around that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There is certainly a larger problem here -- the very mechanisms by which we were to be freed from the ravages of nature (esp. sewage, refrigeration, washing-machines, elevators ...) have enslaved us to convenience through a kind of hypnotization. We now must have convenience, for if we don't, we can't do anything. Think about what happens when the power goes out: our sleep-walk through existence is rudely disturbed, much like when a magician's victims find out that they have been barking like dogs. This is a much worse bondage.
Economics IS the study of scarcity. Or more accurately, how humans develop social systems to cope with or mitigate scarcity. (When you boil it down, trade and money are just tools of controlling resource allocation or power over resources.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
There's a good article to be written about this subject. Unfortunately, that one isn't it.
Where do you find overpopulation?
The most overpopulated parts of the world happen to have the lowest technology levels, I do believe.
GPL Deconstructed
If its already in you, then you ate it.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
How do you tell which one of us has "more" love?
I believe this is one of the rare disputes that can only be settled by a fight to the death.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
In economic terms, this is a shortage. People want to "buy" more roadspace at the current price than is available. When there's a shortage, queuing costs dominate but the queuing costs benefit nobody. There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
That means some sort of usage fee -- tolls. The problem with old-style tolls is that the transaction costs were too high (i.e. there's always a backup at the tollbooth). What we need is anonymous, electronic cash-based tolls.
Electronic tolls also make it easy to charge an arm and a leg during peak times and "bargain rates" at other times.
There is a problem. How do you deal with people who are out of electronic cash? Don't really know because it has to be anonymous.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
we can save people who should by natural law be removed to make space for the next guy.
What is this "natural law" you speak of? Other than the laws of physics, I know of no natural laws out there.
Perhaps you are thinking about "survival of the fittest", which people often misinterpret so that they believe that only the fittest individuals should live and the rest should die. That concept works only in generalizations - that a more fit individual will have a greater likelihood of surviving, but that like all probability, nothing is fixed. The most fit individual in a population could be the one gored by an ox, leaving the less fit to move on.
Yes, technology is used to increase life expectancy, allowing people to live that would have died a thousand years ago. But there's no "law" that states that person should have died - it just happens that way. Humans work toward extending their lifespans and saving others - that's a part of our "human nature" that we have due to evolution. Saving people with technology is just as natural as being killed.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
In first world countries with the medical technology you are blaming, the birthrate is currently less than what is nessicary to maintain population levels. Several countries in Europe are losing population before imigration because the natives are not having kids fast enough to replace those that die, despite people living longer.
In truth medical technology lowers the birth rate. When you don't have good medical care you are best off having a lot of kids, but not caring if they don't survive (because many will not, and caring leads to psycological problems if they don't survive). When you have good medical care you are better off having a few kids that you put lots of effort into ensuring the survival of, they live, and get the attention needed to do well. Medical technology also provides birth control that works.
// Those are states, not measurable quantities.
There is an abundance of truth in this boolean variable. I would not like to set it false, I just think it shouldn't be so true.
Abundance simply ignores the fact that resources are limited. Resources are finite, whether they be one's health, or the raw materials used for one's sustenance. You engage too much of one, you pay with the other. It all evens out in the end.
Peter De Jager's Doomsday 2000 article published in 1993 in Computerworld is often credited with starting the whole Y2K phenomena. It was alarmist, but it was also a reasonable warning to industry at the time. In 1993, a lot of Y2K remediation was needed. But by late 1998, Peter De Jager was saying that Y2K would create minimal problems and became an opponent of Y2k hysteria fanatics like Ed Yourdon. He never beleived that Y2K would result in the whacked out scenarios taught by nut cases like Gary North.
But you'll be hungrier so that when you get there, you'll eat twice as much. How revolting!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
A technology which has, as its primary advantage, an ability to create abundance, carries within it the potential to create problems invulnerable to simplistic solutions. Like genies let loose from the bottle, they are almost impossible to control.
Maybe on a sociological scale they're impossible to control, but on an individual basis it's easy to control. My wife and I deliberately limit ourselves so that we're not running after things that don't matter.
I think the _real_ problem isn't that there's too much, but rather people want more. The fact that 3% of the world's population (North American) controls 60% of the world's wealth is a problem with our society's refusal to want less. Although I don't think much will change in the future, the individual can choose to give his/her excess to others who don't have.
And no, I'm not going to give you my excess spam...
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Seems like you are making a case for Eugenics - be careful with that slippery slope. Eugenics is similiar to communism in that it looks good on paper - but in practice it is not practical. Basically, if we humans are to evolve, it will have to be through the influence of society. We will have to learn self discipline or doom ourselves. But how do we do that? Kill off the stupid people? Well, that's a good start, but once we start on that path, we will surely discover other undesirables. Why do we need mentally handicapped, invalid, old or other burdens on society? We've gotta euthanise them as well. And what about those unwashed muslims/buddhists/JW/LDS fucks - they're just a drain on society also - what with their non-Christian beliefs. Then what about those that are predisposed to cancer etc? We should get those folks out of the gene pool...and on and on and on. Leave the stupid people alone, someone needs to work at 711. If we are going to purge anyone, let's purge the people who abuse/neglect/molest children. These people are the ones hurting our future by emotionally crucifying the next generation.
ymmv
This has seriously reduced the enjoyment of music. A person's A+ list becomes pretty small. Probably about the same size as one's vinyl collection as a kid. (YAMV - Your age may vary)
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
"The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. But my greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth." -- Brigham Young 1848
I don't know that the point is abundance is bad, but that abundance will likely have unintended consequences.
Sure, the first things a new technology does is have its intended consequences. After that however, if the "cost" to do something is dramatically reduced unintended consequences occur.
I don't know if the guy is a luddite or not, but his point valid. If you introduce a technology that dramatically reduces the cost to do something, it's probably guaranteed that additional consequences will occur besides the original reason why you invented the technology in the first place.
It may be wise to try to think through what those consequences might be. Once you've done that, you've got several options:
1) Don't release the technology (Boring)
2) Control the release, so society has time to adjust.
3) Introduce something that acts a counter balance, so the undesired consequences don't occur or are minimized.
4) Screw it, and just roll out the new thing already!
#1 - There so many reasons this is wrong, I won't go into it.
#2 - This almost never happens, maybe it should? I don't know
#3 - If strategy #3 was rolled out with a technology in the first place, things would probably go smoother.
#4 - This is what happens today, until eventually we go ooops (or somebody like the RIAA applies a lot of self-interested political pressure), and then we try to do #3 after the fact. This sometimes gets ugly.
But when all is said and done. #4 just pushes societal evolution. A disturbance enters or society; we struggle with it for 10-100 years; finally equilibrium is established around that new technology; rinse repeat.
#4 has actually worked great up until the industrial revolution. Since then the pace of innovation has been so great, that we don't have time to finish adjusting to the last change before we have to start adjusting to a new one.
That in itself is applying pressure on society to change. It is applying a pressure for society to become quickly adaptable.
So here's a piece for you to nibble on. What's more quickly adaptable? A democratic society or a totalitarian? I certainly prefer my good ol' democracy, but P.R.China has a government structure more like a corporation than Western countries. It can force painful societal adaptiations to occur quickly. Totalitarian governments can fail by being to rigid, too. But if they find the right mix of control, combined with encouraging a free market, they make a formidable force.
Might it be that democracy will fail, because it can't adapt to technological change fast enough? Time will tell.
No. What it means is that we've managed to change what qualifies as fit to be something independant of the environment.
According to my ex-fiance here's a proper equation:
# Carrets x clarity x color x cut x setting cost = totally love amount.
Clarity guide: FL = 10 IF = 9 etc.
Color Guide: D = 10 E = 9.5 etc.
For example, in the case of my ex, here expectations of my love for her were: 2.5 x IF x D x Round x Platinum == $25k
My calculations came out much less; obviously a conflict of opinion ensued.
If your wife's diamond is less than that of your friend's, you're in deep trouble as this quantiatively proves you love your wife less than your friend loves his.
And if you're wife buys into this love equivalence equation, you have much more pressing concerns to worry about.
"The human body is designed to run on scaracity...."
tell that to groups like Christians Childrens Fund.
An abundace of traffic is an scarcity of roads. And abundance of fat is an scarcity of self control. And abudance of spam is a scarcity of cattle prods.
It's all a matter of perspective.
Since the article makes only trivial observations and provides no insights, I guess it's up to us readers. So here's my long rambling attempt:
The article's advice that people should think about the consequences of new technology is sort of worthless, for the same reason mentioned that you can't replace abundance with scarcity because people wouldn't stand for it. If it were normal for people to think ahead about consequences, they wouldn't mind a healthy dose of scarcity that promised them better health, lower stress and greater security.
In the real world, people who stand to profit from something rarely let the impact on others get in their way. At most, they consider their legal liability. When the damage starts to become obvious, all responsibility is placed on the customers who "demanded" the product. Demand, whether real or advertising-generated, is blamed for all the long-term consequences. The fast food industry doesn't accept the blame for creating a nation of lard-asses with heart disease. They just fulfilled the demand and raked up the profits. Those lazy customers did the damage to themselves. And of course, people should eat sensibly.
On the other hand, if you leave a big pile of concrete rubble in your front yard, and some curious kids climb on it and get hurt, you're going to be held liable for their injuries. An unfenced hazard like that is what's called an "attractive nuisance." You don't have to spend billions on advertising to get those kids to wander over and check it out. Merely making it easy to get to is enough to make you responsible for it.
So why aren't people who operate on a much larger scale equally responsible for "attractive nuisances" -- especially when they're handing out billions of toys in Happy Meals? I'm not talking about frivolous lawsuits for spilled hot coffee, I'm talking about people who learn to love products as kids, use them as directed for years and then drop dead at age 50 from the health effects. Apparently the loophole is the fact that almost anything is okay in moderation, and companies don't actually suggest in their advertising that anybody should consume TOO MUCH of their products. But then, the person with the pile of rubble likewise isn't asking anybody to climb on it. The pile is perfectly safe if you merely look at it and imagine the fun you could have climbing on it. So where's the consistency in the law?
I think we're between a rock and a hard place. Liability for future consequences could cripple innovation, or limit it to large companies with litigation war chests. Which is the same thing. Making people responsible for whatever happens to them requires that they have an unrealistic level of expertise and caution. We want a safe world. We want a changing, progressive world. What a can of worms.
Yeah, like these guys.
For as DeBeers well knows, the converse is, "Any marketing process that creates scarcity steals benefits from any persons who are ignorant of abundance."
Next in line for this treatment is VoIP. In four years or so, your average telecommunications company will either be adapting or be gone.
there is no spoon
Actually its not just a tendancy, it WILL happen eventally...
"On a long enough timeline, everyones survival rate drops to zero"
As far as reproduction goes, outside forces that kill off the parents IS self limiting. Two parents nees the resources for two people. They have six children (as a sidenote, in the past parents hade to create eight or ten children just to get six of them to live long enough to be useful, and thats assuming childbirth didnt knock off the female) and now their family uses the resources for eight people. When the parents die off, the families need for resources for goes down to six people, making room for the next generation.
The longer the parents live, the more resources they eat up that could be for their children and grandchildren.
Before you post, I am WELL AWARE of the intangible benefits of grandparents helping raise their grndchildren, being a product of it myself.
[The thing is: How many grandparents are doing this and not spending their later years playing golf in arizona and driving to the drugstore in their golf carts?]
Other intangibles: What is the stress in resources on an extended family (and a community) when grandpa spends a year or seven in the hospital recovering from a stroke on life support that in earlier times would have given him a quick out with less pain and suffering.
What about the stress on soceity taking care of people with debilitating illnesses that can barely take care of themselves, requiring constant care (RESOURCES), after some hero doctor has brought them back from their second or third (etc.) flatline?
Do YOU wanna spend the last 15 or 20 years of your life causing your family unintentional grief while youre barely strong enough to change the channel on the clicker and eating all your meals theorugh a straw? Mainly because as a soceity we've totally given up on the concept of being able to let go?
Its Death, people. its gonna get all of us. The WORST thign we can do is not dealt with it head on.
+--+--+--+
[News Note On all of this]
What about that woman in Florida that FLAT OUT SAID she didnt want her life to degrade to the level of being a really expensive-to-take-care-of-houseplant? Take her off the machines and she'd die naturally. She wouldnt even FEEL IT at a conscious level.
She's no longer has any consciousness.
She EXERCISED HER RIGHT as a Fully Coherent Adult to say "Do Not Do This To Me" and how much hand wringing and pain and resources are being WASTED on this bullshit?
The main reason for which being a politician saw an opening to garner points with the right-wingers by taking the emptional pain of her parents and turining it into a circus?
Ref: CNN for various articles on the stupidity
Parents who simply cannot face the facts that shes gone and thats that.
Its sad, but its the facts.
[/News Note O
s'wut i sed.
When something is abundant, it's free. Witness the Internet. Once software/movies/music gets out, it's available gratis. Anything that can be digitized (i.e. any information) can be made available for zero price. That scares the hell out of the Entrenched Capitalist, as well it should.
As far as information goes, creativity isn't a team sport. Ever hear of a fiction novel written by 12 people? Didn't think so. It may be true that developing ideas may require resources and manpower, but inspiration strikes individuals.
Maybe the legacy of the Information Age will be that eventually, only tangible goods and artificially scare information will carry a price tag. This is a Good Thing. It means everyone benefits from the collective thought of the creative, but you still have to work building things to make a living. We could have that utopia, or just sell information through Absolute DRM, which we're well on the way to having. It's obvious that The Powers That Be know this future, and are actively lobbying for it. It's long past time we sent our own legions of Smart People up to Capitol Hill to sell our vision of the future, too.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Check out his article, "The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons," on his old web site on the Well .
As Solomon (or somebody) commented a few thousand years ago, there is nothing new under the sun.
Catherine
Reminds me of a Pohl book (or was it a short story?) "The Midas Effect". The premise was a future in which there was rampant overproduction, and the poor had to consume like mad, while the rich got to live a simple lifestyle.
I've been thinking about this story for a while now. Scarily enough, it's becoming true for certain things. A huge house at the outskirts of your metropolitan area is cheap. What's expensive is a small apartment in the city (depending on your city, of course). Huge washer and dryers? Cheap. Small washer/dryer combo? Expensive.
Things are definitely becoming stranger and stranger...
AB SO LUTELY! however it should be duly noted that one might make an argument that this strange twist in human history (the poorer folks growing fatter than the rich) is the cause of America's strong political stability.
I mean, for all the debate, boredom and laughter/tears over the 2k bush/gore floridiot fiasco something that would have certainly happened in less than three months in most other countries would have been violence and possibly armed struggle over the same. instead, we counted, and argued, and debated and judged and a hundred other boring methods. why???
obesity has washed the poorer citizens of America into sheeplike obedience. they have sold out to mcdonalds and their taste buds. obese people lack stamina, speed, and often, after a prolonged spell, the willpower or urgency to change their fortunes. obesity is a choice, first and foremost. poorer people could eat healthier, but that is rarely the path of least resistance.
as a result, the working masses have been placated. i can't honestly see anything wrong with having the choice to be thin or thick and choosing thick. throughout history, rebellions and revolutions have been born in the depths of famine. the french revolution started (the bastille) when the price of bread went through the roof, while simutaneously, the price of wine remained constant. yep! the third grade history books don't mention that the famous mob of Paris was blind, stinking drunk (on empty stomachs).
poor people the world over would kill to be fat and not starving! just their leaders know that if that kind of cultural blight happens to their countries that a) they would be at risk of revolution if america removed the fat and b) obesity is a legitimate problem
personally, i think it will be solved just because there's never obese people in Star Trek ;) just kidding!
really though. this issue is close what makes america tick.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Right, it's not zero-sum... it's negative sum.
If you look just at the bad and not the good you'll always be losing.
This is a common failing of the barren critic, known as ecclesias.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources.
not driven by, burden with.
Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
I think Newton, Gauss, Einstein and all scientists and engineers might
have begged to differ
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
You know, old ecclesiases have been crying:
"there is nothing new under the sun"
every generation
bright youngsters of the following generation
Working for necessity's mother.