Five interwoven economies with various solutions
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If I Had a Hammer
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Albus is great, but there are more options. From my site: ---- Our society is facing a huge economic turmoil, driven in part by the fact that most paid human labor has less-and-less relative value in the exchange economy due to several trends including: * the spread of robotics, AI, and other automation, * increasingly better design and better materials, * the accumulation of physical infrastructure, * relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or * the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with: * A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else); * A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle; * A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; * An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and * Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society. A central irony of our times is that our major social institutions revolve around the idea of rationing "scarce" resources, but the technology of the 21st century has the potential to make most resources very abundant. So, our policies relating to areas as diverse as education, welfare, healthcare, economics, infrastructure, research, urbanization, transportation, communications, copyright, patents, and agriculture are built on increasingly obsolete conceptual foundations.
AC wrote: "Paul, referring to Disciplined Minds on Slashdot is like admitting that you are a predator alien. We're going to have to be much more clever than that if we want to convince people to question their ideologies. The subconscious will not cede its control unless you offer it something in return. The best way to deconstruct the subconscious is to study branding and market research. Learn about what happens when people buy stuff, and compare that to what people do when they try to evaluate claims about scientific models with limited information.
See my thread: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14667 "
First, I probably can't in general disagree with your points on branding, advertising, purchasing, etc. Even if specific cases for specific individuals may differ, as in some people are more analytical than others (sadly sometimes meaning perhaps they are more easily bamboozled by "facts"?), some people may be in a stage of life looking for a new idea to try or an explanation for a past difficulty, etc.. I can wonder if that person to be so good at selling such ideas would be me though? But yes, in general, you are probably right. I liked the personal development diagrams in that thread (having only looked through the first page of 11 in the thread, need to read more later). Reminds me of one I've seen elsewhere with eight stages or so but generally overlapping.And I liked the line in Megamind where he says the difference between a villain and a supervilian (or by extension amateur and professional) is... "presentation". "-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy2zB8bLSpk
The first ten episodes of the popular "Downton Abbey" provides examples of workers identifying with the system around them and not seeing much hope for change (although a war shows up and some things do start to change, and some do see potential for change). James P. Hogan echoes similar themes in Voyage from Yesteryear, as people cling to the old scarcity-based social hierarchies even when confronted with abundance. Historian Howard Zinn's take on that: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
One thing Einstein got very right was the need to improve our ways of thinking given our new technological powers: http://anwot.org/
I'd also agree we could use better communications systems to discuss science and reason together about it. My wife and I have taken some steps towards such things in terms of making free and open source software, but no big successes so far. This web page has a video related to a Kickstarter campaign I thought about doing to further those efforts a couple years ago, but I did not proceed with it (taking work doing more conventional stuff instead for sadly short-term reasons): http://twirlip.com/
At least I still have some time now and then to advocate for a Basic Income as at least one way someday to give people more intellectual freedom (among other things). But even that is a tough sell, although I am glad
Fasting sometimes can help too (consult a specialist in it like Dr. Fuhrman to see what is reasonable to expect in various situations). People are always getting (pre)cancer cells and the immune system destroys them usually. Generally cancer is best prevented by diet and lifestyle (including avoiding carcinogens including browned and burned foods with acrylamides) with a healthy immune system. But once you have cancer, it is iffy if it can be gotten rid of... Dr. Fuhrman writes more on this on his site.
If the "tired light hypothesis" was true, and the "observable" universe was actually much older than 14 billion years, if could be possible for a system at the edge of what we observe to take information it has observed from further way and repeat it in our direction. Thus, even if photons from further way could not make it to us, in theory information could -- potentially from a distributed internet spanning endless quadrillions of light years of space and time. Thus the idea of a cosmological horizon is incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon
Sci-fi author James P. Hogan used the Many Worlds Interpretation is some of his sci-fi novels from around the 1980s and 1990s (not sure exactly when the first was). Hogan often championed the academic underdog, arguing they should get a fairer hearing, whether they were right or not..
Something to think about for the modern day (a book recommend by JP Hogan): http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
Interesting point: "Good war is eliminating [the] ability for the bad guys to make war against you." Even though in practice, "War is a Racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Of course, the justification for war, like the USA against Iraq as a so-called "preventive war" makes this a slippery slope. Millions of peopel are now dead or displaced and yet there were no WMDs in Iraq (the supposed justification for the Iraq invasion) and the USA has no obvious intention to pay reparations or fix all that was broken (as if that could even be done for all those dead or maimed or heartbroken). For example of how this logic can get more extreme, why not remove the potential for the "bad guys" to in thirty years be able to make war by striking now before they have created weapons or turned toward militaristic politics and become troublesome "bad guys"? Where do you draw the line (including on paranoia and fear-based planning)? Bombing Iran over fears of their future nuclear capacity falls somewhere along that line... What should be the rules and norms and policies for sentient creatures getting long given an apparent mix of cooperation and competition seemingly implicit in this universe?
Also what happens if, amplifying your suggestion, the entire planet (or solar system or galaxy or universe or metaverse) is defined as a no-go zone for human "civilians" for whatever reason? See the "Beserker" sci-fi series of military robots eventually fighting against all organic life anywhere...
There is a deep irony of creating all this advanced technology to in practice force other humans to act a certain way generally for reasons of material profit to some other humans, I say here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all...."
From a Marine Major General: http://warisaracket.org/racket.html "Smedley Butler: War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
Another quote by Einstein: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"
See also this essay by me on how that applies to all forms of modern weaponry, inspired by that Einstein quote, given a modern-day digital watch has more computing power than was used to design the first atomic weapons: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ---- Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openmanufacturing/8qspPyyS1tY/vZacyDL86DIJ See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possibl
About a gift economy powered by robots and fusion in conflict with current-type scarcity-based institutions (some similar themes as in later Giants novels). And also Frederik Pohl's "Midas World" (1950s about material abundance from fusion, again in conflict with older economic values). Also, Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" short story (prescient 1950s about mobile computing and open source making and sharing in conflict with a scarcity/conquest viewpoint). Iain Banks' Culture Novels touch on these themes too. Al really pressing things to understand as our economy changes as various technologies proliferate...
I also recommend "900 Grandmothers" by R. A. Lafferty for two stories on the Camiroi (Education and Polity/Custom) . And lots of stuff by Ursula K. Le Guin, especially a "Wizard of Earthsea" and "Always Coming Home".
Collections: Asimov's collection of old sci-fi he read called "Before the Golden Age". "The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF" edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The World Turned Upside Down by Eric Flint , James Baen , David Drake.
The Bolo and Beserker series for two other series views of robots (along with Asimov's). And "Silent Running" and "Red Dwarf" for more views on them.
The Diamond Age. Shockwave Rider.
Read and liked many of your choices too! We probably are similar in age to go through such a set.
Lots of non sci-fi stuff is important too if we talk broadly about this. But the list is so large there... Fiction (e.g. Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Grimm's fairy tales, non-western stuff), Non-fiction (e.g. Horowitz and Hill: the Art of Electronics, Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Eat to Live, Bartholomew: Square foot Gardening, Gingery: Build your Own Machine Shop from Scrap, Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings and Cybernetics, Winner: Autonomous Technology, Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind), Biography (e.g. Benjamin Franklin, William C. Norris), etc.. Religious -- various obvious classics that shape the thought of so many people via stories as well as commentary on them.
So many books overlap though. And so many themes come up in different ways in different books in different ways. It is sort of like our books are all part of a global informational hologram. To talk about just one influential book or of few is to like to get a tiny fragment of a hologram -- you may get a whole picture of life but of lower quality with limited viewing angles. More books adds more viewing angles and more detail. We may see the world in a grain of sand, but a whole beach worth of sand adds more possibilities.
Asimov said he was glad he read widely besides sci-fi.
Brilliant point about corporate and government secrecy and power. I've thought for a while (inspired by the book "Honest Business" by a founder of MasterCard) that an innovation in corporate law would be to insist corporations have no right to privacy or internal secrecy. Makes me think of the "Culture" series where AIs can keep their thoughts private, but all databanks and communications are public (although when an AI "Mind" runs a world-sized ship as a de-facto government, perhaps there are some issues there...)
You might like some related ideas which touch on cybernetic dynamics by Langdon Winner in his book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought". He makes a similar point about people being replaceable components in organizations, and if they don't perform to standards, they will be replaced. This limits how humane or long-term-oriented a CEO in a typical US corporation can be, for example. Still, Winner suggests that there are moralities implicit in the things we choose to design -- so he suggests that for large systems, it is not so much that they can be used for good or evil as in that there are implications present in the idea about distribution of power and social implications... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
And I'd add, there is the risk that the design will emphasize the "irony" in my sig, about great potential for abundance used in ignorance and fear of scarcity. http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone."
BTW, not sure fully what it does, but your JavaScript simulation looks cool. Interesting moral issue -- someone perhaps unintentionally creating A-life just by visiting a web page! I did a couple simulations of self-replicating robots myself back in the 1980s, but in ZetaLisp and C.
Might well be true, from your homepage: "We are all the same Universe, each experiencing the one self from different perspectives..." If so, it can still be hard to work out the implications in a universe apparently built around Yin/Yang dualities like fire/ice, meshwork/hierarchy, competition/cooperation, etc. I mention that in my "rant" link included here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4556777&cid=45691707
Mentioning both A-LIfe simulation and corporations, you might find of interest this post I madein 2000 (it mentions simulation earlier): "[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html "Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are several governments that are as powerful or more so than major corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist with people to the extent they need to. But it is not clear what corporations (especially large ones) will do as we approach this singularity -- where AIs and robots are cheaper to employ than people. Today's corporation, like any intelligent machine, is more than the sum of its parts (equipment, goodwill, IP, cash, credit, and people). It's "plug" is not easy to pull, and it can't be easily controlled against its short term interests. What sort of laws and rules will be needed then? If the threat of corporate charter revocation is still
Thanks for the link. By the way, eight of the authors there are from China, including the first author. Four are from Australia, one from the USA.
BTW, to be fair to lawyers, it's true that some US lawyers do good things for the general benefit -- civil rights, environmental defense, open access journal articles, open government, FOSS licensing, etc.. Examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/
I guess it comes down to who has the most money to pay the lawyers, and whether some lawyers are willing to make significantly less money to work in the public interest. I guess engineers can also face the same problem -- like working on some destruction-emphasizing defense projects or monopolistic systems like DRM vs. more productive ends or more sharing-oriented approaches.
Another aspect of that: "Our One-Party Democracy" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=0 "Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. [Actually, more of a corporatist?] But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions...."
The fact is, many public benefit things like FOSS or basic R&D should be funded collectively, and government should be spending money or redistributing it to account for positive and negative externalities. For example, renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear since the 1970s if you account for pollution, defense, and risks. But instead of paying more for gas at the pump, we pay a lot of taxes (or incur public debt) for "defense" spending in the middle east, and we have higher medical bills, and people live in fear of Fukushima-style meltdowns, etc..
Still, while I think the climate is changing, but it's not clear the best approach to that is CO2 limits. If I had to choose between CO2 limits versus a global basic income along with free mobility between nations (lawyer-y things), I'd take the latter, given that it is too late to stop lots of climate change and wealth and mobility is a way most people globally could at least deal with it.
Of course, the source article is paywalled as a form of "artificial scarcity" dreamed up by lawyers.:-) Lawyers who base their work ultimately on the public domain of public law and court proceedings, but tell everyone else not to share...
Good point on how we should invest our efforts in productive directions. More by me on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
The question is, how much is Google part of the problem vs. part of the solution? I discuss here in relation to Google's "Virgle" Mars settlement April Fools joke of 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html ---- So what am I really saying?
That we as a society are not going to happily get to Mars or the Asteroids or other star systems, or even just fix up Space Ship Earth, until we come to see the love of money as the problem, not the solution.
Or as made clear by Iain M. Banks: http://folk.uio.no/thomas/po/the-culture.html "Money is a sign of poverty, meaning that money only has a function in a scarcity economy, and therefore its existence betrays a pre-abundant (poor) society."
And so financial obesity is part of the problem, not the solution.... That $600 billion a year is spent essentially from fear of the human potential. From fear of "OpenVirgle". From *fear* the kids might actually figure out how to go to Mars instead of being profligate consumers and obedient cannon fodder soldiers.:-( That fear is still the fundamental basis of the two biggest institutions almost all of us spend almost all of our time (school and work). And so *fear* is what keeps more people from doing space settlement given how interesting it is and how much prosperity our mostly automated productive systems can pump out -- whether those free people work on OpenVirgle or choose another approach or another related good cause (Earthly sustainability).... And it is likely fear that holds Google back from becoming a post-scarcity organization despite the continuing rush of exponential growth in technological capacity its planners surely must be predicting:... ----
Intelligent mobile robots are near to totally transforming our society. And the transition might be quicker than we might expect, as robots can go from worse than human to better than human at some task almost overnight when there is an R&D breakthrough in some area. Here is one such example for manipulation, tossing and catching a cell phone: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
One thing most people do not yet understand about robotics (especially in the hands of some place like Google) is that if you have millions of networked robots, all learning independently, they can pool that learning over the network. And that network can then learn very quickly. And so "performance" can improve very quickly, with millions of trial-and-error expe
"The greatest threat to power is not violence but disengagement [from the grid network]."
Interesting point, AC. It relates to this, also by Howard Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attic -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."
Or this by Noam Chomsky: "The Threat of a Good Example" http://www.chomsky.info/books/unclesam01.htm "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.... There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?"..."
So yes, withdrawing support is a powerful way of change, as Gandhi used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperation_movement "The Non-Cooperation Movement was a significant phase of the Indian struggle for freedom from British rule. It was led by Mahatma Gandhi and was supported by the Indian National Congress. After the Jallianwala Bagh incident, Gandhi started the Non Cooperation movement. It aimed to resist British occupation in India through non-violent means. Protestors would refuse to buy British goods, adopt the use of local handicrafts, picket liquor shops, and try to uphold the Indian values of honor and integrity. The ideals of Ahimsa or non-violence, and Gandhi's ability to rally hundreds of thousands of common citizens towards the cause of Indian independence, were first seen on a large scale in this movement through the summer 1920, they feared that the movement might lead to popular violence. Among the significant causes of this movement were colonial oppression, exemplified by the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh massacre, economic hardships to the common man due to a large chunk of Indian wealth being exported to Britain, ruin of Indian artisans due to British factory-made goods replacing handmade goods, and popular resentment with the British over Indian soldiers dying in World War I while fighting as part of the British Army, in battles that otherwise had nothing to do with India."
Or as a twist, would it really matter if most of India's wealth were exported to Britain or to a 1% of Indians who live in gated communities inside India?
Great example; the same is true of people living in harsh climates like snowy areas -- or even, like on slashdot of people giving each other technological advice yet probably working in competing companies. One might even see that in a marriage -- with spouses working together when a child is sick yet also squabbling over housework... Life is at the interface of fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, competition and cooperation...
Politics is a process of resource allocation by discussion (backed ultimately by violence and also gift-giving or its withdrawal), as opposed to, say, mainstream US capitalist/consumer economics which is about resource allocation by moving the digital equivalent of pieces of artificially-scarce green paper around (within a larger US political context, as above backed by violence and gift-giving or its withdrawal). Yet, there is no reasons those communications and currencies could not be emails and IRC chats and bug tracker pstings, like coordinates much of Debian GNU/Linux. http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
So, it is not unreasonable to say that wherever human go, they will take some aspects of all that along. My father travelled the world as a merchant marine sailor for about twenty years, and one of his favorite sayings was a variation on "wherever you go, you take yourself along".
Yet. I think there is a deeper issue like mentioned in my sig. China has demonstrated new technologies of abundance by putting a robot on the moon powered by solar and nuclear technologies. Those technologies could produce physical abundance for all by today's standards -- even for trillions of people via self-replicating space habitats. That is a new truth. It can be a new truth even if probably humans may always find things to squabble about, like two kids in a room filled with toys can fight over the same one for whatever reasons of the moment.
Yet, such new technologies in a way make the world a smaller place, like the how the US space program to put a man on the moon in the 1960s was seen in US government as only justified in getting lots of funding in order to show the USSR that the USA was capable of landing a nuclear missile on Red Square. So many technologies can make the world smaller and smaller relative to our capacity to use such technologies to cause harm, like I write about here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
We may always have competition between people for various reasons (the mating dance?), yet our society can still figure out ways to structure that competition in healthier ways. "No contest: the case against competition" http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm ---- "We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition." "It is competition that gives us meaning in life." These word
On holding onto optimism about change: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate -- in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
. ..
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it repro
They are on to other stuff there now after finishing the live coverage (which was great to listen to)... They seem to be planning to have updates and further discussion during the day though...
One thing I found confusing in the coverage was distinguishing between what were live images and what were simulations... I did not know if some of the images were coming from perhaps other lunar satellites with cameras focused on the landing probe? Or if they were simulations or infographics tracking real positions?
Good points with the historical analogy to ocean-going explorations and later commerce. CCTV was talking about the implications of the China landing as I started to write this, and putting it into the context of past efforts by other countries like the USA and USSR. But they are making a big point about how nothing much has landed for 37 years that could do local experimented and take local high-definition images,,,
They are just ending their live coverage it seems...Nice to see a recap of the landing video as I was posting on slashdot while listening, and didn't realize how quick it was going to happen after the final deceleration burn, and missed seeing the actual video of the moment of landing at the time... The headline said the landing would happen about twenty minutes or so later than it did so I thought it would take longer...
The next CCTV show is up and talking more about the historical context right now... They are talking about how US President Carter gave China one gram of moon rock and they used half of it for research...
"There are hundreds of pulsars. If one of them eats an asteroid and changes its spin rate, you can use the others to figure out how it's changed, and recalibrate. It's fine as long as they don't all glitch at once - and they're hundreds of light-years apart, so there's nothing that could make that happen."
Although a lot of that technology was engineered by US Americans decades ago...
CCTV is now talking about how US manned space flight to the moon ended in 1972... And how NASA is 1/2 of one percent of the US budget... Although now they are talking about private space exploration in the USA...
Just to add to my point, the inability of US governments to put up fairly basic websites after spending so much money shows something deeply dysfunctional about the US political process.
Health care disparities would presumably reflect that too, to some extent. But a deeper issue is how health is more than access to "sick care", What you eat, how much you worry, where you can live, whether you have time for self-education and exercise, these are also big factors, and those connect to at least a certain level of wealth.
The USA is really confused about that, in part because of decades of propaganda funded by very selfish people.
Meanwhile, China is about to land a robot on the moon!
As George Orwell said: http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
Pretty amazing to see such technological ability spreading around the world -- India going to Mars, and China going to the Moon. I can hope the dream of space settlement will grow in those and other countries and we will see space habitats eventually.
Maybe China will be the first to realize the ideas described in this Carter-era study? "Advanced Automation for Space Missions" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Interesting thoughts, thanks. It's hard to know how it will all play out. I agree with you on looking at first principles like energy flows -- that is why so much of mainstream economics is bunk. I mention that here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html "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.
The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics". "
Elites can also come and go for various reasons. In the book of the oral history of some Native Americans, "The Walking People", the elite of that group 1000s of years ago lived by the beach while the rest lived up higher, but they got wiped out by a tidal wave, and the rest started walking...
Maybe a deeper issue is, as Charles Dickens worried about like in "A Tale of Two Cities", that society can so fast become an angry mob tearing everything apart... But the angry mob of the French Revolution mostly could lust use blades like the guillotine to vent their wrath. Individuals in today's angry mobs will have access to bioweapons including designer plagues, stolen nukes, chemical weapons, drones, cell-phone-based IEDs, computer viruses, airplanes to crash into things, and so on. That could all spiral into something very awful, especially when governments fight back and it all escalates... It's been suggested one answer to the Fermi Paradox is that all civilizations with advanced tech wipe themselves out.
I feel it is best to avoid the risk of ending up there, and things like a basic income, a gift economy, better democratic planning, and even improvised subsi
Inherently safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA "The TRIGA reactor uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel, which has a large, prompt negative fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, meaning that as the temperature of the core increases, the reactivity rapidly decreases. It is thus highly unlikely, though not impossible for a nuclear meltdown to occur."
Yeah, so many good ideas have been shelved as you point out because they did not fit with the political or social or economic priorities of the time.
How they could be better by being smaller (like TRIGA): http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html "Natural circulation can also be used to protect the containment from breaking open due to excess pressure. In present-day power plants, active cooling using water pumps is necessary to control the pressure. But with the smaller reactor, there is less energy to dissipate, making natural circulation a viable alternative."
One intriguing possibility is a central factory that makes small nuclear power units meant to run without significant maintenance for 30 years and which then go back to the factory for reprocessing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_nuclear_reactor
I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain what we have though: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/nuclear-turbine/ "Sean Riley puts on his hazmat suit and heads into the radiation zone for his next tough fix, replacing a steam turbine in a nuclear power plant to boost its energy-producing capacity. Dismantling an enormous turbine and putting it back together again is tough work at the best of times, but when there's risk of radioactive particles inside, tough is an understatement."
That said, I'm not really a fan of big centralized power plants for social reasons, so I lean towards solar, superinsulated homes, and energy efficiency. Also, while in theory nuclear energy could be run well, in practice, given corporate secrecy and other social dysfunctions, like with TEPCO, I have little confidence current profit-oriented corporations could run big nuclear reactors safely. "Silkwood" is another example, although one can see that with corporations that handle anything dangerous, including chemicals used to make ICs -- at least nuclear releases are easier to monitor than most chemical or biochemical releases.
An example is in the USA with dozens of nuclear plants similar to Fukushima requiring active systems to shut down (and power) that are all at the end of their lives and which should have never been built. They should be shut down as unsafe and replaced with something safer (nuclear, fusion, solar, or otherwise), but likely will just be run longer until the next disaster.
With solar reaching grid parity (cheaper than grid electricity from coal,natural gas, and nuclear), it is hard to argue for nuclear without some huge design breakthroughs. It was hard even ten or twenty years ago when one could point to the solar pricing trends (but people scoffed). Hot or cold fusion maybe would be the next step for "nuclear" though, and one could argue fusion plants would have less environmental impact than covering 1% of the landscape with solar panels. Although "solar roads" is a neat idea. http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml "When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the in
Slashdot Mirror
Albus is great, but there are more options. From my site:
----
Our society is facing a huge economic turmoil, driven in part by the fact that most paid human labor has less-and-less relative value in the exchange economy due to several trends including:
* the spread of robotics, AI, and other automation,
* increasingly better design and better materials,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society. A central irony of our times is that our major social institutions revolve around the idea of rationing "scarce" resources, but the technology of the 21st century has the potential to make most resources very abundant. So, our policies relating to areas as diverse as education, welfare, healthcare, economics, infrastructure, research, urbanization, transportation, communications, copyright, patents, and agriculture are built on increasingly obsolete conceptual foundations.
:-)
AC wrote: "Paul, referring to Disciplined Minds on Slashdot is like admitting that you are a predator alien. We're going to have to be much more clever than that if we want to convince people to question their ideologies. The subconscious will not cede its control unless you offer it something in return. The best way to deconstruct the subconscious is to study branding and market research. Learn about what happens when people buy stuff, and compare that to what people do when they try to evaluate claims about scientific models with limited information.
See my thread: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14667 "
First, I probably can't in general disagree with your points on branding, advertising, purchasing, etc. Even if specific cases for specific individuals may differ, as in some people are more analytical than others (sadly sometimes meaning perhaps they are more easily bamboozled by "facts"?), some people may be in a stage of life looking for a new idea to try or an explanation for a past difficulty, etc.. I can wonder if that person to be so good at selling such ideas would be me though? But yes, in general, you are probably right. I liked the personal development diagrams in that thread (having only looked through the first page of 11 in the thread, need to read more later). Reminds me of one I've seen elsewhere with eight stages or so but generally overlapping.And I liked the line in Megamind where he says the difference between a villain and a supervilian (or by extension amateur and professional) is ... "presentation". "-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy2zB8bLSpk
The first ten episodes of the popular "Downton Abbey" provides examples of workers identifying with the system around them and not seeing much hope for change (although a war shows up and some things do start to change, and some do see potential for change). James P. Hogan echoes similar themes in Voyage from Yesteryear, as people cling to the old scarcity-based social hierarchies even when confronted with abundance. Historian Howard Zinn's take on that: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
BTW, you might also like some other quotes I've collected here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Also related (there are better links I've posted before, these are just top Google matches):
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/
http://landshape.org/enm/peer-censorship-and-scientific-fraud/
One thing Einstein got very right was the need to improve our ways of thinking given our new technological powers:
http://anwot.org/
I'd also agree we could use better communications systems to discuss science and reason together about it. My wife and I have taken some steps towards such things in terms of making free and open source software, but no big successes so far. This web page has a video related to a Kickstarter campaign I thought about doing to further those efforts a couple years ago, but I did not proceed with it (taking work doing more conventional stuff instead for sadly short-term reasons): http://twirlip.com/
At least I still have some time now and then to advocate for a Basic Income as at least one way someday to give people more intellectual freedom (among other things). But even that is a tough sell, although I am glad
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds
Fasting sometimes can help too (consult a specialist in it like Dr. Fuhrman to see what is reasonable to expect in various situations). People are always getting (pre)cancer cells and the immune system destroys them usually. Generally cancer is best prevented by diet and lifestyle (including avoiding carcinogens including browned and burned foods with acrylamides) with a healthy immune system. But once you have cancer, it is iffy if it can be gotten rid of... Dr. Fuhrman writes more on this on his site.
If the "tired light hypothesis" was true, and the "observable" universe was actually much older than 14 billion years, if could be possible for a system at the edge of what we observe to take information it has observed from further way and repeat it in our direction. Thus, even if photons from further way could not make it to us, in theory information could -- potentially from a distributed internet spanning endless quadrillions of light years of space and time. Thus the idea of a cosmological horizon is incomplete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon
By the way, Hugh Everett's life is another example of how poorly academia often rewards thinking outside the box: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett
Too bad he did not know how to escape "The Pleasure Trap" (which can be hard under stress):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Sci-fi author James P. Hogan used the Many Worlds Interpretation is some of his sci-fi novels from around the 1980s and 1990s (not sure exactly when the first was). Hogan often championed the academic underdog, arguing they should get a fairer hearing, whether they were right or not..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Universe_(physics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp
http://www.thesunisiron.com/
Semmelweis is another example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis
One can see more extreme examples in times now despised enough to admit of them like Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Something to think about for the modern day (a book recommend by JP Hogan):
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
A different-but-related take on that by Freeman Dyson:
http://edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society
getting long -> getting along
Interesting point: "Good war is eliminating [the] ability for the bad guys to make war against you." Even though in practice, "War is a Racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Of course, the justification for war, like the USA against Iraq as a so-called "preventive war" makes this a slippery slope. Millions of peopel are now dead or displaced and yet there were no WMDs in Iraq (the supposed justification for the Iraq invasion) and the USA has no obvious intention to pay reparations or fix all that was broken (as if that could even be done for all those dead or maimed or heartbroken). For example of how this logic can get more extreme, why not remove the potential for the "bad guys" to in thirty years be able to make war by striking now before they have created weapons or turned toward militaristic politics and become troublesome "bad guys"? Where do you draw the line (including on paranoia and fear-based planning)? Bombing Iran over fears of their future nuclear capacity falls somewhere along that line... What should be the rules and norms and policies for sentient creatures getting long given an apparent mix of cooperation and competition seemingly implicit in this universe?
Also what happens if, amplifying your suggestion, the entire planet (or solar system or galaxy or universe or metaverse) is defined as a no-go zone for human "civilians" for whatever reason? See the "Beserker" sci-fi series of military robots eventually fighting against all organic life anywhere...
There is a deep irony of creating all this advanced technology to in practice force other humans to act a certain way generally for reasons of material profit to some other humans, I say here: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Alternatives include to use the robots to build solar power systems and a network of self-replicating space habitats and so on:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
From a Marine Major General: http://warisaracket.org/racket.html "Smedley Butler: War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
At length: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Another quote by Einstein: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"
See also this essay by me on how that applies to all forms of modern weaponry, inspired by that Einstein quote, given a modern-day digital watch has more computing power than was used to design the first atomic weapons:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
----
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic:
A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openmanufacturing/8qspPyyS1tY/vZacyDL86DIJ
See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possibl
About a gift economy powered by robots and fusion in conflict with current-type scarcity-based institutions (some similar themes as in later Giants novels). And also Frederik Pohl's "Midas World" (1950s about material abundance from fusion, again in conflict with older economic values). Also, Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" short story (prescient 1950s about mobile computing and open source making and sharing in conflict with a scarcity/conquest viewpoint). Iain Banks' Culture Novels touch on these themes too. Al really pressing things to understand as our economy changes as various technologies proliferate...
I also recommend "900 Grandmothers" by R. A. Lafferty for two stories on the Camiroi (Education and Polity/Custom) . And lots of stuff by Ursula K. Le Guin, especially a "Wizard of Earthsea" and "Always Coming Home".
Collections: Asimov's collection of old sci-fi he read called "Before the Golden Age". "The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF" edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The World Turned Upside Down by Eric Flint , James Baen , David Drake.
The Bolo and Beserker series for two other series views of robots (along with Asimov's). And "Silent Running" and "Red Dwarf" for more views on them.
The Diamond Age. Shockwave Rider.
Read and liked many of your choices too! We probably are similar in age to go through such a set.
Lots of non sci-fi stuff is important too if we talk broadly about this. But the list is so large there... Fiction (e.g. Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Grimm's fairy tales, non-western stuff), Non-fiction (e.g. Horowitz and Hill: the Art of Electronics, Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Eat to Live, Bartholomew: Square foot Gardening, Gingery: Build your Own Machine Shop from Scrap, Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings and Cybernetics, Winner: Autonomous Technology, Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind), Biography (e.g. Benjamin Franklin, William C. Norris), etc.. Religious -- various obvious classics that shape the thought of so many people via stories as well as commentary on them.
So many books overlap though. And so many themes come up in different ways in different books in different ways. It is sort of like our books are all part of a global informational hologram. To talk about just one influential book or of few is to like to get a tiny fragment of a hologram -- you may get a whole picture of life but of lower quality with limited viewing angles. More books adds more viewing angles and more detail. We may see the world in a grain of sand, but a whole beach worth of sand adds more possibilities.
Asimov said he was glad he read widely besides sci-fi.
Brilliant point about corporate and government secrecy and power. I've thought for a while (inspired by the book "Honest Business" by a founder of MasterCard) that an innovation in corporate law would be to insist corporations have no right to privacy or internal secrecy. Makes me think of the "Culture" series where AIs can keep their thoughts private, but all databanks and communications are public (although when an AI "Mind" runs a world-sized ship as a de-facto government, perhaps there are some issues there...)
You might like some related ideas which touch on cybernetic dynamics by Langdon Winner in his book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought". He makes a similar point about people being replaceable components in organizations, and if they don't perform to standards, they will be replaced. This limits how humane or long-term-oriented a CEO in a typical US corporation can be, for example. Still, Winner suggests that there are moralities implicit in the things we choose to design -- so he suggests that for large systems, it is not so much that they can be used for good or evil as in that there are implications present in the idea about distribution of power and social implications...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
And I'd add, there is the risk that the design will emphasize the "irony" in my sig, about great potential for abundance used in ignorance and fear of scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone."
BTW, not sure fully what it does, but your JavaScript simulation looks cool. Interesting moral issue -- someone perhaps unintentionally creating A-life just by visiting a web page! I did a couple simulations of self-replicating robots myself back in the 1980s, but in ZetaLisp and C.
Might well be true, from your homepage: "We are all the same Universe, each experiencing the one self from different perspectives..." If so, it can still be hard to work out the implications in a universe apparently built around Yin/Yang dualities like fire/ice, meshwork/hierarchy, competition/cooperation, etc. I mention that in my "rant" link included here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4556777&cid=45691707
Mentioning both A-LIfe simulation and corporations, you might find of interest this post I madein 2000 (it mentions simulation earlier):
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
"Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some
individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are
several governments that are as powerful or more so than major
corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches
about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares
may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market
allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist with
people to the extent they need to. But it is not clear what corporations
(especially large ones) will do as we approach this singularity -- where
AIs and robots are cheaper to employ than people. Today's corporation,
like any intelligent machine, is more than the sum of its parts
(equipment, goodwill, IP, cash, credit, and people). It's "plug" is not
easy to pull, and it can't be easily controlled against its short term
interests.
What sort of laws and rules will be needed then? If the threat of
corporate charter revocation is still
Thanks for the link. By the way, eight of the authors there are from China, including the first author. Four are from Australia, one from the USA.
BTW, to be fair to lawyers, it's true that some US lawyers do good things for the general benefit -- civil rights, environmental defense, open access journal articles, open government, FOSS licensing, etc.. Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action
http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/
I guess it comes down to who has the most money to pay the lawyers, and whether some lawyers are willing to make significantly less money to work in the public interest. I guess engineers can also face the same problem -- like working on some destruction-emphasizing defense projects or monopolistic systems like DRM vs. more productive ends or more sharing-oriented approaches.
Another aspect of that: ..."
"Our One-Party Democracy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=0
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. [Actually, more of a corporatist?] But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.
The fact is, many public benefit things like FOSS or basic R&D should be funded collectively, and government should be spending money or redistributing it to account for positive and negative externalities. For example, renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear since the 1970s if you account for pollution, defense, and risks. But instead of paying more for gas at the pump, we pay a lot of taxes (or incur public debt) for "defense" spending in the middle east, and we have higher medical bills, and people live in fear of Fukushima-style meltdowns, etc..
Still, while I think the climate is changing, but it's not clear the best approach to that is CO2 limits. If I had to choose between CO2 limits versus a global basic income along with free mobility between nations (lawyer-y things), I'd take the latter, given that it is too late to stop lots of climate change and wealth and mobility is a way most people globally could at least deal with it.
And the US Republicans themselves are getting conflicted about things too:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/22/1716216/a-war-over-solar-power-is-raging-within-the-gop
Space settlement is another example of a future p
http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/26/0437213/using-pulsars-as-gps-for-starships
Of course, the source article is paywalled as a form of "artificial scarcity" dreamed up by lawyers. :-) Lawyers who base their work ultimately on the public domain of public law and court proceedings, but tell everyone else not to share...
Good point on how we should invest our efforts in productive directions. More by me on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
The question is, how much is Google part of the problem vs. part of the solution? I discuss here in relation to Google's "Virgle" Mars settlement April Fools joke of 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html ... :-( That fear is still the fundamental basis of the two biggest institutions almost all of us spend almost all of our time (school and work). And so *fear* is what keeps more people from doing space settlement given how interesting it is and how much prosperity our mostly automated productive systems can pump out -- whether those free people work on OpenVirgle or choose another approach or another related good cause (Earthly sustainability). ... And it is likely fear that holds Google back from becoming a post-scarcity organization despite the continuing rush of exponential growth in technological capacity its planners surely must be predicting: ...
----
So what am I really saying?
That we as a society are not going to happily get to Mars or the Asteroids or other star systems, or even just fix up Space Ship Earth, until we come to see the love of money as the problem, not the solution.
Or as made clear by Iain M. Banks:
http://folk.uio.no/thomas/po/the-culture.html
"Money is a sign of poverty, meaning that money only has a function in a scarcity economy, and therefore its existence betrays a pre-abundant (poor) society."
And so financial obesity is part of the problem, not the solution.
That $600 billion a year is spent essentially from fear of the human potential. From fear of "OpenVirgle". From *fear* the kids might actually figure out how to go to Mars instead of being profligate consumers and obedient cannon fodder soldiers.
----
Intelligent mobile robots are near to totally transforming our society. And the transition might be quicker than we might expect, as robots can go from worse than human to better than human at some task almost overnight when there is an R&D breakthrough in some area. Here is one such example for manipulation, tossing and catching a cell phone:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
One thing most people do not yet understand about robotics (especially in the hands of some place like Google) is that if you have millions of networked robots, all learning independently, they can pool that learning over the network. And that network can then learn very quickly. And so "performance" can improve very quickly, with millions of trial-and-error expe
"The greatest threat to power is not violence but disengagement [from the grid network]."
Interesting point, AC. It relates to this, also by Howard Zinn:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attic -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."
Or this by Noam Chomsky: ... There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ..."
"The Threat of a Good Example"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/unclesam01.htm
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
And by Bucky Fuller:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/165737.Richard_Buckminster_Fuller
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
So yes, withdrawing support is a powerful way of change, as Gandhi used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperation_movement
"The Non-Cooperation Movement was a significant phase of the Indian struggle for freedom from British rule. It was led by Mahatma Gandhi and was supported by the Indian National Congress. After the Jallianwala Bagh incident, Gandhi started the Non Cooperation movement. It aimed to resist British occupation in India through non-violent means. Protestors would refuse to buy British goods, adopt the use of local handicrafts, picket liquor shops, and try to uphold the Indian values of honor and integrity. The ideals of Ahimsa or non-violence, and Gandhi's ability to rally hundreds of thousands of common citizens towards the cause of Indian independence, were first seen on a large scale in this movement through the summer 1920, they feared that the movement might lead to popular violence.
Among the significant causes of this movement were colonial oppression, exemplified by the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh massacre, economic hardships to the common man due to a large chunk of Indian wealth being exported to Britain, ruin of Indian artisans due to British factory-made goods replacing handmade goods, and popular resentment with the British over Indian soldiers dying in World War I while fighting as part of the British Army, in battles that otherwise had nothing to do with India."
Or as a twist, would it really matter if most of India's wealth were exported to Britain or to a 1% of Indians who live in gated communities inside India?
Consider the US
Great example; the same is true of people living in harsh climates like snowy areas -- or even, like on slashdot of people giving each other technological advice yet probably working in competing companies. One might even see that in a marriage -- with spouses working together when a child is sick yet also squabbling over housework... Life is at the interface of fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, competition and cooperation...
Politics is a process of resource allocation by discussion (backed ultimately by violence and also gift-giving or its withdrawal), as opposed to, say, mainstream US capitalist/consumer economics which is about resource allocation by moving the digital equivalent of pieces of artificially-scarce green paper around (within a larger US political context, as above backed by violence and gift-giving or its withdrawal). Yet, there is no reasons those communications and currencies could not be emails and IRC chats and bug tracker pstings, like coordinates much of Debian GNU/Linux.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
So, it is not unreasonable to say that wherever human go, they will take some aspects of all that along. My father travelled the world as a merchant marine sailor for about twenty years, and one of his favorite sayings was a variation on "wherever you go, you take yourself along".
Yet. I think there is a deeper issue like mentioned in my sig. China has demonstrated new technologies of abundance by putting a robot on the moon powered by solar and nuclear technologies. Those technologies could produce physical abundance for all by today's standards -- even for trillions of people via self-replicating space habitats. That is a new truth. It can be a new truth even if probably humans may always find things to squabble about, like two kids in a room filled with toys can fight over the same one for whatever reasons of the moment.
Yet, such new technologies in a way make the world a smaller place, like the how the US space program to put a man on the moon in the 1960s was seen in US government as only justified in getting lots of funding in order to show the USSR that the USA was capable of landing a nuclear missile on Red Square. So many technologies can make the world smaller and smaller relative to our capacity to use such technologies to cause harm, like I write about here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
We may always have competition between people for various reasons (the mating dance?), yet our society can still figure out ways to structure that competition in healthier ways.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
----
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These word
On holding onto optimism about change: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm .
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate -- in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
. .
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it repro
They are on to other stuff there now after finishing the live coverage (which was great to listen to)... They seem to be planning to have updates and further discussion during the day though...
One thing I found confusing in the coverage was distinguishing between what were live images and what were simulations... I did not know if some of the images were coming from perhaps other lunar satellites with cameras focused on the landing probe? Or if they were simulations or infographics tracking real positions?
Good points with the historical analogy to ocean-going explorations and later commerce. CCTV was talking about the implications of the China landing as I started to write this, and putting it into the context of past efforts by other countries like the USA and USSR. But they are making a big point about how nothing much has landed for 37 years that could do local experimented and take local high-definition images,,,
They are just ending their live coverage it seems...Nice to see a recap of the landing video as I was posting on slashdot while listening, and didn't realize how quick it was going to happen after the final deceleration burn, and missed seeing the actual video of the moment of landing at the time... The headline said the landing would happen about twenty minutes or so later than it did so I thought it would take longer...
The next CCTV show is up and talking more about the historical context right now... They are talking about how US President Carter gave China one gram of moon rock and they used half of it for research...
"There are hundreds of pulsars. If one of them eats an asteroid and changes its spin rate, you can use the others to figure out how it's changed, and recalibrate. It's fine as long as they don't all glitch at once - and they're hundreds of light-years apart, so there's nothing that could make that happen."
Good point! Maybe the Chinese led by engineers will work that out, as opposed to the USA led by lawyers?
http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-government-officials-are-scientists/
Amazing to think I was able to watch the Chinese Chang'e-3 lunar landing live through China TV!
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/12/14/055230/change-3-lunar-rover-landing-slated-for-1340-utc-saturday
Although a lot of that technology was engineered by US Americans decades ago...
CCTV is now talking about how US manned space flight to the moon ended in 1972... And how NASA is 1/2 of one percent of the US budget... Although now they are talking about private space exploration in the USA...
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/one-giant-leap-kerbalkind-spaceflight-sim-wins-geek-gift-award-2D11741994
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Program
https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/contact.php
They are unfolding the solar panel now...
Comments by me on how China's government is led now by engineers vs. US led now by lawyers: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4550453&cid=45688539
Just to add to my point, the inability of US governments to put up fairly basic websites after spending so much money shows something deeply dysfunctional about the US political process.
China has just landed Chang'e on the moon! One big difference. The US government is run by lawyers. China's government is run by engineers:
http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-government-officials-are-scientists/
Pros and cons from both approaches... We really need a healthy mix of all types in government...
http://marketrealist.com/2013/10/shutdown-101-perceived-wealth-distribution-isnt-reality/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
Health care disparities would presumably reflect that too, to some extent. But a deeper issue is how health is more than access to "sick care", What you eat, how much you worry, where you can live, whether you have time for self-education and exercise, these are also big factors, and those connect to at least a certain level of wealth.
The USA is really confused about that, in part because of decades of propaganda funded by very selfish people.
On global issues, see:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey/
http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
http://www.gapminder.org/GapminderMedia/wp-uploads/Results-from-the-Ignorance-Survey-in-the-US..pdf
Meanwhile, China is about to land a robot on the moon!
As George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
Pretty amazing to see such technological ability spreading around the world -- India going to Mars, and China going to the Moon. I can hope the dream of space settlement will grow in those and other countries and we will see space habitats eventually.
Maybe China will be the first to realize the ideas described in this Carter-era study?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Interesting thoughts, thanks. It's hard to know how it will all play out. I agree with you on looking at first principles like energy flows -- that is why so much of mainstream economics is bunk. I mention that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"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.
The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics". "
Elites can also come and go for various reasons. In the book of the oral history of some Native Americans, "The Walking People", the elite of that group 1000s of years ago lived by the beach while the rest lived up higher, but they got wiped out by a tidal wave, and the rest started walking...
Maybe a deeper issue is, as Charles Dickens worried about like in "A Tale of Two Cities", that society can so fast become an angry mob tearing everything apart... But the angry mob of the French Revolution mostly could lust use blades like the guillotine to vent their wrath. Individuals in today's angry mobs will have access to bioweapons including designer plagues, stolen nukes, chemical weapons, drones, cell-phone-based IEDs, computer viruses, airplanes to crash into things, and so on. That could all spiral into something very awful, especially when governments fight back and it all escalates... It's been suggested one answer to the Fermi Paradox is that all civilizations with advanced tech wipe themselves out.
I feel it is best to avoid the risk of ending up there, and things like a basic income, a gift economy, better democratic planning, and even improvised subsi
Inherently safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
"The TRIGA reactor uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel, which has a large, prompt negative fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity, meaning that as the temperature of the core increases, the reactivity rapidly decreases. It is thus highly unlikely, though not impossible for a nuclear meltdown to occur."
Yeah, so many good ideas have been shelved as you point out because they did not fit with the political or social or economic priorities of the time.
CANDU is somewhat safer than usual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Safety_features
More on why reactors capitalism built were expensive:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
How they could be better by being smaller (like TRIGA):
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"Natural circulation can also be used to protect the containment from breaking open due to excess pressure. In present-day power plants, active cooling using water pumps is necessary to control the pressure. But with the smaller reactor, there is less energy to dissipate, making natural circulation a viable alternative."
One intriguing possibility is a central factory that makes small nuclear power units meant to run without significant maintenance for 30 years and which then go back to the factory for reprocessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_nuclear_reactor
I have a lot of respect for the people who maintain what we have though:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/nuclear-turbine/
"Sean Riley puts on his hazmat suit and heads into the radiation zone for his next tough fix, replacing a steam turbine in a nuclear power plant to boost its energy-producing capacity. Dismantling an enormous turbine and putting it back together again is tough work at the best of times, but when there's risk of radioactive particles inside, tough is an understatement."
That said, I'm not really a fan of big centralized power plants for social reasons, so I lean towards solar, superinsulated homes, and energy efficiency. Also, while in theory nuclear energy could be run well, in practice, given corporate secrecy and other social dysfunctions, like with TEPCO, I have little confidence current profit-oriented corporations could run big nuclear reactors safely. "Silkwood" is another example, although one can see that with corporations that handle anything dangerous, including chemicals used to make ICs -- at least nuclear releases are easier to monitor than most chemical or biochemical releases.
An example is in the USA with dozens of nuclear plants similar to Fukushima requiring active systems to shut down (and power) that are all at the end of their lives and which should have never been built. They should be shut down as unsafe and replaced with something safer (nuclear, fusion, solar, or otherwise), but likely will just be run longer until the next disaster.
With solar reaching grid parity (cheaper than grid electricity from coal,natural gas, and nuclear), it is hard to argue for nuclear without some huge design breakthroughs. It was hard even ten or twenty years ago when one could point to the solar pricing trends (but people scoffed). Hot or cold fusion maybe would be the next step for "nuclear" though, and one could argue fusion plants would have less environmental impact than covering 1% of the landscape with solar panels. Although "solar roads" is a neat idea.
http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
"When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the in