From Kevin Kelly: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all """ We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government -- for now.
The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.
I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one. """
A better idea than Bayh-Dole, which gives ownership of inventions to universities and the government, would be for all inventions funded in whole or in part by public or charitable dollars should go under free licenses (or into the public domain). Something I wrote on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html """ The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past. """
VisualWorks Smalltalk had this "new" kind of garbage collector more than ten years ago. See:
"VisualWorks space descriptions" http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/papers/papersByOthers/visualworksSpaceDescriptio.html "NewSpace is used to house newly created objects. It is composed of three sub-spaces: an object-creation space (Eden) and two SurvivorSpaces. When an object is first created, it is placed in Eden. When Eden starts to fill up (i.e., when the number of used bytes in Eden exceeds the scavenge threshold), the scavenger is invoked and those objects housed in Eden and the occupied SurvivorSpace that are still reachable from the system roots are copied to the unoccupied Survivor Space. Thereafter, those objects that survive each scavenge will be shuffled by the scavenger from the occupied SurvivorSpace to the unoccupied one, until such time that the aggregate size of these survivors threatens to make the scavenge pause excessively long (i.e., when the number of used bytes in SurvivorSpace exceeds the tenure threshold), whereupon the scavenger will attempt to speed up subsequent scavenges by moving some of the older surviving objects from NewSpace to OldSpace. We say that such objects are being 'tenured' to OldSpace...."
Just one more thing Java is borrowing from Smalltalk. Now, if they would only borrow the syntax...:-)
== what have funding policies in automotive intelligence wrought? ===
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off: * totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead * with ways to verify what those intell
Like nuclear technology, or biotech, or other advanced technologies which all function as amplifiers for the human mind, robotics have the potential to make the world work well for most everyone. But it requires using them in a post-scarcity way, fostering abundance for all through cooperation. Instead, often people think of these technologies from a mindset of scarcity, and so use them to competitive way to defend a hoard of privilege.
Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
From our garden simulator help file: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000136.htm "The magic wand is used to grow plants, to pull all plants in a soil patch, to duplicate plants and soil patches, to rename plants, to reseed plants, and to place plants in stasis (or remove them from stasis). The tool actions associated with any tool can be changed in the tool editor."
You could also map action from other tools, like the "growcorder" onto the magic wand to use it for that functionality: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000134.htm
"The growcorder is used to scan, magnify, or scan and magnify garden objects to find out more information about them."
I guess the way our patent system works, we can expect a cease and desist order from Microsoft any day now for using the ideas we developed over a decade before them.:-)
I am writing to you regarding a new matter that has been brought to my attention by my clients. In this particular matter our office represents Dean Kamen's evil twin brother.
The writing of cease and desist orders in an electronic form has been patented by our client in patent #9,219,493: "Use Of Cease And Desist Orders in Electronic Discussion". Your use of such a letter is in violation of United States patent law, and I request that you remove this content immediately.
I have a good faith belief, and in fact know for certain, that the posting of these works was not authorized by my clients, any agent of my clients, or the law.
Sincerely, Dewey, Cheetum, and Howe, Attorneys at law
What I found interesting in the comment and reply is the perceived tension between relying on (centralized?) manufacturing and freedom.
Anyway, it seems to be the general feeling of slashdot that there is no land one can go to right now to escape these trends (other than perhaps the future.:-)
In the "utopia" at the end of Marshall Brain's Manna story, there was no anonymity and effectively probably no privacy: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm But that is sort-of like Brin's Transparent Society idea.
Another post in this Slashdot discussion makes the point that "Freedom" and "Justice" are not the same thing as "Democracy" (even if they often may go together). One can wonder if "Privacy" is orthogonal to those as well? Have so many things changed that privacy is indeed history? On the other hand, in the short story "The Skills of Xanadu", which is another open manufacturing utopia, people had total privacy even in plain sight when they wanted it, out of social conventions and a form of computer-mediated telepathy.
"RE:The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/13e85ebf99d0554f
In any case, another implication of your comment is that, for many people, the conceptual goal for open manufacturing in a free society may not need be as high as producing everything we have now (even indoor plumbing?). Just producing enough to support a reasonably free and sustainable society may be a good enough first goal? Anyway, there are bound to be a diversity of opinions on that; I'm just drawing together some themes.
I remain convinced, along the lines of Manuel de Landa, that there is *no* possibility of choice between hierarchy and meshwork, because all systems have both aspects. One can at best talk about balances between the centralized hierarchies and grassroots meshworks in different situations.
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces" http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
Oil, for many of the purposes we use it for, may become more expensive in the near term. But there are *lots* of alternatives. I tend to like solar photovoltaic best as a solution that is quiet and has few if no moving parts, but there are lots of other possibilities for getting usable energy.
I'd be more worried about social problems caused by unemployment from exponentially rising productive capacity of society in the face of limited demand, and that is the very problem the elites (and others) of the world need to wrestle with. For example, how many people does it take to make a Kindle (or OLPC or whatever) for everyone on the planet, as opposed to how many people does it take to keep a vast industry going making and recycling paper? Automation as well as better design is ending the very notion of work as we know it, to the point where, as with GNU/Linux a relatively few people can supply everyone with high quality products, so any rationale for a link between having a right to consume and having a job is going away (which may create huge social problems in a capitalist framework). This was predicted even in the 1960s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
Something I wrote on that topic last year:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton" http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html "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?... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?:-) Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero? "
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart--unless a culprit runs afoul of the media--an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tel
I've been working toward a Java version of a Social Semantic Desktop. The code is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/ "The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, as well as related social semantic desktop applications inspired in part by NEPOMUK and Halo Semantic MediaWiki."
Just for fun, theoretically, you can put payloads into orbit and on routes to the moon/planets/asteroids if you give them a solar sail. (People could not survive that trip, unless encoded in data bits and silicon.)
In round figures, people are about 90% bacteria by numbers, and about 10% bacteria by weight. Bathing too often may disrupt your bacterial ecology and lead to infections or skin problems, and growing up in too clean environments may lead to immune problems. Although exactly what is too much is problematical. See:
"The filthy, stinking truth: The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick." http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/
Until we actually landed on the moon, the best scientists still thought landers might sink into dust. Someday, we may turn the Moon into a green paradise using greenhouses and artificial lighting or mirrors.
Psychologically, the individual's perception is still the center of everything (though people try to move beyond that in their thinking). Quantum mechanics reflects this. Still, we may be living in a simulation in which case, like those living in Plato's "Cave", most of what we assume may be just a shadow of the truth: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Anyway, just having fun with your points. I like your insightful comment that knowing enough to be dangerous (as opposed to nothing or lots) is a source of difficulties.
Here is the big issue with Moore's law and it was forseen in the 1960s: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis."
So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.
That's a very interesting question. I don't know the answer. But is it perhaps because some people don't want to know? http://www.tmi-cmn.org/tmiphf.htm "A common thread that ran through all concerns about the accident was the lack of adequate and accessible data about radiation levels during and after the accident. Trust was another significant issue. Misinformation supplied by the plant operator, GPU, damaged community relations. The NRC and other agencies did not handle the situation in ways that allayed public concerns."
It looks like a modern geiger counter costs about $500. Maybe *every* person around a nuclear plant should be given one?
That is a false dilemma. We don't have to use either coal or nuclear power. Both have been heavily subsidized by government in various ways for various special interest reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
There are lots of alternatives. Nothing is perfect, of course.
Almost all big industrial processes are dangerous, it's true. Even with solar panels, people will fall off roofs when they install them. It's sometimes hard to assess benefits to whom versus risks to who else?
Still, was the TMI release safe just like the air was declared safe by the EPA in NYC after 9/11?
"EPA Misled Public on 9/11 Pollution: White House ordered false assurances on air quality, report says " http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823-03.htm """ Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, called for a Justice Department investigation. "That the White House instructed EPA officials to downplay the health impact of the World Trade Center contaminants due to 'competing considerations' at the expense of the health and lives of New York City residents is an abomination," he said in a news release. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in an interview it was "understandable that in the midst of a crisis the White House did not want the EPA to sound alarmist." But, he warned, "If the public loses faith that things are safe when the government says so, we'll have done more damage than a pointed statement the week after 9/11 would have." """
As to there being no deaths related to TMI, that's not what these people say:
"30 Years and Counting: People Died at Three Mile Island " http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman03242009.html """ Using unsubstantiated estimates of how much radiation was released, the government issued average doses allegedly received by people in the region, which it assured the public were safe. But the estimates were utterly meaningless, among other things ignoring the likelihood that high doses of concentrated fallout could come down heavily on specific areas.... In fact, the most reliable studies were conducted by local residents like Jane Lee and Mary Osborne, who went door-to-door in neighborhoods where the fallout was thought to be worst. Their surveys showed very substantial plagues of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, respiratory problems, hair loss, rashes, lesions and much more.... Gundersen, a leading technical expert on nuclear engineering, says: "When I correctly interpreted the containment pressure spike and the doses measured in the environment after the TMI accident, I proved that TMI's releases were about one hundred times higher than the industry and the NRC claim, in part because the containment leaked. This new data supports the epidemiology of Dr. Steve Wing and proves that there really were injuries from the accident. New reactor designs are also effected, as the NRC is using its low assumed release rates to justify decreases in emergency planning and containment design."... But the Big Lie remains officially in tact. Expect to hear all week that TMI was "a success story" because "no one was killed." But in mere moments that brand new reactor morphed from a $900 million asset to a multi-billion-dollar liability. It could happen to any atomic power plant, now, tomorrow and into the future. Meanwhile, the death toll from America's worst industrial catastrophe continues to rise. More than ever, it is shrouded in official lies and desecrated by a reactor-pushing "renaissance" hell-bent on repeating the nightmare on an even larger scale. """
Or here:
"Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety " http://www.counterpunch.org/sturgis04032009.html """ The evidence that people, animals and plants near TMI were exposed to high levels of radiation in the 1979 disaster is not merely anecdotal. While government studies of the disaster as well as a number of independent researchers assert the incident caused no harm, other surveys and studie
This long essay talks about the deeper social issue is the transition to a "post-scarcity" society.
"Post-Scarcity Princeton" http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html (Sorry, I did not go to Harvard, but I do mention it there in passing.:-)
This is a satire about what the practice of law would be like if the law was set up the way most lawyers advise the rest of the world to live::-)
"Microslaw" http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
Albert Einstein said: "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it".
We need to move beyond a lottery model for supporting creativity.
Keep trying. History will ultimately be on your side.
I agree. What I find most interesting about this is the robotic applications for touch sensitivity and dexterous manipulation.
If robots can "feel" the world, vision would not be nearly so important.
Touch sensors that are as cheap and functional as the one mentioned here will IMHO revolutionize robotic manipulation, and in turn, manufacturing and deployment of manufactured goods in unstructured settings (like doing plumbing).
Insects do really well relying a lot on touch.
While I don't follow that field very closely, it would seem to me that this invention could be game changing.
Also, one of the top priorities of a place like Willow Garage http://www.willowgarage.com/ is to make robots that can safely interact with humans an coexist in human space. Touch in an important part of that.
I expect to see a lot more invention along this line.
People are regularly relocated for big things like hydroelectric dams, as happened near where I live now, or small things like a new bridge over the lake about to be built and needing land for an access path where a few houses now sit. It's a messy social process, and I'm not necessarily for dam building (there are many horror stories obviously, of natives displaced without even any compensation), but it has happened and people have tried (and perhaps failed) to come up with approaches towards relocation with some sense of fairness. What's going on with rising sea levels connected to CO2 pollution can thus perhaps be thought of in those terms. It's a complex issue; the notion of any sort of private or even public land ownership is always problematical if one considers ethical ambiguities related to histories of invasion and various first comers claiming special rights (why should primacy be the highest deciding factor?). One always has to make assumptions in talking about what is fair (including, sadly, the assumption of what role threat and intimidation and violence plays in all that). There are lots of ways to think about the fairness of climate change from CO2 pollution (again, see the book, "Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making" for general ideas). What is unfair about the current situation is these people losing their beach front property (and related livelihoods) are paying the highest costs for the benefits of CO2 pollution which are mostly going to other people. But, the process is effectively irreversible in the near future. Short of some very radical plans which may have other unforeseen side effects (dumping freighters of iron powder in the oceans to create algae blooms which then sink?), these low lying lands will disappear under any politically likely approach to CO2 reduction. So, rather than emphasize slowing climate change, I think it is more important to talk about dealing fairly with climate change (whatever "fair" means to different people) and advancing our culture to the point where it can do what needs to be done to give everyone an abundant life despite climate change.
But, as with reparations for other past misdeeds by large societies (slavery, mountaintop removal, groundwater pollution, desecration of sacred spaces, etc.), it's not clear to me how the mix should go between direct reparations to the people involved (or their descendants, like for slavery) or if this should instead spur us as a society towards more general social investments that benefit everybody (like creating a general and cheap technology to build new land in the ocean like Eric Hunting mentioned in "Re: Land and Capital; Invention and Automation"). Probably some mix of both would be fairest, but unfortunately often now under current economic and political ideologies we have neither reparations nor broad public investment in open and sustainable technology to any great degree.:-( But, we may see that change eventually, especially as the globe generally gets wealthier and various sustainable industrial activities get easier....
Let's use [someone's] figure of $1000 per square meter for artificial land on the ocean. Even if maybe these people may someday do it for less: http://seasteading.org/ If people need, say, 1000 square meters of ocean front land per person to be happy and grow most of their own food near the tropics (given the ocean as a playground too), then that's a mi
A key idea of free and open source technologies is that they are ultimately so much better and easier to maintain, that if only one person in a thousand feels like contributing (say, with Debian), that makes more than enough productivity to support everyone.
But what about all the "slackers" who will consume without giving back? The answer is just, "So what?" Why not have pity on such people who are stuck in such an embarrassingly juvenile state of mind?
If a few can supply the many, then, so what of the slackers? Who cares? Why build a whole mythology around slackers? And surprisingly, there may be less slackers than one might expect, because when you have the freedom to make things your way, without a "boss", there is often a lot of fun to be had in making things. Just look at all the kids making free music for the internet these days. Or people writing web pages.:-)
Examples like the Israeli Kibbutzim have already shown in the past that even with hard manual labor, there are always a bunch of schmucks (like maybe even myself and my wife, or many others already working in non-profits:-) http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html who are willing to work hard even with apparent slackers in their face. Sure, Kibbutzim had problems with slackers, but modern automated robotic technology changes the nature of that situation: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robot (and without bringing in migrant laborers to exploit and expose to pesticides). And how hard can it be to sit in your GPS-driven air-conditioned tractor and listen to free music? Or even make some more music of your own in between keeping an eye on how the robots are doing?
We're may be about to see an entire change *back* to the way things used to be.
This is the world the prospective college student is probably imagining these days as in their future -- or will be soon.:-) Robot tractors. Free music. GNU/Linux everywhere. Slackers who only take stuff and don't make stuff as being "so junior high" or "so nursing home". Essentially, these kids are imagining (or will soon) a John Lennon "Imagine" sort of world -- with abundance and security for all. With robot tractors able to get higher yields from less land and less water through precision farming, why fight so much about the agricultural fields or river water? With nanotech solar panels and nanotech near-perfect insulation, why fight about the oil fields?
Here is part of a sci-fi story about the flip side of that "Imagine" world kids are thinking about, where it all goes horribly wrong, say, with a Stanford-led elite unable to let go of a fear of scarcity, and instead using the robots to guard most of the world who are kept in "welfare" prison camps: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm
"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.
To me, "post-scarcity" means the end of rationing the basics for everybody, where wha
Power is relative and is always to some extent distributed: 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."
Also, even with a lot of free software, I spend a lot of time reading about it and learning how to use it, just like hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time learning about medicinal plants and the habits of animals. There is a lot we can learn by looking at how hunter-gatherers lived. From:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
In hunter-gatherer times people spent a lot of time raising kids, traveling, singing, dancing, and so on (beyond collecting food, which took fairly little time compared to an eight hour work day today). A lot of time was just spent admiring the natural world and the stars in the sky in a spiritual way. So, I have little doubt people will find meaningful things to do, even in a world of material abundance.
by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient
Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
WAR IS A RACKET
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out....
See especially: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act."
See also: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
Consider who could pay for food or water (or copyrighted content or patented processes) in thirty years, if robotics continues to develop just at the current rate over the last thirty years.
Slashdot Mirror
From Kevin Kelly:
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all
"""
We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government -- for now.
The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.
I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.
"""
In some ways, the capitalistically-oriented Bayh-Dole act is another thing that has damaged scientific integrity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
A better idea than Bayh-Dole, which gives ownership of inventions to universities and the government, would be for all inventions funded in whole or in part by public or charitable dollars should go under free licenses (or into the public domain). Something I wrote on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
From:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"""
The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
"""
VisualWorks Smalltalk had this "new" kind of garbage collector more than ten years ago. See: ..."
"VisualWorks space descriptions"
http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/papers/papersByOthers/visualworksSpaceDescriptio.html
"NewSpace is used to house newly created objects. It is composed of three sub-spaces: an object-creation space (Eden) and two SurvivorSpaces. When an object is first created, it is placed in Eden. When Eden starts to fill up (i.e., when the number of used bytes in Eden exceeds the scavenge threshold), the scavenger is invoked and those objects housed in Eden and the occupied SurvivorSpace that are still reachable from the system roots are copied to the unoccupied Survivor Space. Thereafter, those objects that survive each scavenge will be shuffled by the scavenger from the occupied SurvivorSpace to the unoccupied one, until such time that the aggregate size of these survivors threatens to make the scavenge pause excessively long (i.e., when the number of used bytes in SurvivorSpace exceeds the tenure threshold), whereupon the scavenger will attempt to speed up subsequent scavenges by moving some of the older surviving objects from NewSpace to OldSpace. We say that such objects are being 'tenured' to OldSpace.
Just one more thing Java is borrowing from Smalltalk. Now, if they would only borrow the syntax... :-)
More on this theme from the perspective of open vs. proprietary technology:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615?
== what have funding policies in automotive intelligence wrought? ===
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise
some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the
driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities,
which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors.
Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice
these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest
physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the
codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in
their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly
funded software and selling modified versions of such software as
proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of
paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter
how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such
self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban
planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means
of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the
work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially,
will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or
will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community
development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality
http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html
and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and
more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000
Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of
thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps
people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with
public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary
because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in
early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual.
It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best
to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are
talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to
disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong
here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already
for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly
proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more
complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex
environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much
faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our
lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally
avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive
intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every
American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the
automotive software engineers and their employers will do well
financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their
software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of
configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of
their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intell
Like nuclear technology, or biotech, or other advanced technologies which all function as amplifiers for the human mind, robotics have the potential to make the world work well for most everyone. But it requires using them in a post-scarcity way, fostering abundance for all through cooperation. Instead, often people think of these technologies from a mindset of scarcity, and so use them to competitive way to defend a hoard of privilege.
Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
More on this theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
From our garden simulator help file:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000136.htm
"The magic wand is used to grow plants, to pull all plants in a soil patch, to duplicate plants and soil patches, to rename plants, to reseed plants, and to place plants in stasis (or remove them from stasis). The tool actions associated with any tool can be changed in the tool editor."
You could also map action from other tools, like the "growcorder" onto the magic wand to use it for that functionality:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/help100/00000134.htm
"The growcorder is used to scan, magnify, or scan and magnify garden objects to find out more information about them."
I guess the way our patent system works, we can expect a cease and desist order from Microsoft any day now for using the ideas we developed over a decade before them. :-)
Dear sir,
I am writing to you regarding a new matter that has been brought to my attention by my clients. In this particular matter our office represents Dean Kamen's evil twin brother.
The writing of cease and desist orders in an electronic form has been patented by our client in patent #9,219,493: "Use Of Cease And Desist Orders in Electronic Discussion". Your use of such a letter is in violation of United States patent law, and I request that you remove this content immediately.
I have a good faith belief, and in fact know for certain, that the posting of these works was not authorized by my clients, any agent of my clients, or the law.
Sincerely,
Dewey, Cheetum, and Howe, Attorneys at law
I put a reference to your insightful comment on the "open manufacturing" mailing list:
"Forfeiting plumbing for self-determination?"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/8462e40751be6966#
What I found interesting in the comment and reply is the perceived tension between relying on (centralized?) manufacturing and freedom.
Anyway, it seems to be the general feeling of slashdot that there is no land one can go to right now to escape these trends (other than perhaps the future. :-)
David Brin suggests in his transparent society that the only alternative to one-way surveillance is for everyone to be able to inspect all surveillance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
In the "utopia" at the end of Marshall Brain's Manna story, there was no anonymity and effectively probably no privacy:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
But that is sort-of like Brin's Transparent Society idea.
Another post in this Slashdot discussion makes the point that "Freedom" and "Justice" are not the same thing as "Democracy" (even if they often may go together). One can wonder if "Privacy" is orthogonal to those as well? Have so many things changed that privacy is indeed history? On the other hand, in the short story "The Skills of Xanadu", which is another open manufacturing utopia, people had total privacy even in plain sight when they wanted it, out of social conventions and a form of computer-mediated telepathy.
"RE:The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/13e85ebf99d0554f
In any case, another implication of your comment is that, for many people, the conceptual goal for open manufacturing in a free society may not need be as high as producing everything we have now (even indoor plumbing?). Just producing enough to support a reasonably free and sustainable society may be a good enough first goal? Anyway, there are bound to be a diversity of opinions on that; I'm just drawing together some themes.
I remain convinced, along the lines of Manuel de Landa, that there is *no* possibility of choice between hierarchy and meshwork, because all systems have both aspects. One can at best talk about balances between the
centralized hierarchies and grassroots meshworks in different situations.
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
Yes. I don't think Peak Oil is show stopper issue. It has been said said, "The stone age did not end when we ran out of rocks, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil." Examples:
http://www.nashvillefossils.com/resources/pages/historyofuse.html
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
Oil, for many of the purposes we use it for, may become more expensive in the near term. But there are *lots* of alternatives. I tend to like solar photovoltaic best as a solution that is quiet and has few if no moving parts, but there are lots of other possibilities for getting usable energy.
I'd be more worried about social problems caused by unemployment from exponentially rising productive capacity of society in the face of limited demand, and that is the very problem the elites (and others) of the world need to wrestle with. For example, how many people does it take to make a Kindle (or OLPC or whatever) for everyone on the planet, as opposed to how many people does it take to keep a vast industry going making and recycling paper? Automation as well as better design is ending the very notion of work as we know it, to the point where, as with GNU/Linux a relatively few people can supply everyone with high quality products, so any rationale for a link between having a right to consume and having a job is going away (which may create huge social problems in a capitalist framework). This was predicted even in the 1960s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
Something I wrote on that topic last year: ... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero? "
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"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?
From John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
Power ÷ 22
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart--unless a culprit runs afoul of the media--an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tel
I've been working toward a Java version of a Social Semantic Desktop. The code is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
"The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, as well as related social semantic desktop applications inspired in part by NEPOMUK and Halo Semantic MediaWiki."
That should have read: "Just for fun, theoretically, using a cannon you can put payloads into orbit"
Just for fun, theoretically, you can put payloads into orbit and on routes to the moon/planets/asteroids if you give them a solar sail. (People could not survive that trip, unless encoded in data bits and silicon.)
Maggots and leeches are proving effective in medicine in various ways.
"Maggots and Leeches: Old Medicine is New"
http://www.livescience.com/health/050419_maggots.html
In round figures, people are about 90% bacteria by numbers, and about 10% bacteria by weight. Bathing too often may disrupt your bacterial ecology and lead to infections or skin problems, and growing up in too clean environments may lead to immune problems. Although exactly what is too much is problematical. See:
"The filthy, stinking truth: The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick."
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/
Until we actually landed on the moon, the best scientists still thought landers might sink into dust. Someday, we may turn the Moon into a green paradise using greenhouses and artificial lighting or mirrors.
Psychologically, the individual's perception is still the center of everything (though people try to move beyond that in their thinking). Quantum mechanics reflects this. Still, we may be living in a simulation in which case, like those living in Plato's "Cave", most of what we assume may be just a shadow of the truth:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Anyway, just having fun with your points. I like your insightful comment that knowing enough to be dangerous (as opposed to nothing or lots) is a source of difficulties.
Here is the big issue with Moore's law and it was forseen in the 1960s:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis."
So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.
That's a very interesting question. I don't know the answer. But is it perhaps because some people don't want to know?
http://www.tmi-cmn.org/tmiphf.htm
"A common thread that ran through all concerns about the accident was the lack of adequate and accessible data about radiation levels during and after the accident. Trust was another significant issue. Misinformation supplied by the plant operator, GPU, damaged community relations. The NRC and other agencies did not handle the situation in ways that allayed public concerns."
It looks like a modern geiger counter costs about $500. Maybe *every* person around a nuclear plant should be given one?
That is a false dilemma. We don't have to use either coal or nuclear power. Both have been heavily subsidized by government in various ways for various special interest reasons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
There are lots of alternatives. Nothing is perfect, of course.
Almost all big industrial processes are dangerous, it's true. Even with solar panels, people will fall off roofs when they install them. It's sometimes hard to assess benefits to whom versus risks to who else?
Still, was the TMI release safe just like the air was declared safe by the EPA in NYC after 9/11?
"EPA Misled Public on 9/11 Pollution: White House ordered false assurances on air quality, report says "
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0823-03.htm
"""
Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, called for a Justice Department investigation. "That the White House instructed EPA officials to downplay the health impact of the World Trade Center contaminants due to 'competing considerations' at the expense of the health and lives of New York City residents is an abomination," he said in a news release. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in an interview it was "understandable that in the midst of a crisis the White House did not want the EPA to sound alarmist." But, he warned, "If the public loses faith that things are safe when the government says so, we'll have done more damage than a pointed statement the week after 9/11 would have."
"""
As to there being no deaths related to TMI, that's not what these people say: ... In fact, the most reliable studies were conducted by local residents like Jane Lee and Mary Osborne, who went door-to-door in neighborhoods where the fallout was thought to be worst. Their surveys showed very substantial plagues of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, respiratory problems, hair loss, rashes, lesions and much more. ... Gundersen, a leading technical expert on nuclear engineering, says: ... But the Big Lie remains officially in tact. Expect to hear all week that TMI was "a success story" because "no one was killed." But in mere moments that brand new reactor morphed from a $900 million asset to a multi-billion-dollar liability. It could happen to any atomic power plant, now, tomorrow and into the future. Meanwhile, the death toll from America's worst industrial catastrophe continues to rise. More than ever, it is shrouded in official lies and desecrated by a reactor-pushing "renaissance" hell-bent on repeating the nightmare on an even larger scale.
"30 Years and Counting: People Died at Three Mile Island "
http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman03242009.html
"""
Using unsubstantiated estimates of how much radiation was released, the government issued average doses allegedly received by people in the region, which it assured the public were safe. But the estimates were utterly meaningless, among other things ignoring the likelihood that high doses of concentrated fallout could come down heavily on specific areas.
"When I correctly interpreted the containment pressure spike and the doses measured in the environment after the TMI accident, I proved that TMI's releases were about one hundred times higher than the industry and the NRC claim, in part because the containment leaked. This new data supports the epidemiology of Dr. Steve Wing and proves that there really were injuries from the accident. New reactor designs are also effected, as the NRC is using its low assumed release rates to justify decreases in emergency planning and containment design."
"""
Or here:
"Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety "
http://www.counterpunch.org/sturgis04032009.html
"""
The evidence that people, animals and plants near TMI were exposed to high levels of radiation in the 1979 disaster is not merely anecdotal. While government studies of the disaster as well as a number of independent researchers assert the incident caused no harm, other surveys and studie
This other article is in slashdot from just yesterday:
"Offshore Windpower To Potentially Exceed US Demand "
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/03/1712253
People will likely be printing solar panels at home in a decade or two.
Charles-
You're so right. :-)
Here are links to some related things I've written, to maybe give you some more inspiration. :-)
This posting asks, if copyrights are so valuable, why is there not an annual tax on them for the burden they impose on society?
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
This long essay talks about the deeper social issue is the transition to a "post-scarcity" society. :-)
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
(Sorry, I did not go to Harvard, but I do mention it there in passing.
This is a satire about what the practice of law would be like if the law was set up the way most lawyers advise the rest of the world to live: :-)
"Microslaw"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
Albert Einstein said: "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it".
We need to move beyond a lottery model for supporting creativity.
Keep trying. History will ultimately be on your side.
--Paul Fernhout
I agree. What I find most interesting about this is the robotic applications for touch sensitivity and dexterous manipulation.
If robots can "feel" the world, vision would not be nearly so important.
Touch sensors that are as cheap and functional as the one mentioned here will IMHO revolutionize robotic manipulation, and in turn, manufacturing and deployment of manufactured goods in unstructured settings (like doing plumbing).
Insects do really well relying a lot on touch.
While I don't follow that field very closely, it would seem to me that this invention could be game changing.
Also, one of the top priorities of a place like Willow Garage
http://www.willowgarage.com/
is to make robots that can safely interact with humans an coexist in human space. Touch in an important part of that.
I expect to see a lot more invention along this line.
Climate change happens.
Nothing being proposed by anyone will make a significant dent in it as far as CO2 levels in the next couple decades.
So why not just adapt?
From something I wrote here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/183fed4ee1411253?hl=en
People are regularly relocated for big things like hydroelectric dams, as
happened near where I live now, or small things like a new bridge over the
lake about to be built and needing land for an access path where a few
houses now sit. It's a messy social process, and I'm not necessarily for dam
building (there are many horror stories obviously, of natives displaced
without even any compensation), but it has happened and people have tried
(and perhaps failed) to come up with approaches towards relocation with some
sense of fairness. What's going on with rising sea levels connected to CO2
pollution can thus perhaps be thought of in those terms. It's a complex
issue; the notion of any sort of private or even public land ownership is
always problematical if one considers ethical ambiguities related to
histories of invasion and various first comers claiming special rights (why
should primacy be the highest deciding factor?). One always has to make
assumptions in talking about what is fair (including, sadly, the assumption
of what role threat and intimidation and violence plays in all that). There
are lots of ways to think about the fairness of climate change from CO2
pollution (again, see the book, "Policy Paradox: The Art of Political
Decision Making" for general ideas). What is unfair about the current
situation is these people losing their beach front property (and related
livelihoods) are paying the highest costs for the benefits of CO2 pollution
which are mostly going to other people. But, the process is effectively
irreversible in the near future. Short of some very radical plans which may
have other unforeseen side effects (dumping freighters of iron powder in the
oceans to create algae blooms which then sink?), these low lying lands will
disappear under any politically likely approach to CO2 reduction. So, rather
than emphasize slowing climate change, I think it is more important to talk
about dealing fairly with climate change (whatever "fair" means to different
people) and advancing our culture to the point where it can do what needs to
be done to give everyone an abundant life despite climate change.
But, as with reparations for other past misdeeds by large societies :-( But, we may see ...
(slavery, mountaintop removal, groundwater pollution, desecration of sacred
spaces, etc.), it's not clear to me how the mix should go between direct
reparations to the people involved (or their descendants, like for slavery)
or if this should instead spur us as a society towards more general social
investments that benefit everybody (like creating a general and cheap
technology to build new land in the ocean like Eric Hunting mentioned in
"Re: Land and Capital; Invention and Automation"). Probably some mix of both
would be fairest, but unfortunately often now under current economic and
political ideologies we have neither reparations nor broad public investment
in open and sustainable technology to any great degree.
that change eventually, especially as the globe generally gets wealthier and
various sustainable industrial activities get easier.
Let's use [someone's] figure of $1000 per square meter for artificial land on the
ocean. Even if maybe these people may someday do it for less:
http://seasteading.org/
If people need, say, 1000 square meters of ocean front land per person to be
happy and grow most of their own food near the tropics (given the ocean as a
playground too), then that's a mi
See also:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
A key idea of free and open source technologies is that they are ultimately so much better and easier to maintain, that if only one person in a thousand feels like contributing (say, with Debian), that makes more than enough productivity to support everyone.
But what about all the "slackers" who will consume without giving back? The answer is just, "So what?" Why not have pity on such people who are stuck in such an embarrassingly juvenile state of mind?
If a few can supply the many, then, so what of the slackers? Who cares? Why build a whole mythology around slackers? And surprisingly, there may be less slackers than one might expect, because when you have the freedom to make things your way, without a "boss", there is often a lot of fun to be had in making things. Just look at all the kids making free music for the internet these days. Or people writing web pages. :-)
Examples like the Israeli Kibbutzim have already shown in the past that even with hard manual labor, there are always a bunch of schmucks (like maybe even myself and my wife, or many others already working in non-profits :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html
who are willing to work hard even with apparent slackers in their face. Sure, Kibbutzim had problems with slackers, but modern automated robotic technology changes the nature of that situation:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robot
(and without bringing in migrant laborers to exploit and expose to pesticides). And how hard can it be to sit in your GPS-driven air-conditioned tractor and listen to free music? Or even make some more music of your own in between keeping an eye on how the robots are doing?
We're may be about to see an entire change *back* to the way things used to be.
This is the world the prospective college student is probably imagining these days as in their future -- or will be soon. :-) Robot tractors. Free music. GNU/Linux everywhere. Slackers who only take stuff and don't make stuff as being "so junior high" or "so nursing home". Essentially, these kids are imagining (or will soon) a John Lennon "Imagine" sort of world -- with abundance and security for all. With robot tractors able to get higher yields from less land and less water through precision farming, why fight so much about the agricultural fields or river water? With nanotech solar panels and nanotech near-perfect insulation, why fight about the oil fields?
Here is part of a sci-fi story about the flip side of that "Imagine" world kids are thinking about, where it all goes horribly wrong, say, with a Stanford-led elite unable to let go of a fear of scarcity, and instead using the robots to guard most of the world who are kept in "welfare" prison camps:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm
"Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction, blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested, you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only tried it twice.
To me, "post-scarcity" means the end of rationing the basics for everybody, where wha
Anybody raising kids is almost never bored. :-)
Power is relative and is always to some extent distributed:
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."
Also, even with a lot of free software, I spend a lot of time reading about it and learning how to use it, just like hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time learning about medicinal plants and the habits of animals. There is a lot we can learn by looking at how hunter-gatherers lived. From:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
In hunter-gatherer times people spent a lot of time raising kids, traveling, singing, dancing, and so on (beyond collecting food, which took fairly little time compared to an eight hour work day today). A lot of time was just spent admiring the natural world and the stars in the sky in a spiritual way. So, I have little doubt people will find meaningful things to do, even in a world of material abundance.
It said "Almost". But, yet, "War is a racket" driven by a scarcity-oriented world view. From:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
http://www.whywork.org/
See especially:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act."
See also:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
On the other hand:
"Blame It on Mr. Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled"
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118358476840657463.html
And, extending that theme:
"Blame the Bailouts on Mister Rogers?"
http://emac.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/12/12/blame-the-crisis-on-mister-rogers/
Maybe there are deeper issues here on all sides? From:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72330a22bcae8928?
Consider who could pay for food or water (or copyrighted content or patented
processes) in thirty years, if robotics continues to develop just at the
current rate over the last thirty years.
Check out clerks?
"Your supermarket cashier may not know a kiwano from a tamarillo, but
Veggie Vision does."
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/machin...
Cab drivers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
Heart Surgeons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Surgical
Airline pilots?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
Nurses?
"Robot nurse escorts and schmoozes the elderly"