If automation enables a human to do the work of ten people, and of demand is limited (a key point), then the need for 90% of jobs in that area goes away. Automation does not have to be 100% to have a have big effect on employment.
The Japanese are working hard on health care robots for their aging populations. Again, a robot that could do 90% of tasks, or let one real person support ten people via indirect means like tele-operation will change the employment dynamics of that field. Even just a doubling of effectiveness could make a huge difference -- even just by removing travel time or data logging for, say, a visiting nurse.
Other ways automation can change health aid employment is if people had more free and then could care for elderly relatives directly. Humans still provide the care, but it is outside formal employment. Also, even without more free time, a telepresence robot could let distant relatives care for an elderly relative, perhaps even doing physical tasks like the laundry if the robot manipulators had haptic feedback through the internet.
By the way, for stuff like showers, there are already machines for that for nursing homes. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03... "With an electronic whir, the machine released a dollop of "peach body shampoo," a kind of body wash. Then, as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home's new human washing machine."
Also, on robot lawyers: http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/2... "The law profession is being reshaped by new automation technologies that allow law firms to complete legal work in a fraction of the time and with far less manpower. Think IBM's "Jeopardy!"-winning computer Watson -- practicing law. "Watson the lawyer is coming," said Ralph Losey, a legal technology expert at the law firm Jackson Lewis. "He won't come up with the creative solutions, but when it comes to the regular games that lawyers play, he'll kill them." That means potentially huge cost savings for clients, though it's not so promising for law school graduates looking for work. The good news for lawyers is that no one thinks the profession can be automated entirely. But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents."
There, stuff you said would never happen has already happened to some extent -- enough to make a difference to employment outlooks! And that is often the case in such discussions, as much as it is also possible to overestimate the difficulty of replacing humans in some tasks. As I mention in a previous post, what often happens with automation is that the task itself gets redesigned to be easier to automate (probably what happened with the bath). Or as in factories, the environment gets systematically structured so robots can navigate it within their limitations. Also, automation can often take the low-hanging fruit from a job (like legal search) which may eliminate 90% of the billable hours from some task while also removing the ladder by which an apprentice provides value to learn a trade and move up the employment ladder.
Of course, the good news is this means consumer prices will drop. But someone unemployed with zero income can't afford legal services or health services even if they are 1/10th the cost.... At least not without some form of "income" from the government or charity. Or, alternatively, some sort of gift of capital of personal robots to be used for local subsistence production or perhaps selling robot-produced products and services for exchange credits (sort of like renting your PC's idle time to bigger number crunching projects).
Also, since when do services have to be entirely *better* to compete? If I told you, you can hire a human health aid for US$4000 a month for e
Thankd for the Drucker mention, AC, and the GM history. Any good specific Drucker references you suggest related to his comments on automation and employment and wages?
This is at the HBR: https://hbr.org/2014/10/what-p... "âoeEvery few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred,â Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review. âoeIn a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself â" its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.â For Drucker, the newest new world was marked, above all, by one dominant factor: âoethe shift to a knowledge society.â...
Be more mindful of those left behind. Drucker worried a lot about a group that he characterized as "knowledge-worker cousins": service workers. "Knowledge workers and service workers are not 'classes' in the traditional sense," Drucker wrote. "But there is a danger that... society will become a class society unless service workers attain both income and dignity." He added: "Anyone can acquire the 'means of production', i.e., the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win." Again, Drucker's words prove prescient as the gains in the knowledge economy are hardly being shared equitably. "Our basic grievance with today's billionaires is that relatively little of the value they've created trickles down to the rest of us," the University of Toronto's Roger Martin asserts. He warns that this situation is unsustainable, and that top executives need to rein in their compensation. Surely, Drucker would have agreed. "A healthy business," he wrote, "cannot exist in a sick society.""
Good sentiments. What specific solutions did he propose for "being mindful of those left behind"? Also, ironically, it is often the knowledge workers who are in some ways more at risk of automation of various sorts than people who work in trades using both their hands and mind. Examples include the "Cloud" replacing sysadmins, or software replacing radiologists, or various internet sites reducing the need for lawyers for many basic tasks for small businesses including forming a corporation. Robots are not still not up to the skill level of, say, a human carpenter and we have not yet rebuilt our general infrastructure to work within their limitations. Contrast our fairly random infrastructure of non-standard and undocumented home layouts with factory floors that have been documented and standardized like for Kiva robots, or systematically organized corporate information management systems that can have software replace human though at various key points. However, I expect that we may see even the home become more standardized to deal with robotic limitations, possibly causing another housing price collapse, because for many people, especially the elderly or parents with young children, it might be worth it to move to a new home if it means robots coudl systematically clean it and prepare food and be available for medical emergencies or helping recover from falls and so on.
I see this about a 2014 conference talking about the risk of "a devastating effect on jobs and employment": http://www.druckersociety.at/i... "There is a broad consensus among economists that we enter 2014 into a period of limited economic recovery - even though it will by uneven by country and region and fraught with uncertainties.
A cyclical improvement of the global economy will provide an opportunity to address the huge structural issues that are still looming. They include: unsustainable debt levels, underfunded social
All too true, from drones to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "In 2006, Samsung Techwin announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56 mm robotic machine gun and optional grenade launcher to guard the Korean DMZ. It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can "identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles (3.2 km) away." The robot, which was developed by a South Korean university, uses "twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles (4 km) in daylight and around half that distance at night." It is also equipped with communication equipment (a microphone and speakers), "so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops." If the person gives the wrong password, the robot can "sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun." South Korea's soldiers in Iraq are "currently using robot sentries to guard home bases."[3]"
And the movie Elysium painted such a picture as well, with robot guards and robot police. http://www.santafe.edu/news/it... "he makers of this summer's Hollywood blockbuster Elysium got one thing right, according to a column in the Washington Examiner that cites a 2005 research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles: The abundance of 'guard labor' depicted in the movie -- in the movie's case case robot police and sleeper agents -- is an expected feature of a society with a high degree of economic inequality. The 2005 paper, co-authored by Bowles and Arjun Jayadev and published as an SFI working paper, connects inequality with a larger proportion of a population engaged in enforcing the property rights and protecting the assets of the elite. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force was dedicated to guard labor in 2002, they wrote."
As Keynes wrote in his book about his own predecessors: "The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."
We have a choice as a society (at least in theory) like the choice presented in Marshall Brain's book Manna. For Plan A, we can create a world of wealth for all that takes us all (if we want) to the planets and asteroids and stars and beyond, by using fusion power and dirt cheap solar and 3D printing and nanotech and robotic helpers and cybernetic augmentation and so on. Or, for Plan B, we can let all but the super rich starve as the economy implodes from automation, and then, if society does not self-destruct in that starvation process, the children of the super rich can go to the stars eventually if they want. Either way, humanity, if it survives, ends up entirely super rich from technology. With exponential technological growth and declining human fertility in industrialized countries, and a solar system that can likely house quad
Just watched the first episode -- impressive and made by volunteers. Subsequent episodes are being made with some Kickstarter funding. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Here is a good explanation, based in part on research done by the Federal Reserve, on how creativity flourished best when people earn enough that money is off the table as a worry (that means about US$75K+ in the USA) and people have autonomy in their work, increasing mastery facing a challenge, and a sense of purpose. "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Frankly, I think very few artists are motivated by money. This is even more true if you broaden a definition of art to include so much of what people do as hobby crafts or fan fiction or local folk song writing or creative cooking and so on.
Money plays a role in the life of an artist in Western society of course because, in an exchange-emphasizing economy, we all need to get money somehow to pay for food and lodgings and material and so on -- including paying for our kids. And to put a lot of time into some craft, you need to find a way to support yourself that leaves time for learning and doing it. Especially for anyone with a family, if it is not your day job, your time to put into it is otherwise going to be severely limited. Some people still make it work by dedication and generally sacrificing other relationships and responsibilities, including by pushing them onto siblings or the state.
See for example, "The Murdering of My Years": http://books.google.com/books/... "Looking back on their lives, people often ask themselves "Where did the years go?" "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet provides a wide ranges of provocative answers to that question. Edited in the style of a documentary, "The Murdering of My Years is a compendium of stories by activists and artists about how they manage to get by in America. They talk about the jobs they've had (as cabbies, organizers, waitresses, clerks, drivers taking scabs to secret scab trainings, telemarketers, etc.), how they were initially politicized, the nature of their art, and how they feel about working (or resistance to working) in a political context. The stories range from the absurd to the heartbreaking, from the exciting and strange to the depressingly banal. The book examines the pain, disillusionment, and fundamental hopelessness that afflict many workers. It also tells stories or triumph, joy, and subversion in the workplace."
As is made clear in that book and others, the "starving artist" concept is mostly a myth. If you're starving, making art is generally the last thing on your mind. However, it's true that people who are obsessed with an idea or a technique may well end up starving because they prioritize their art over making money. But the actual suffering process rarely lends much to the art's production -- even if previous suffering might inform some future art in terms of shaping an artist's sympathies (as it might for anyone in any profession).
I think it more likely the urge to create generally comes from within and is sustained by intrinsic motivation of love of the craft and the product. If people just want money, there are more reliable ways to get it than trying to appeal to a fickle art audience. No doubt some few people do make become artists to get rich,
Cool, Jim! You might like this related proposal by me also for a basic income funded by a wealth tax of 6% on declared assets, with only declared assets being insured and defended by the government, explaining why millionaires should support the idea: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
BTW, if we had a basic income, it's not clear to me there would still be any justification for copyright or patents. Suddenly anyone wanting to create could do so on their own or in collaboration with other like-minded creative people. So, given the costs of copyright and patents to society of chilling effects and other negative effects, it could be better to eliminate them entirely.
Real innovations are rarely rewarded in society. After all, for example, you invented Spasim, the first 3D networked computer game, which eventually spawned an entire industry all the way to Minecraft and Space Engineers. As the original developer of an idea, did you get royalties from the entire industry for decades? I doubt it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
For another example, it took Ralph Baer fifteen years to even get someone to pay attention to the concept of computer games hooked to TVs: http://games.slashdot.org/stor...
Meanwhile, someone like Bill Gates got financially obese based on starting as a millionaire at birth, dumpster diving to read other's code, and then licensing someone else's work to IBM -- work which apparently was improperly taken from the inventor (with IBM going through Gates to avoid liability).
Refs: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg... "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
http://patch.com/california/lo... ""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."
http://www.businessweek.com/st... "They Made America is certain to elicit cries of protest. That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era -- Gates, IBM, and Tim Paterson, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall. Because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured "more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.""
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... "Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry.... In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Pater
Interesting thoughts, Michael(?). I agree that some trends in Japan may foreshadow things the USA does (even the Japanese banking crisis decades ago related to rel estate bubbles leading to stagnation).
Thanks for your book link, which also has a link to a related site which includes connecting current challenges with historical developments: http://www.transitiontoanewhum... "I have spent a couple decades writing a book about human ecology, because it is drastically changing, which presents great danger and great potential. The idea is to describe both so that we can avoid the disasters and take advantage of the potentials. The problems I describe could end human civilization, but the only way to avoid the disasters is to adapt to a new ecology, like the title of the book says. About 10,000 years or so ago, we started leaving the ecology we had grown up in for millions of years. Right now we are in an ecology that is one transient ecology of many that we have been moving through. We need to find one that is stable and that we can live in long term or we are, well, a specie without an ecology is in trouble. If we do not create a stable ecology that is some form of civilization, well, it is going to look like one of those "Post Apocalyptic" movies. It will not be pleasant and it will be hard for humans to ever really be much more than animals. The thing is that it is not just about finding a new ecology, it is also about adapting to survive and be comfortable in it. We are still mostly adapted to the old ecology when we lived in tribes and we need to change to adapt to the new ecology. It is a lot of things. We need to be smarter and more comfortable in a civilization than we are. That is what the books are about. In the mean time, this web site is supposed to serve a few other purposes and offer other resources. It is especially to present discussions about how different points of view can be understood."
Just spending a few minutes so far looking at your site and book blurb, in scope, it reminds me of "Beyond Civilization" by Daniel Quinn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
It also reminds me a bit of "A New Way Of Thinking" which you may find of interest: http://www.anwot.org/
Certainly evolutionary pressures need to be understood (I was in a PHD program in ecology and evolution for a time). But in the time scale of a transition to some new economy full of AI and robots as capable as most humans for most economic activities (twenty years?) these seem to me to not be pressing issues, whatever the long term may hold. You might also find of interest Freeman Dyson's speculations about genetic engineering as far as possible long term trends in designer biology. http://www.nybooks.com/article...
On genetics and health, while mutations and birth defects are serious issues, it seems to me the most pressing current health issues relate to vitamin D deficiency, diet lacking in enough vegetables and fruits and with too many refined carbohydrates and artificial additives, too much bad stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of community, problematical infrastructure, and so on (see "Blue Zones" for example).
You also wrote on your site: "In my broad studies, I had to examine the Philosophy of Science. One interesting point is about how science is advanced. Is it by a team of researchers or by individuals. It is a contested point, but I think it is clear that it is by both. Still, in the balance, the contributions by individuals like Newton and Einstein show the power of individual inspiration. That is the path I have taken. "
Personally, my own life would be little different -- except for a big change of not engaging in bouts of unrelated paid employment for expenses. I'd still spend time with my kid and homeschool. I'd still work on free software like the Pointrel system or software related to my wife's free book. I'd still work towards organizing all manufacturing knowledge (OSCOMAK) and work towards designing self-replicating space habitats. I'd hopefully be doing all those software and hardware things a lot better and a lot faster because I'd have more time (without taking on unrelated employment, even as I'd still be happy to help out on other projects just to be helpful and exchange ideas, same as helping any neighbor). I'd probably have lab space for physical experiments which would also speed things up. Another speed boost would (hopefully) be lots of like minded peers who were free to do similar things who I could collaborate with -- including on simulating and building and running free automated tire production factories as I posted on yesterday, especially since people will probably still need tires, even in space habitats::-) "Automated FOSS tire plant ideas; simulation tools? " http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I'd probably feel less compelled to do those things quickly though, so I might do more gardening. I'd still help out with my local historical society.
I think most people could find interesting things to do. It might take some period of "deworking" to make the transition. For kids leaving public school to do "unschooling" (or even just plain homeschooling) a rule of thumb is that it takes at least one month for every month in school to make a transition to independent learning. So, for someone who has worked at a conventional job for a dozen years on top of a dozen years of schooling, it might take a couple years for him or her to start to regain some independent initiative.
I feel it likely a lot of people would just have the time to be better parents, better friends, better neighbors, and better family members. As Bob Black wrote in his essay on "The Abolition of Work": http://www.whywork.org/rethink... "Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" "
Is it any wonder you want to avoid such desperate people? Even if most of them are doing a heroic job of trying to hold everything together despite limited time? And the flip side of it is, the people in the USA with lots of spare time, they tend to either be those who are (inherited) wealthy parasites who accept or ignore the huge rich/poor divide or they are people who are poor or old/tired or disabled or mentally ill. Obviously, I'm exaggerating here -- but not by that much. People in Western Europe are more likely to have free time and be able to use it to be better companions and more involved citizens and volunteers. http://www.neatorama.com/2012/... http://newint.org/features/201...
... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas. http://focusfusion.org/index.p...
Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.
I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion: http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one). http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit
You seem to me to be aiming to imply "involuntary" within an arbitrary legal framework where the person who first twiddled some bits together can control what others later do with that set of bits. I'm assuming you are implying that those other people sharing the original pattern further without permission is "involuntary" sharing by the person who first put the pattern together. I guess I can see that perspective on "sharing", even if it is defining "sharing" in a way that emphasizes (using contract law) the preferences of the original creator over the preferences of any current holders of a copy of the bit sequence.
If you have a digital copy of a recent song released under a typical commercial license, it is illegal in the USA to give a copy of that song to someone else (maybe with some fair use exceptions). You have a local copy of something, but the law says you can't share it with those who want or need it based on the license chosen by the author or the current copyright holder. That is the sharing I'm talking about.
What if it was a song like, say, "Desperado" and you were too poor to buy a copy to give to some young guy like, say, Aaron Schwartz about to do something really alienated and foolish?:-( Thankfully there are still other options: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics... "And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin' Your prison is walking through this world all alone [other great parts omitted out of copyright fears]"
It is really a very odd idea though, when you think about it, that some initial distributor of the song (let alone a government-funded research paper) gets to prevent you from copying, modifying, and/or redistributing a pattern of bits stored on hardware in your possession. It seems very undemocratic as it opens up the possibility that on the flimsiest of evidence anyone who claims any sort of copyright on anything can demand an inspection of the contents of any data storage to make sure a crime has not been committed?
In ancient times, someone inspired to write a song might have been seen to have received a transmission from some godly muse. From that perspective, by what right can such a person enter into a contract to restrict the redistribution of that muse's work? Isn't such a restriction imposed by the government an interference with the divine as well as with charitable human society?
I'm not saying I necessarily see it that way myself, but it's an example of how there are all sorts of ways to look at these things. The way that is dominant in the current legal system is the result of past political struggles and is not the only perspective. As is mentioned here: http://conceptualguerilla.com/... "Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Another perspective: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs... "In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted."
Or further: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/... ""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the laun
"A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?"
It doesn't matter much in a wealthy post-scarcity society because there is already so much abundance to go around. If someone is good at, say, "drawing vultures", why should anyone really care if there is little "demand" for that skill -- assuming everyone can still get all the food they want from automated farms powered by fusion power plants and delivered by a local package delivery system? You also never know when a skill might prove useful in the future -- like making an entertaining smartphone app called "Angry Vultures?:-)
Frankly, what most PhD students produce in their dissertation is, by their own admission generally, of little interest to the general public, and even rarely of interest to more than a handful of other specialists. Assuming we can "afford" it, why should people not be able to get a PhD in what they want to study? When you look at the lives of the children of the wealthy, who often can afford to write books, or get PhDs, or work at non-profits, or be involved in the low-paying performing arts and so on, that is what we often see in practice.
In VFY, Hogan suggests that "competence" can be valued irrespective of what it is in. A character connects that to the early days of the post-scarcity society's founding, when the first children (produced from DNA by a space probe landing on a new planet, creating a cultural break from the past) were raised by robots who would provide them with whatever they wanted; the only way to compete for status among peers and to stand out by learning to do something well, whatever it was. As long as people aren't actively bothering other people, they would tend to be allowed by their peers to do what they want. If people are actively harming others, then there will be conflicts, which are resolved in a variety of ways (including, in the end, violence). Hogan goes into that in some detail in the book, and one does not have to agree with every aspect of what he envisioned to see that alternatives could be possible.
Hogan's idea is just a fictional example; no doubt reality would be more complex. People can legitimately disagree on assessments of risks and rewards and also on social forms and ways to resolve conflicts. And there are no doubt human qualities of "values" that transcend competence. One can easily find examples of people doing despicable things "competently", such as rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in internment camps in the USA during WWII. Or what would it mean to be a highly competent "waterboarder" (even when history shows torture pretty much never provides useful intelligence overall compared to humane treatment of captives)? So in practice, yes, one should consider both means and ends in evaluating behavior. As the Navaho, paraphrasing I hope correctly, if it is done in the right spirit, it is more important than if it is done well.
Competence might also be in picking the right problem to solve -- like where a fumbler doing something in a half-assed way might still have been working on the most important issue and create enough of a solution to help everyone? Being a parent is an important calling, but there are no "perfect" parents, just good ones usually muddling through as best they can (even when financially wealthy) -- and it is hard to put a value on parenting the next generation, which is in some ways both the most important task of a civilization while also usually having negative economic value for decades. There is also a lot to be said for diversity, as in: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." It can in practice be hard to appreciate competence in some area you are not familiar with. And often the greatest artistry is in making things look simple, or even helping others to learn complex skills easily, or re-engineering things so they are easy to do or learn.
Hogan's "Chironian" civilization is the creation of an imaginative elect
See: "Fresh Start For the Left: What Activists Would Do If They Took the Social Sciences Seriously" http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa... "Convincing leftists to adopt a combined electoral/social movement strategy that abandons third parties and the possible use of property destruction or other forms of physical attack would be a difficult task. Right now there are few leftists who are not for one or another of these self-defeating approaches.
But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work. Economics, sociology, and political science establish this point in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it is still too difficult if not impossible to collect all the information, and make the fast adjustments to changing preferences, that would be needed for central planning in a complex economy, no matter how community-based it was at its starting point. In addition, no one has yet devised methods for analyzing the inadequate information that can be gathered. Then there are all the problems of keeping a bureaucracy responsive, even one that held frequent meetings with neighborhood councils and work-site employee councils, as still nicely summarized in the old phrase, "who says organization says oligarchy."
The impossibility of centralized, non-market planning, even within a democratic society, I am asserting, means that it is necessary to abandon the economic plan that has been seen as the solution by most egalitarians for the past 150 years. It's the "s" word, socialism. Because no one mentions socialism any more, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with China taking the capitalist road, in the form of "Market-Leninism," it's hard to know just how many leftists still think socialism would work in a fully developed democratic economy. But it's my guess that many still hold out some hope, if only because there seems to be no other alternative. The problem is embodied in the label that many leftists now have adopted for themselves, "anti-capitalists." But what does "anti-capitalist" mean?
Many leftists will be skeptical, but a highly plausible new direction for bringing about greater economic equality and more access to common property is offered by planning through the market. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets.
There is thus no need for one big centralized planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets. In the past, egalitarians could not think of these interventions as planning tools for two reasons. First, they are currently used by the corporations that dominate the government for their own short-run interests. Second, most egalitarians couldn't see the possibilities for any kind of decentralized market-based planning because they thought of planning as central planning.
According to this way of thinking about planning, then, the big issue is winning political power from the corporate-conservative coalition, which is another reason why challenges in the electoral arena are such an important dimension of a full-scale egalitarian movement within a democratic society. That is, taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations
Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...
Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.
Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... "Intrinsic motivation has been studied since the early 1970s. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to analyze one's capacity, to observe and to gain knowledge.[5] It is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on external pressures or a desire for reward."
One of the biggest problems most financially successful artists have is that their buying public wants more of the same (say, another Harry Potter novel), whereas their artistic muse may want to move in new directions. That's a reason many commercially successful artists tend to stagnate artistically since doing more of the same is much less risky financially but is often unsatisfying artistically.
It was just that in James P. Hogan's post-scarcity society you generally acquired status through demonstrating competence in some way (could be anything, even being a good waiter or running some interesting attraction like a steam locomotive), not by acquiring material wealth. Skill in *producing* or repairing high quality goods would be respected, not generally the skill in *acquiring* such goods, especially since most material things were freely available for the taking as they could be mass produced by robots as copies as desired. Even for original works of art, it was the creator of the work who would get the status, not the ultimate possessor of the artwork (who in a way became indebted to the artwork's creator by acknowledging the competency of the creator). There is a section of the book where with some hand waving it is suggested that if you grow up in such a society you just know the rules almost instinctively and also can spot a pretender at competence the way a shopkeeper in today's society could spot a counterfeit hundred dollar bill. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy?:-)
So, projecting that idea into the Star Trek universe, it might be that overall most "red shirts" are just in some sense less competent than someone who had worked his way up, like Kirk or Picard? So, no wonder they are getting killed so easily, if they don't have the competencies the blue shirt characters have?:-) All that said, Worf demonstrated that "red shirt" security on the Enterprise could be highly competent and respected -- although, come to think of it, I'm not sure what color his uniform was? Gold? Anyway, it is all fiction of course. Just something to think about. Iain Banks had his own take on all that with the Culture series as well.
In general, US society has trouble with the idea that status could come from competence and gift giving as opposed to acquiring and hoarding wealth. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States,[1] among whom it is traditionally the primary economic system.[2]... Typically the potlatch was practiced more in the winter seasons as historically the warmer months were for procuring wealth for the family, clan, or village, then coming home and sharing that with neighbors and friends.... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[16] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.[17] The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized".[18] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."
An example of a modern day laws banning gift giving: "90-Year-Old Man Charged With Feeding Homeless Says He Won't 'Give Up' " http://abcnews.go.com/US/90-ye... "The Fort Lauderdale Police told ABC News that Abbott will get his court subpoena in the mail and a judge will decide whether he will spend up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. "Arnold thinks he can feed wherever he wants and the laws say differently. Despite the fact that he's a super nice guy and he's a gentleman and a kind soul we have to enforce the law," Seiler said. Although Abbott has been cited twice in less than a week,
Thanks, meta-monkey! Glad someone else thinks it could be fun.:-) While I don't have time to do much on it at the moment, I'd suggest building tire factory simulations that can be used in a web browser is a step forward. After that, who knows?
== Some more rambles on the idea and its implications
It looks like each tire is made one at a time, with a lot of labor? And some danger to the worker with spinning wheels and cutting tools and so on. Not sure if all plants are still like that. It might explain why tires can be inconsistent. Safety can drives automaton because automation can generally assure higher quality (not always). Just looking at a guy cutting something by eye which is going to form a seem makes me wonder how often tires are a bit lopsided? No wonder they need balancing...
Costs for products generally drop when people can figure out how to get them produced in a continuous printing-like process such as big newspapers use (solar cells will probably soon be going that way). Often is is cheaper to re-engineer a product to be "printed" than to automate a more complex process. For example, if the tire material was produced by first creating a big sheet, and there was some way to the material could then be formed into shape at the end. Or if there was some new material that would phase change (maybe under radiation?) from liquid to solid and be super strong, then the process could be simplified by removing the need for the steel wires. But that all takes on quickly into research projects -- which have their own fun, but are different from just automating the current process. But no doubt there are people in graduate programs in material science and manufacturing engineering (probably getting subsistence wages there for years) who would love to research that kind of stuff.
Maybe the closest model to this right now is the Linux Kernel or, more broadly, a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian? There are a variety of interest parties involved with something like that. I theory, any Linux user would contribute, but in practice you need to go up a long learnign curve, and so few people do contribute, but some few do. Although by now most of the core Kernel developers are supported by companies that sell related products or services (like RedHat or most lately Samsung). http://news.slashdot.org/story...
In the case of tires, who would tangentially benefit from a a great tire factory? In theory, perhaps makers of automobiles, professors of material science, people at places like the US DOT or NIST and similar might all get involved in setting up and running such a plant as something tangential to their other work?
The biggest issue in our current society would be getting the capital together to do that. However, in the short term, we could make a simulation of the factory in some framework.
Minecraft probably isn't the right framework for realistic simulations. The electrical engineering in Mniecraft would be fairly limited even with mods for improvements over redstone. However, these videos show that people can actually build factories just for fun. They even may build multiple versions of the factor
It's a big a paradigm shift to a gift economy (or improved subsistence), sure. As an example of it, if you really thought you needed "open heart surgery", here is a gift to keep you away from going under the surgeon's knife or robot::-) "Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless" https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
There, I just saved you US$100K and a lot of suffering. Please pay it forward if you can and want to.:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "Trevor's plan is a charitable program based on the networking of good deeds. He calls his plan "Pay It Forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying the favor back. However, it needs to be a major favor that the receiver can't complete themselves."
Sadly, I sat next to someone at an automotive shop yesterday who had just spend three days getting the software to work right for such cardiology intervention tools for a local hospital. And I could not bring myself to point that out, not thinking of a polite way to say it. I did obliquely say how various forms of blood testing for nutritional deficiency like vitamin A or vitamin D was a breakthrough, as was various forms of diagnostic imaging. It's a hard conversation to have, about how much of what we spend so much money and suffering on is needless and even harmful.
My father died of a heart attack about half a year after getting a stent put in. A sister died about a year after open heart surgery. Neither procedure addressed the underlying nutritional issues leading to clogged arteries which also affect arteries everywhere like the brain and which also impair the immune system.
Of course, you might say, so OK, cardiology is a scam, but you needed new tires which why you were in the automotive shop and paid about $1000 yesterday. And that is true. But my neighbor had come over before that with an impact wrench to help me get some lug nuts free to get a spare on (a longer story), and my wife used the internet to look at tire reviews on public forums (ended up with Goodyear Assurance TripleTred instead of Nokain WR G3 based on availability, but Goodyear got surprisingly good reviews). And the tire shop people wen
Enjoyed skimming through it, especially the point about character encoding and the value of utf-8. Many arguments for name restrictions are because it would make shell commands and scripts easier to write correctly. That suggests to me the bigger issue is the shell.
As the computer language Forth shows, there does not have to be an obvious line between a programming language and a command line. It's unfortunate our systems generally have multiple languages with different conventions. What might be better is a good language with levels of parsing, sort of like the difference between JSON and JavaScript, or HTML/CSS and JavaScript, where some levels are not intended to have executable code and the system knows that. Anyway, just a seed of an idea.
Just to try to grow it a bit, imagine if (shudder, as I prefer Smalltalk syntax) we used JavaScript as a "shell" syntax. When you wanted to delete a file, you might enter:
$ File.remove(["force"], "file name with spaces or not");
instead of:
$ rm -f file\ name\ with\ spaces\ or\ not
Actually, I prefer the JavaScript version.:-)
Because JavaScript is so flexible, you could do in some JavaScript shell profile:
var rm = File.remove;
var rmf = rm.bind(["force"]);
Then, with assumed semicolons you could write:
$ rmf("file name with spaces or not")
That seems much clearer to me than the conventional shell script notation.
Commands could return JavaScript objects for results, displayed as JSON. So:
I'm not sure if there would be other stiff like pipes that might trip you up, especially with JavaScript's syntax and single-tasking assumptions. Probably the results of these functions might have to be some form of Deferreds or something like that?
As a first cut at pipes, assuming the result of a previous operation as a JavaScript object is passed as a final argument to the next operation:
Or with appropriate aliases via var and an assumption that "then" does a bind for arguments:
$ ls().then(grep, "test*").then(write, "out.txt")
Seems much easier to me to really understand this. It's a tradeoff of course. You might be typing a few more characters sometimes than for something like Bash, but whenever you tried to do something complex, it might be more understandable than a mess of metacharacters. And then file names (in ut8) without restrictions on metacharacters would not be such a big issue. These functions could even have a case-insensitive option.
with a IMHO human-friendly syntax like one derived from Smalltalk, where you used spaces to separate messages instead of a dot ("."), you would have:
"Neuroadaptation" is the key issue of what stronger stuff does not taste better in the long term. We just can't always have the rush of the first taste of the potato chip (salt, fat, crunch) if we start eating them all the time. Our tastes just start to expect that level regularly and if we go back to food with less, we feel bad for a time until our tastes readjust again. The same thing might be true of direct brain stimulation?
From the Pleasure Trap article: "Like our other sensory nerves, our taste buds also will "get used to" a given level of stimulation -- and this can have dangerous consequences. The taste buds of the vast majority of people in industrialized societies are currently neuroadapted to artificially high-fat, high-sugar, and high-salt animal and processed foods. These foods are ultimately no more enjoyable than more healthful fare, but few people will ever see that this is true. This is because they consistently consume highly stimulating foods, and have "gotten used to" them. If they were to eat a less stimulating, health-promoting diet, they soon would enjoy such fare every bit as much. Unfortunately, very few people will ever realize this critically important fact. Instead, nearly all of these people will die prematurely of strokes, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and cancer as a result of self-destructive dietary choices."
Still, you said your experience differed. So I wonder what else might have been different. You used the word "almost". One issue is how frequently people eat junk food. Even a couple times a week might be a problem?
Also, there is a certain style to cooking good healthy foods so they taste good. For example vegetables should not be overcooked... Dr. Fuhrman and his wife have some good cooking tips in various videos.
Medically-supervised fasting is another way to reset taste buds (in about a week). That may be why most religions include fasting as part of their traditions (watered down these days). When I fasted for more than a week, afterwards stuff with salt and sugar tasted offensively strong. Simple soups and plain vegetables tasted great, with various flavor nuances. Sadly, over the last few years I've become readapted to stronger less-healthy stuff (living in a family with other people eating other stuff).
In general, it is a good question what aspects of modern technology have overall made us happier or less happy over the long term. Aspects of today's fancy computers (including 24X7 social media) may in some ways be increasing stress for people more than they make us happier? Too many choices can also be stressful. Anyway, a complex topic.
My own comments on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... "In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system."
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik... "Guinan was the mysterious bartender in Ten Forward, the lounge aboard the USS Enterprise-D. She was well known for her wise counsel, which had proven invaluable many times. She was an El-Aurian, a race of "listeners" who were scattered by the Borg. Q, however, once suggested that there is far more to her than could be imagined. "
Or consider Vincent's sometimes influential role in Eureka's Cafe Diem: http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/C... "Cafe Diem is the cafe of Vincent, on the main street of Eureka. It's the place where everybody meets to eat one of Vincent's extraordinary meals or have a cup of his signature "Vinspresso". "
James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" provides other examples of why some people wait tables in a gift economy -- even when robots could easily do it.
Also, in a post-scarcity future many undesirable aspects of any tasks can be engineered out. Tables might be built of materials that were easy to clean. Cleaning cloths might be super-absorbent. You might wear technology that made taking orders easy. You boosted immune system would make catching disease from a diner unlikely. And so on...
See Bob Black on this: https://www.whywork.org/rethin... "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
Why do people host dinner parties for friends when they involve "work"?
Why do people knit when they can buy machine-woven cloth for less than that of the raw yarn?
In some ways, waiting tables and preparing food are far more important jobs than most of what most people do for "paid" work these days... As Bob Black wrote in the above-linked essay:
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess b
As does being an informed citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, a good sibling, a good storyteller tailored for local needs, and so on. So, always lots of important things to do even when we don't need to "work" for someone else for a wage...
Check out: http://www.primitivism.com/ori... "When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues that supernormal stimulation govern the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of animals. In her 2010 book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose,[9] she examines the impact of supernormal stimuli on the diversion of impulses for nurturing, sexuality, romance, territoriality, defense, and the entertainment industry's hijacking of our social instincts. In the earlier book, Waistland,[2] she explains junk food as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt, sugar, and fats and television as an exaggeration of social cues of laughter, smiling faces and attention-grabbing action. Modern artifacts may activate instinctive responses which evolved in a world without magazine centerfolds or double cheeseburgers, where breast development was a sign of health and fertility in a prospective mate, and fat was a rare and vital nutrient...."
http://www.healthpromoting.com... https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before--as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated--and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game--typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure--an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. As Dr. Fuhrman reports in his excellent volume Eat to Live, these artificial products, and others like them, comprise a whopping 93% American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes up to 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable--even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food--and their lives--much less. Indeed, most people believe that they would literally suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness...."
On alternatives to profit-making websites emphasizing other types of transactions than exchange, see my comment: "1. Outdoor Holiday Lights 2. ??? 3. Profit!" http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
As I mention there, I've been working on-and-off towards software for supporting a social semantic desktop. Many other have of course (like with NEPOMUK), I'm just one more. The Maelstrom sounds like it may be heading in that direction too.
I have some later stuff I have not released yet, but it is pretty similar to this: "A step towards a social semantic desktop in JavaScript using a NodeJS or PHP backend " https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
A key idea there is to write applications that spread their content state across a set of files, where you change the content state by adding a new file rather than changing an existing file.
So, for a simple example, imagine you have a document you can find by some UUID. When you make a new version of it, you write out a new file that references the same UUID but has a later timestamp. When you want to display the content, you search through all the versions of the document you have and display the one with the latest timestamp. Every actual file can be referenced by its SHA256 hash value and its length
Now, things can rapidly get more complex that that like by having hyperdocuments where only part of the document is in each file and so on. That requires a somewhat a different style of writing applications than is typical today.
In that version, you can have log files you add to, which can be generated by the system as it accepts new files and sees if they have special indexing tags. You can also have git-like variables that represent a pointer to a specific file and which can only be changed if you present the current version of the variable.
That older version is a bit more complicated than the one I'm working on, which has been progressing mostly by subtraction.:-) In the new version (not yet on GitHub, but I plan to put it there at some point), I got rid of the logs and variables, and replaced them with memory indexes of all content which is always a JSON document. Standard indexing of the files is simple and mainly just enough to find related ones which you can process or index further locally. Indexing in the server is based mainly on files having an optional ID (representing a document potentially with versions under the same ID) and having optional tags (to provide context about hyperdocuments), as well as having a SHA256 and length for direct retrieval. You can also query a server for files that match those IDs. Eventually, I see those queries as being like "magnet URIs". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
I've been writing a Single Page Application in JavaScript that uses that new backend to support "Participative Narrative Inquiry" (implementing ideas outlined in my wife's book "Working with Stories");
I think there is a great potential for such tools for community dialog and community planning and community design. I have a video related to that on the front page of site that is currently running the Pointrel20130202 software: http://twirlip.com/
Of course *many* people have been working towards a social semantic desktop (like NEPOMUK). And there are many document-oriented databases (CouchDB, MongoDB, etc.) and a variety of other databases of different sorts. These are just my own experiments and I don't know if they will succeed in being generally useful. I remain hopeful that someone will develop a general purpose system for this and it will be useful for communications, planning, and design. Maybe Maelstrom (or Maelstrom plus some new apps written in the way described above) will be it.
The Theodore Sturgeon short sci-fi story, "The Skills of Xanadu" is
Slashdot Mirror
AC wrote: "Him: Robots are destroying jobs!!! Me: Nah, this is just nerds starting to destroy money ;)"
LOL! :-) Thanks for the insightful post.
If automation enables a human to do the work of ten people, and of demand is limited (a key point), then the need for 90% of jobs in that area goes away. Automation does not have to be 100% to have a have big effect on employment.
The Japanese are working hard on health care robots for their aging populations. Again, a robot that could do 90% of tasks, or let one real person support ten people via indirect means like tele-operation will change the employment dynamics of that field. Even just a doubling of effectiveness could make a huge difference -- even just by removing travel time or data logging for, say, a visiting nurse.
Other ways automation can change health aid employment is if people had more free and then could care for elderly relatives directly. Humans still provide the care, but it is outside formal employment. Also, even without more free time, a telepresence robot could let distant relatives care for an elderly relative, perhaps even doing physical tasks like the laundry if the robot manipulators had haptic feedback through the internet.
By the way, for stuff like showers, there are already machines for that for nursing homes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03...
"With an electronic whir, the machine released a dollop of "peach body shampoo," a kind of body wash. Then, as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home's new human washing machine."
Also, on robot lawyers:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/2...
"The law profession is being reshaped by new automation technologies that allow law firms to complete legal work in a fraction of the time and with far less manpower. Think IBM's "Jeopardy!"-winning computer Watson -- practicing law. "Watson the lawyer is coming," said Ralph Losey, a legal technology expert at the law firm Jackson Lewis. "He won't come up with the creative solutions, but when it comes to the regular games that lawyers play, he'll kill them." That means potentially huge cost savings for clients, though it's not so promising for law school graduates looking for work. The good news for lawyers is that no one thinks the profession can be automated entirely. But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents."
There, stuff you said would never happen has already happened to some extent -- enough to make a difference to employment outlooks! And that is often the case in such discussions, as much as it is also possible to overestimate the difficulty of replacing humans in some tasks. As I mention in a previous post, what often happens with automation is that the task itself gets redesigned to be easier to automate (probably what happened with the bath). Or as in factories, the environment gets systematically structured so robots can navigate it within their limitations. Also, automation can often take the low-hanging fruit from a job (like legal search) which may eliminate 90% of the billable hours from some task while also removing the ladder by which an apprentice provides value to learn a trade and move up the employment ladder.
Of course, the good news is this means consumer prices will drop. But someone unemployed with zero income can't afford legal services or health services even if they are 1/10th the cost.... At least not without some form of "income" from the government or charity. Or, alternatively, some sort of gift of capital of personal robots to be used for local subsistence production or perhaps selling robot-produced products and services for exchange credits (sort of like renting your PC's idle time to bigger number crunching projects).
Also, since when do services have to be entirely *better* to compete? If I told you, you can hire a human health aid for US$4000 a month for e
Thankd for the Drucker mention, AC, and the GM history. Any good specific Drucker references you suggest related to his comments on automation and employment and wages?
This is at the HBR: ... ... society will become a class society unless service workers attain both income and dignity." He added: "Anyone can acquire the 'means of production', i.e., the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win." Again, Drucker's words prove prescient as the gains in the knowledge economy are hardly being shared equitably. "Our basic grievance with today's billionaires is that relatively little of the value they've created trickles down to the rest of us," the University of Toronto's Roger Martin asserts. He warns that this situation is unsustainable, and that top executives need to rein in their compensation. Surely, Drucker would have agreed. "A healthy business," he wrote, "cannot exist in a sick society.""
https://hbr.org/2014/10/what-p...
"âoeEvery few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred,â Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review. âoeIn a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself â" its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.â For Drucker, the newest new world was marked, above all, by one dominant factor: âoethe shift to a knowledge society.â
Be more mindful of those left behind. Drucker worried a lot about a group that he characterized as "knowledge-worker cousins": service workers. "Knowledge workers and service workers are not 'classes' in the traditional sense," Drucker wrote. "But there is a danger that
Good sentiments. What specific solutions did he propose for "being mindful of those left behind"? Also, ironically, it is often the knowledge workers who are in some ways more at risk of automation of various sorts than people who work in trades using both their hands and mind. Examples include the "Cloud" replacing sysadmins, or software replacing radiologists, or various internet sites reducing the need for lawyers for many basic tasks for small businesses including forming a corporation. Robots are not still not up to the skill level of, say, a human carpenter and we have not yet rebuilt our general infrastructure to work within their limitations. Contrast our fairly random infrastructure of non-standard and undocumented home layouts with factory floors that have been documented and standardized like for Kiva robots, or systematically organized corporate information management systems that can have software replace human though at various key points. However, I expect that we may see even the home become more standardized to deal with robotic limitations, possibly causing another housing price collapse, because for many people, especially the elderly or parents with young children, it might be worth it to move to a new home if it means robots coudl systematically clean it and prepare food and be available for medical emergencies or helping recover from falls and so on.
I see this about a 2014 conference talking about the risk of "a devastating effect on jobs and employment":
http://www.druckersociety.at/i...
"There is a broad consensus among economists that we enter 2014 into a period of limited economic recovery - even though it will by uneven by country and region and fraught with uncertainties.
A cyclical improvement of the global economy will provide an opportunity to address the huge structural issues that are still looming. They include: unsustainable debt levels, underfunded social
All too true, from drones to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"In 2006, Samsung Techwin announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56 mm robotic machine gun and optional grenade launcher to guard the Korean DMZ. It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can "identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles (3.2 km) away." The robot, which was developed by a South Korean university, uses "twin optical and infrared sensors to identify targets from 2.5 miles (4 km) in daylight and around half that distance at night." It is also equipped with communication equipment (a microphone and speakers), "so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops." If the person gives the wrong password, the robot can "sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun." South Korea's soldiers in Iraq are "currently using robot sentries to guard home bases."[3]"
And the movie Elysium painted such a picture as well, with robot guards and robot police.
http://www.santafe.edu/news/it...
"he makers of this summer's Hollywood blockbuster Elysium got one thing right, according to a column in the Washington Examiner that cites a 2005 research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles: The abundance of 'guard labor' depicted in the movie -- in the movie's case case robot police and sleeper agents -- is an expected feature of a society with a high degree of economic inequality. The 2005 paper, co-authored by Bowles and Arjun Jayadev and published as an SFI working paper, connects inequality with a larger proportion of a population engaged in enforcing the property rights and protecting the assets of the elite. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. labor force was dedicated to guard labor in 2002, they wrote."
Even without robots, see also:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J...
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
As Keynes wrote in his book about his own predecessors: "The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."
We have a choice as a society (at least in theory) like the choice presented in Marshall Brain's book Manna. For Plan A, we can create a world of wealth for all that takes us all (if we want) to the planets and asteroids and stars and beyond, by using fusion power and dirt cheap solar and 3D printing and nanotech and robotic helpers and cybernetic augmentation and so on. Or, for Plan B, we can let all but the super rich starve as the economy implodes from automation, and then, if society does not self-destruct in that starvation process, the children of the super rich can go to the stars eventually if they want. Either way, humanity, if it survives, ends up entirely super rich from technology. With exponential technological growth and declining human fertility in industrialized countries, and a solar system that can likely house quad
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
Here they talk about the volunteers contributing their time and money to make the sets:
http://thescene.com/watch/wire...
Just watched the first episode -- impressive and made by volunteers. Subsequent episodes are being made with some Kickstarter funding.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Here is a good explanation, based in part on research done by the Federal Reserve, on how creativity flourished best when people earn enough that money is off the table as a worry (that means about US$75K+ in the USA) and people have autonomy in their work, increasing mastery facing a challenge, and a sense of purpose.
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Frankly, I think very few artists are motivated by money. This is even more true if you broaden a definition of art to include so much of what people do as hobby crafts or fan fiction or local folk song writing or creative cooking and so on.
Money plays a role in the life of an artist in Western society of course because, in an exchange-emphasizing economy, we all need to get money somehow to pay for food and lodgings and material and so on -- including paying for our kids. And to put a lot of time into some craft, you need to find a way to support yourself that leaves time for learning and doing it. Especially for anyone with a family, if it is not your day job, your time to put into it is otherwise going to be severely limited. Some people still make it work by dedication and generally sacrificing other relationships and responsibilities, including by pushing them onto siblings or the state.
See for example, "The Murdering of My Years":
http://books.google.com/books/...
"Looking back on their lives, people often ask themselves "Where did the years go?" "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet provides a wide ranges of provocative answers to that question. Edited in the style of a documentary, "The Murdering of My Years is a compendium of stories by activists and artists about how they manage to get by in America. They talk about the jobs they've had (as cabbies, organizers, waitresses, clerks, drivers taking scabs to secret scab trainings, telemarketers, etc.), how they were initially politicized, the nature of their art, and how they feel about working (or resistance to working) in a political context. The stories range from the absurd to the heartbreaking, from the exciting and strange to the depressingly banal. The book examines the pain, disillusionment, and fundamental hopelessness that afflict many workers. It also tells stories or triumph, joy, and subversion in the workplace."
As is made clear in that book and others, the "starving artist" concept is mostly a myth. If you're starving, making art is generally the last thing on your mind. However, it's true that people who are obsessed with an idea or a technique may well end up starving because they prioritize their art over making money. But the actual suffering process rarely lends much to the art's production -- even if previous suffering might inform some future art in terms of shaping an artist's sympathies (as it might for anyone in any profession).
I think it more likely the urge to create generally comes from within and is sustained by intrinsic motivation of love of the craft and the product. If people just want money, there are more reliable ways to get it than trying to appeal to a fickle art audience. No doubt some few people do make become artists to get rich,
Cool, Jim! You might like this related proposal by me also for a basic income funded by a wealth tax of 6% on declared assets, with only declared assets being insured and defended by the government, explaining why millionaires should support the idea:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
BTW, if we had a basic income, it's not clear to me there would still be any justification for copyright or patents. Suddenly anyone wanting to create could do so on their own or in collaboration with other like-minded creative people. So, given the costs of copyright and patents to society of chilling effects and other negative effects, it could be better to eliminate them entirely.
Real innovations are rarely rewarded in society. After all, for example, you invented Spasim, the first 3D networked computer game, which eventually spawned an entire industry all the way to Minecraft and Space Engineers. As the original developer of an idea, did you get royalties from the entire industry for decades? I doubt it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
For another example, it took Ralph Baer fifteen years to even get someone to pay attention to the concept of computer games hooked to TVs:
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...
Meanwhile, someone like Bill Gates got financially obese based on starting as a millionaire at birth, dumpster diving to read other's code, and then licensing someone else's work to IBM -- work which apparently was improperly taken from the inventor (with IBM going through Gates to avoid liability).
Refs:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
http://patch.com/california/lo...
""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
"They Made America is certain to elicit cries of protest. That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era -- Gates, IBM, and Tim Paterson, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall. Because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured "more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.""
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... ... In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Pater
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry.
Interesting thoughts, Michael(?). I agree that some trends in Japan may foreshadow things the USA does (even the Japanese banking crisis decades ago related to rel estate bubbles leading to stagnation).
Thanks for your book link, which also has a link to a related site which includes connecting current challenges with historical developments:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...
"I have spent a couple decades writing a book about human ecology, because it is drastically changing, which presents great danger and great potential. The idea is to describe both so that we can avoid the disasters and take advantage of the potentials. The problems I describe could end human civilization, but the only way to avoid the disasters is to adapt to a new ecology, like the title of the book says. About 10,000 years or so ago, we started leaving the ecology we had grown up in for millions of years. Right now we are in an ecology that is one transient ecology of many that we have been moving through. We need to find one that is stable and that we can live in long term or we are, well, a specie without an ecology is in trouble. If we do not create a stable ecology that is some form of civilization, well, it is going to look like one of those "Post Apocalyptic" movies. It will not be pleasant and it will be hard for humans to ever really be much more than animals. The thing is that it is not just about finding a new ecology, it is also about adapting to survive and be comfortable in it. We are still mostly adapted to the old ecology when we lived in tribes and we need to change to adapt to the new ecology. It is a lot of things. We need to be smarter and more comfortable in a civilization than we are. That is what the books are about. In the mean time, this web site is supposed to serve a few other purposes and offer other resources. It is especially to present discussions about how different points of view can be understood."
Just spending a few minutes so far looking at your site and book blurb, in scope, it reminds me of "Beyond Civilization" by Daniel Quinn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
It also reminds me a bit of "A New Way Of Thinking" which you may find of interest:
http://www.anwot.org/
You have a synopsis here that mentions genetic issues:
http://www.transitiontoanewhum...
Certainly evolutionary pressures need to be understood (I was in a PHD program in ecology and evolution for a time). But in the time scale of a transition to some new economy full of AI and robots as capable as most humans for most economic activities (twenty years?) these seem to me to not be pressing issues, whatever the long term may hold. You might also find of interest Freeman Dyson's speculations about genetic engineering as far as possible long term trends in designer biology.
http://www.nybooks.com/article...
On genetics and health, while mutations and birth defects are serious issues, it seems to me the most pressing current health issues relate to vitamin D deficiency, diet lacking in enough vegetables and fruits and with too many refined carbohydrates and artificial additives, too much bad stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of community, problematical infrastructure, and so on (see "Blue Zones" for example).
You also wrote on your site: "In my broad studies, I had to examine the Philosophy of Science. One interesting point is about how science is advanced. Is it by a team of researchers or by individuals. It is a contested point, but I think it is clear that it is by both. Still, in the balance, the contributions by individuals like Newton and Einstein show the power of individual inspiration. That is the path I have taken. "
I certainly appreciate the
Personally, my own life would be little different -- except for a big change of not engaging in bouts of unrelated paid employment for expenses. I'd still spend time with my kid and homeschool. I'd still work on free software like the Pointrel system or software related to my wife's free book. I'd still work towards organizing all manufacturing knowledge (OSCOMAK) and work towards designing self-replicating space habitats. I'd hopefully be doing all those software and hardware things a lot better and a lot faster because I'd have more time (without taking on unrelated employment, even as I'd still be happy to help out on other projects just to be helpful and exchange ideas, same as helping any neighbor). I'd probably have lab space for physical experiments which would also speed things up. Another speed boost would (hopefully) be lots of like minded peers who were free to do similar things who I could collaborate with -- including on simulating and building and running free automated tire production factories as I posted on yesterday, especially since people will probably still need tires, even in space habitats: :-)
"Automated FOSS tire plant ideas; simulation tools? "
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I'd probably feel less compelled to do those things quickly though, so I might do more gardening. I'd still help out with my local historical society.
I think most people could find interesting things to do. It might take some period of "deworking" to make the transition. For kids leaving public school to do "unschooling" (or even just plain homeschooling) a rule of thumb is that it takes at least one month for every month in school to make a transition to independent learning. So, for someone who has worked at a conventional job for a dozen years on top of a dozen years of schooling, it might take a couple years for him or her to start to regain some independent initiative.
I feel it likely a lot of people would just have the time to be better parents, better friends, better neighbors, and better family members. As Bob Black wrote in his essay on "The Abolition of Work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!" "
Is it any wonder you want to avoid such desperate people? Even if most of them are doing a heroic job of trying to hold everything together despite limited time? And the flip side of it is, the people in the USA with lots of spare time, they tend to either be those who are (inherited) wealthy parasites who accept or ignore the huge rich/poor divide or they are people who are poor or old/tired or disabled or mentally ill. Obviously, I'm exaggerating here -- but not by that much. People in Western Europe are more likely to have free time and be able to use it to be better companions and more involved citizens and volunteers.
http://www.neatorama.com/2012/...
http://newint.org/features/201...
... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...
As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.
Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.
I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit
You seem to me to be aiming to imply "involuntary" within an arbitrary legal framework where the person who first twiddled some bits together can control what others later do with that set of bits. I'm assuming you are implying that those other people sharing the original pattern further without permission is "involuntary" sharing by the person who first put the pattern together. I guess I can see that perspective on "sharing", even if it is defining "sharing" in a way that emphasizes (using contract law) the preferences of the original creator over the preferences of any current holders of a copy of the bit sequence.
If you have a digital copy of a recent song released under a typical commercial license, it is illegal in the USA to give a copy of that song to someone else (maybe with some fair use exceptions). You have a local copy of something, but the law says you can't share it with those who want or need it based on the license chosen by the author or the current copyright holder. That is the sharing I'm talking about.
What if it was a song like, say, "Desperado" and you were too poor to buy a copy to give to some young guy like, say, Aaron Schwartz about to do something really alienated and foolish? :-( Thankfully there are still other options:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
"And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
[other great parts omitted out of copyright fears]"
It is really a very odd idea though, when you think about it, that some initial distributor of the song (let alone a government-funded research paper) gets to prevent you from copying, modifying, and/or redistributing a pattern of bits stored on hardware in your possession. It seems very undemocratic as it opens up the possibility that on the flimsiest of evidence anyone who claims any sort of copyright on anything can demand an inspection of the contents of any data storage to make sure a crime has not been committed?
In ancient times, someone inspired to write a song might have been seen to have received a transmission from some godly muse. From that perspective, by what right can such a person enter into a contract to restrict the redistribution of that muse's work? Isn't such a restriction imposed by the government an interference with the divine as well as with charitable human society?
I'm not saying I necessarily see it that way myself, but it's an example of how there are all sorts of ways to look at these things. The way that is dominant in the current legal system is the result of past political struggles and is not the only perspective. As is mentioned here:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."
Another perspective:
http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs...
"In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted."
Or further:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the laun
"A person can be highly competent at something that people don't value. How would that situation be handled?"
It doesn't matter much in a wealthy post-scarcity society because there is already so much abundance to go around. If someone is good at, say, "drawing vultures", why should anyone really care if there is little "demand" for that skill -- assuming everyone can still get all the food they want from automated farms powered by fusion power plants and delivered by a local package delivery system? You also never know when a skill might prove useful in the future -- like making an entertaining smartphone app called "Angry Vultures? :-)
Frankly, what most PhD students produce in their dissertation is, by their own admission generally, of little interest to the general public, and even rarely of interest to more than a handful of other specialists. Assuming we can "afford" it, why should people not be able to get a PhD in what they want to study? When you look at the lives of the children of the wealthy, who often can afford to write books, or get PhDs, or work at non-profits, or be involved in the low-paying performing arts and so on, that is what we often see in practice.
In VFY, Hogan suggests that "competence" can be valued irrespective of what it is in. A character connects that to the early days of the post-scarcity society's founding, when the first children (produced from DNA by a space probe landing on a new planet, creating a cultural break from the past) were raised by robots who would provide them with whatever they wanted; the only way to compete for status among peers and to stand out by learning to do something well, whatever it was. As long as people aren't actively bothering other people, they would tend to be allowed by their peers to do what they want. If people are actively harming others, then there will be conflicts, which are resolved in a variety of ways (including, in the end, violence). Hogan goes into that in some detail in the book, and one does not have to agree with every aspect of what he envisioned to see that alternatives could be possible.
Hogan's idea is just a fictional example; no doubt reality would be more complex. People can legitimately disagree on assessments of risks and rewards and also on social forms and ways to resolve conflicts. And there are no doubt human qualities of "values" that transcend competence. One can easily find examples of people doing despicable things "competently", such as rounding up Japanese-Americans and putting them in internment camps in the USA during WWII. Or what would it mean to be a highly competent "waterboarder" (even when history shows torture pretty much never provides useful intelligence overall compared to humane treatment of captives)? So in practice, yes, one should consider both means and ends in evaluating behavior. As the Navaho, paraphrasing I hope correctly, if it is done in the right spirit, it is more important than if it is done well.
Competence might also be in picking the right problem to solve -- like where a fumbler doing something in a half-assed way might still have been working on the most important issue and create enough of a solution to help everyone? Being a parent is an important calling, but there are no "perfect" parents, just good ones usually muddling through as best they can (even when financially wealthy) -- and it is hard to put a value on parenting the next generation, which is in some ways both the most important task of a civilization while also usually having negative economic value for decades. There is also a lot to be said for diversity, as in: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." It can in practice be hard to appreciate competence in some area you are not familiar with. And often the greatest artistry is in making things look simple, or even helping others to learn complex skills easily, or re-engineering things so they are easy to do or learn.
Hogan's "Chironian" civilization is the creation of an imaginative elect
See: "Fresh Start For the Left: What Activists Would Do If They Took the Social Sciences Seriously" http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
"Convincing leftists to adopt a combined electoral/social movement strategy that abandons third parties and the possible use of property destruction or other forms of physical attack would be a difficult task. Right now there are few leftists who are not for one or another of these self-defeating approaches.
But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work. Economics, sociology, and political science establish this point in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it is still too difficult if not impossible to collect all the information, and make the fast adjustments to changing preferences, that would be needed for central planning in a complex economy, no matter how community-based it was at its starting point. In addition, no one has yet devised methods for analyzing the inadequate information that can be gathered. Then there are all the problems of keeping a bureaucracy responsive, even one that held frequent meetings with neighborhood councils and work-site employee councils, as still nicely summarized in the old phrase, "who says organization says oligarchy."
The impossibility of centralized, non-market planning, even within a democratic society, I am asserting, means that it is necessary to abandon the economic plan that has been seen as the solution by most egalitarians for the past 150 years. It's the "s" word, socialism. Because no one mentions socialism any more, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with China taking the capitalist road, in the form of "Market-Leninism," it's hard to know just how many leftists still think socialism would work in a fully developed democratic economy. But it's my guess that many still hold out some hope, if only because there seems to be no other alternative. The problem is embodied in the label that many leftists now have adopted for themselves, "anti-capitalists." But what does "anti-capitalist" mean?
Many leftists will be skeptical, but a highly plausible new direction for bringing about greater economic equality and more access to common property is offered by planning through the market. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets.
There is thus no need for one big centralized planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets. In the past, egalitarians could not think of these interventions as planning tools for two reasons. First, they are currently used by the corporations that dominate the government for their own short-run interests. Second, most egalitarians couldn't see the possibilities for any kind of decentralized market-based planning because they thought of planning as central planning.
According to this way of thinking about planning, then, the big issue is winning political power from the corporate-conservative coalition, which is another reason why challenges in the electoral arena are such an important dimension of a full-scale egalitarian movement within a democratic society. That is, taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations
Thanks for the clarification! :-)
Rather than a "ploy", I'd suggest it is more like a"plea" based on essentially zero net new jobs being created in the USA over the past decade despite population growth, three decades of stagnant wages despite industrial productivity that has tripled or more during that time, and a level of wealth concentration unmatched in the USA for about a century where the owners of capital now *loan* money to workers to buy the stuff they produce instead of providing the money as wages. See, for example: http://www.capitalismhitsthefa...
Capitalism can't work as a system unless purchasing power is fairly broadly distributed. And right now, for most people in the USA (excepting senior citizens), the right to consume is linked to someone in your family having wages from a job. Unless you have a lot of financial wealth, you are considered low status if you don't earn money through wages and instead rely on some form of "unearned" "charity". That link has been increasingly stretched since the Triple Revolution Memorandum was written in 1964. The most recent financial crisis was in part due to workers reaching their credit limits based on what they could borrow against rising home values given (eventually) more realistic valuations of house values.
Of course, if people have been suggesting this since 1964, why has it not happened earlier? Amara's law is perhaps one reason: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." In my opinion, since 1964 the effects of automation in the USA so far have not been so much to completely displace workers as to keep wages down through the law of supply and demand for labor. This is somewhat analogous to how the US H1B program has not eliminated domestic programmers but (along with various forms of software automation) has contributed to keeping their wages flat for a decade in an era of supposed increased demand by increasing the supply of labor. Automation also changes the balance of power between workers and employers, like Marshall Brain has written about in "Robotic Freedom" leading to wealth concentration. Also, as former Harvard economics professor Juliet Schor pointed out in "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure", rising expectations (including from pervasive advertising) have produced an increase demand for products, so that has kept up demand for labor even as labor becomes more productive by being amplified by automation. So, the predictions from 1964 (and earlier) have been playing out, but more slowly and in more indirect ways than predicted.
An important point is that even if robotics, AI, and automation have not yet taken most jobs, they almost certainly have been keeping wages down for many jobs. The Atlantic as had some good articles including looking at the economics of what jobs are being automated in what sequence. Some of them:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
However, there are all sorts of complex and messed up politics relating to all this, as others have written about. In th
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Intrinsic motivation has been studied since the early 1970s. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to analyze one's capacity, to observe and to gain knowledge.[5] It is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on external pressures or a desire for reward."
One of the biggest problems most financially successful artists have is that their buying public wants more of the same (say, another Harry Potter novel), whereas their artistic muse may want to move in new directions. That's a reason many commercially successful artists tend to stagnate artistically since doing more of the same is much less risky financially but is often unsatisfying artistically.
It was just that in James P. Hogan's post-scarcity society you generally acquired status through demonstrating competence in some way (could be anything, even being a good waiter or running some interesting attraction like a steam locomotive), not by acquiring material wealth. Skill in *producing* or repairing high quality goods would be respected, not generally the skill in *acquiring* such goods, especially since most material things were freely available for the taking as they could be mass produced by robots as copies as desired. Even for original works of art, it was the creator of the work who would get the status, not the ultimate possessor of the artwork (who in a way became indebted to the artwork's creator by acknowledging the competency of the creator). There is a section of the book where with some hand waving it is suggested that if you grow up in such a society you just know the rules almost instinctively and also can spot a pretender at competence the way a shopkeeper in today's society could spot a counterfeit hundred dollar bill. Projects there self-organized on the basis of individuals deferring to each other based on specific competences -- not sure what the would have made of the recent "systemd" controversy? :-)
So, projecting that idea into the Star Trek universe, it might be that overall most "red shirts" are just in some sense less competent than someone who had worked his way up, like Kirk or Picard? So, no wonder they are getting killed so easily, if they don't have the competencies the blue shirt characters have? :-) All that said, Worf demonstrated that "red shirt" security on the Enterprise could be highly competent and respected -- although, come to think of it, I'm not sure what color his uniform was? Gold? Anyway, it is all fiction of course. Just something to think about. Iain Banks had his own take on all that with the Culture series as well.
In general, US society has trouble with the idea that status could come from competence and gift giving as opposed to acquiring and hoarding wealth. For example: ... Typically the potlatch was practiced more in the winter seasons as historically the warmer months were for procuring wealth for the family, clan, or village, then coming home and sharing that with neighbors and friends. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[16] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.[17] The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized".[18] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"A potlatch is a gift-giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States,[1] among whom it is traditionally the primary economic system.[2]
An example of a modern day laws banning gift giving:
"90-Year-Old Man Charged With Feeding Homeless Says He Won't 'Give Up' "
http://abcnews.go.com/US/90-ye...
"The Fort Lauderdale Police told ABC News that Abbott will get his court subpoena in the mail and a judge will decide whether he will spend up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. "Arnold thinks he can feed wherever he wants and the laws say differently. Despite the fact that he's a super nice guy and he's a gentleman and a kind soul we have to enforce the law," Seiler said. Although Abbott has been cited twice in less than a week,
Thanks, meta-monkey! Glad someone else thinks it could be fun. :-) While I don't have time to do much on it at the moment, I'd suggest building tire factory simulations that can be used in a web browser is a step forward. After that, who knows?
== Some more rambles on the idea and its implications
Here is a bit of what is involved in making tires:
"How tires are made "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Michelin tyre manufacturing process"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It looks like each tire is made one at a time, with a lot of labor? And some danger to the worker with spinning wheels and cutting tools and so on. Not sure if all plants are still like that. It might explain why tires can be inconsistent. Safety can drives automaton because automation can generally assure higher quality (not always). Just looking at a guy cutting something by eye which is going to form a seem makes me wonder how often tires are a bit lopsided? No wonder they need balancing...
Costs for products generally drop when people can figure out how to get them produced in a continuous printing-like process such as big newspapers use (solar cells will probably soon be going that way). Often is is cheaper to re-engineer a product to be "printed" than to automate a more complex process. For example, if the tire material was produced by first creating a big sheet, and there was some way to the material could then be formed into shape at the end. Or if there was some new material that would phase change (maybe under radiation?) from liquid to solid and be super strong, then the process could be simplified by removing the need for the steel wires. But that all takes on quickly into research projects -- which have their own fun, but are different from just automating the current process. But no doubt there are people in graduate programs in material science and manufacturing engineering (probably getting subsistence wages there for years) who would love to research that kind of stuff.
Maybe the closest model to this right now is the Linux Kernel or, more broadly, a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian? There are a variety of interest parties involved with something like that. I theory, any Linux user would contribute, but in practice you need to go up a long learnign curve, and so few people do contribute, but some few do. Although by now most of the core Kernel developers are supported by companies that sell related products or services (like RedHat or most lately Samsung).
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
In the case of tires, who would tangentially benefit from a a great tire factory? In theory, perhaps makers of automobiles, professors of material science, people at places like the US DOT or NIST and similar might all get involved in setting up and running such a plant as something tangential to their other work?
The biggest issue in our current society would be getting the capital together to do that. However, in the short term, we could make a simulation of the factory in some framework.
A couple examples:
"Minecraft 100% Automatic Bread Factory (sounds like by a kid)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Minecraft cake factory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Cake factory v2, Fully automatic!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Minecraft probably isn't the right framework for realistic simulations. The electrical engineering in Mniecraft would be fairly limited even with mods for improvements over redstone. However, these videos show that people can actually build factories just for fun. They even may build multiple versions of the factor
It's a big a paradigm shift to a gift economy (or improved subsistence), sure. As an example of it, if you really thought you needed "open heart surgery", here is a gift to keep you away from going under the surgeon's knife or robot: :-)
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement are Essentially Worthless"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
There, I just saved you US$100K and a lot of suffering. Please pay it forward if you can and want to. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Trevor's plan is a charitable program based on the networking of good deeds. He calls his plan "Pay It Forward", which means the recipient of a favor does a favor for three others rather than paying the favor back. However, it needs to be a major favor that the receiver can't complete themselves."
Sadly, I sat next to someone at an automotive shop yesterday who had just spend three days getting the software to work right for such cardiology intervention tools for a local hospital. And I could not bring myself to point that out, not thinking of a polite way to say it. I did obliquely say how various forms of blood testing for nutritional deficiency like vitamin A or vitamin D was a breakthrough, as was various forms of diagnostic imaging. It's a hard conversation to have, about how much of what we spend so much money and suffering on is needless and even harmful.
My father died of a heart attack about half a year after getting a stent put in. A sister died about a year after open heart surgery. Neither procedure addressed the underlying nutritional issues leading to clogged arteries which also affect arteries everywhere like the brain and which also impair the immune system.
Of course, you might say, so OK, cardiology is a scam, but you needed new tires which why you were in the automotive shop and paid about $1000 yesterday. And that is true. But my neighbor had come over before that with an impact wrench to help me get some lug nuts free to get a spare on (a longer story), and my wife used the internet to look at tire reviews on public forums (ended up with Goodyear Assurance TripleTred instead of Nokain WR G3 based on availability, but Goodyear got surprisingly good reviews). And the tire shop people wen
Enjoyed skimming through it, especially the point about character encoding and the value of utf-8. Many arguments for name restrictions are because it would make shell commands and scripts easier to write correctly. That suggests to me the bigger issue is the shell.
As the computer language Forth shows, there does not have to be an obvious line between a programming language and a command line. It's unfortunate our systems generally have multiple languages with different conventions. What might be better is a good language with levels of parsing, sort of like the difference between JSON and JavaScript, or HTML/CSS and JavaScript, where some levels are not intended to have executable code and the system knows that. Anyway, just a seed of an idea.
Just to try to grow it a bit, imagine if (shudder, as I prefer Smalltalk syntax) we used JavaScript as a "shell" syntax. When you wanted to delete a file, you might enter:
$ File.remove(["force"], "file name with spaces or not");
instead of:
$ rm -f file\ name\ with\ spaces\ or\ not
Actually, I prefer the JavaScript version. :-)
Because JavaScript is so flexible, you could do in some JavaScript shell profile:
var rm = File.remove;
var rmf = rm.bind(["force"]);
Then, with assumed semicolons you could write:
$ rmf("file name with spaces or not")
That seems much clearer to me than the conventional shell script notation.
Commands could return JavaScript objects for results, displayed as JSON. So:
$ File.list()
{"test1.js", "test2.js"}
$ File.list(["long"])
{".": ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", 2822, "2014-12-03Z08:14"], /*", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"]}
"..": ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", 2822, "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
"test1.js", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
"test2.js", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
"-rf", ["drwxr-xr-x+", "pdfernhout", "staff ", "1234", "2014-12-03Z08:14"],
"metacharacter & ||||| weirdness!!!! | rm -rf
$ rm("metacharacter & ||||| weirdness!!!! | rm -rf /*")
$ rm("-rf")
I'm not sure if there would be other stiff like pipes that might trip you up, especially with JavaScript's syntax and single-tasking assumptions. Probably the results of these functions might have to be some form of Deferreds or something like that?
As a first cut at pipes, assuming the result of a previous operation as a JavaScript object is passed as a final argument to the next operation:
$ File.list().then(File.grep.bind("test*")).then(File.write.bind("out.txt"))
Or with appropriate aliases via var and an assumption that "then" does a bind for arguments:
$ ls().then(grep, "test*").then(write, "out.txt")
Seems much easier to me to really understand this. It's a tradeoff of course. You might be typing a few more characters sometimes than for something like Bash, but whenever you tried to do something complex, it might be more understandable than a mess of metacharacters. And then file names (in ut8) without restrictions on metacharacters would not be such a big issue. These functions could even have a case-insensitive option.
with a IMHO human-friendly syntax like one derived from Smalltalk, where you used spaces to separate messages instead of a dot ("."), you would have:
$ (File ls) then: [File grep: "test*"] then:
"Neuroadaptation" is the key issue of what stronger stuff does not taste better in the long term. We just can't always have the rush of the first taste of the potato chip (salt, fat, crunch) if we start eating them all the time. Our tastes just start to expect that level regularly and if we go back to food with less, we feel bad for a time until our tastes readjust again. The same thing might be true of direct brain stimulation?
From the Pleasure Trap article: "Like our other sensory nerves, our taste buds also will "get used to" a given level of stimulation -- and this can have dangerous consequences. The taste buds of the vast majority of people in industrialized societies are currently neuroadapted to artificially high-fat, high-sugar, and high-salt animal and processed foods. These foods are ultimately no more enjoyable than more healthful fare, but few people will ever see that this is true. This is because they consistently consume highly stimulating foods, and have "gotten used to" them. If they were to eat a less stimulating, health-promoting diet, they soon would enjoy such fare every bit as much. Unfortunately, very few people will ever realize this critically important fact. Instead, nearly all of these people will die prematurely of strokes, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and cancer as a result of self-destructive dietary choices."
Still, you said your experience differed. So I wonder what else might have been different. You used the word "almost". One issue is how frequently people eat junk food. Even a couple times a week might be a problem?
Also, there is a certain style to cooking good healthy foods so they taste good. For example vegetables should not be overcooked... Dr. Fuhrman and his wife have some good cooking tips in various videos.
Medically-supervised fasting is another way to reset taste buds (in about a week). That may be why most religions include fasting as part of their traditions (watered down these days). When I fasted for more than a week, afterwards stuff with salt and sugar tasted offensively strong. Simple soups and plain vegetables tasted great, with various flavor nuances. Sadly, over the last few years I've become readapted to stronger less-healthy stuff (living in a family with other people eating other stuff).
In general, it is a good question what aspects of modern technology have overall made us happier or less happy over the long term. Aspects of today's fancy computers (including 24X7 social media) may in some ways be increasing stress for people more than they make us happier? Too many choices can also be stressful. Anyway, a complex topic.
LOL. :-)
My own comments on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system."
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik... "Guinan was the mysterious bartender in Ten Forward, the lounge aboard the USS Enterprise-D. She was well known for her wise counsel, which had proven invaluable many times. She was an El-Aurian, a race of "listeners" who were scattered by the Borg. Q, however, once suggested that there is far more to her than could be imagined. "
Or consider Vincent's sometimes influential role in Eureka's Cafe Diem:
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/C...
"Cafe Diem is the cafe of Vincent, on the main street of Eureka. It's the place where everybody meets to eat one of Vincent's extraordinary meals or have a cup of his signature "Vinspresso". "
James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" provides other examples of why some people wait tables in a gift economy -- even when robots could easily do it.
Also, in a post-scarcity future many undesirable aspects of any tasks can be engineered out. Tables might be built of materials that were easy to clean. Cleaning cloths might be super-absorbent. You might wear technology that made taking orders easy. You boosted immune system would make catching disease from a diner unlikely. And so on...
See Bob Black on this:
https://www.whywork.org/rethin...
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
Or listen to or read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon:
https://archive.org/details/pr...
https://books.google.com/books...
Why do people host dinner parties for friends when they involve "work"?
Why do people knit when they can buy machine-woven cloth for less than that of the raw yarn?
In some ways, waiting tables and preparing food are far more important jobs than most of what most people do for "paid" work these days... As Bob Black wrote in the above-linked essay:
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess b
As does being an informed citizen, a good neighbor, a good friend, a good sibling, a good storyteller tailored for local needs, and so on. So, always lots of important things to do even when we don't need to "work" for someone else for a wage...
Check out: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest", so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic."
See also my essay: "Basic income from a millionaire's perspective? "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
Or more general on post-scarcity: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... ..."
"Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett argues that supernormal stimulation govern the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of animals. In her 2010 book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose,[9] she examines the impact of supernormal stimuli on the diversion of impulses for nurturing, sexuality, romance, territoriality, defense, and the entertainment industry's hijacking of our social instincts. In the earlier book, Waistland,[2] she explains junk food as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt, sugar, and fats and television as an exaggeration of social cues of laughter, smiling faces and attention-grabbing action. Modern artifacts may activate instinctive responses which evolved in a world without magazine centerfolds or double cheeseburgers, where breast development was a sign of health and fertility in a prospective mate, and fat was a rare and vital nutrient.
http://www.healthpromoting.com... ..."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before--as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated--and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game--typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure--an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. As Dr. Fuhrman reports in his excellent volume Eat to Live, these artificial products, and others like them, comprise a whopping 93% American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes up to 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable--even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food--and their lives--much less. Indeed, most people believe that they would literally suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness.
On alternatives to profit-making websites emphasizing other types of transactions than exchange, see my comment: "1. Outdoor Holiday Lights 2. ??? 3. Profit!" http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
As I mention there, I've been working on-and-off towards software for supporting a social semantic desktop. Many other have of course (like with NEPOMUK), I'm just one more. The Maelstrom sounds like it may be heading in that direction too.
I have some later stuff I have not released yet, but it is pretty similar to this:
"A step towards a social semantic desktop in JavaScript using a NodeJS or PHP backend "
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
A key idea there is to write applications that spread their content state across a set of files, where you change the content state by adding a new file rather than changing an existing file.
So, for a simple example, imagine you have a document you can find by some UUID. When you make a new version of it, you write out a new file that references the same UUID but has a later timestamp. When you want to display the content, you search through all the versions of the document you have and display the one with the latest timestamp. Every actual file can be referenced by its SHA256 hash value and its length
Now, things can rapidly get more complex that that like by having hyperdocuments where only part of the document is in each file and so on. That requires a somewhat a different style of writing applications than is typical today.
In that version, you can have log files you add to, which can be generated by the system as it accepts new files and sees if they have special indexing tags. You can also have git-like variables that represent a pointer to a specific file and which can only be changed if you present the current version of the variable.
That older version is a bit more complicated than the one I'm working on, which has been progressing mostly by subtraction. :-) In the new version (not yet on GitHub, but I plan to put it there at some point), I got rid of the logs and variables, and replaced them with memory indexes of all content which is always a JSON document. Standard indexing of the files is simple and mainly just enough to find related ones which you can process or index further locally. Indexing in the server is based mainly on files having an optional ID (representing a document potentially with versions under the same ID) and having optional tags (to provide context about hyperdocuments), as well as having a SHA256 and length for direct retrieval. You can also query a server for files that match those IDs. Eventually, I see those queries as being like "magnet URIs".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
I've been writing a Single Page Application in JavaScript that uses that new backend to support "Participative Narrative Inquiry" (implementing ideas outlined in my wife's book "Working with Stories");
I think there is a great potential for such tools for community dialog and community planning and community design. I have a video related to that on the front page of site that is currently running the Pointrel20130202 software:
http://twirlip.com/
Of course *many* people have been working towards a social semantic desktop (like NEPOMUK). And there are many document-oriented databases (CouchDB, MongoDB, etc.) and a variety of other databases of different sorts. These are just my own experiments and I don't know if they will succeed in being generally useful. I remain hopeful that someone will develop a general purpose system for this and it will be useful for communications, planning, and design. Maybe Maelstrom (or Maelstrom plus some new apps written in the way described above) will be it.
The Theodore Sturgeon short sci-fi story, "The Skills of Xanadu" is