Thanks for the link and more history. I'll have to check out the PowerPoint file when not on a ChromeBook (just trying to test out a possible future of computing). One of the best academic course I ever took was with Michael Mahoney related to the history of technology, although that was just before he was getting into the history of computing. http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/computing.html
I've worked towards that on-and-off as time permits with my Pointrel system. I see you have a long list of related publications on technology and society it would be interesting to read through.
I don't know if he is connected to any of them, but William C. Norris who championed "PLATO" for computer-based education is another great example in that area of people trying to make computer innovations to help humanity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris_(CEO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_system "PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) [1][2] was the first (ca. 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Originally, PLATO was built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary -- university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Several descendant systems still operate.
The PLATO project was assumed by the Control Data Corporation (CDC), who built the machines with which PLATO operated at the University. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world; the last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006 (coincidentally, just a month after Norris died), yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games."
Alan Kay and his colleagues working on Smalltalk are yet another, somewhat as a follow on to Doug's work.
I just watched the 1950s movie "The Invisible Boy" (with Robbie the Robot") and it is interesting how it presaged so much later thinking on dangerous out-of-control AI. Human-machine symbiosis may have its own issues, but still seems more hopefull somehow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Boy
The 1950s story The Skills of Xanadu by Theodore Sturgeon is the most hopeful in that sense. It would be great to know whether Sturgeon was thinking about Weiner's or Bush's writings? http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=
First, what people get paid often has very little connection with productivity. On top of that, it may even dis-incentivize them -- see Dan Pink on that. So, the assumptions implicit in your post are problematical. "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Also, never before have we been automating intelligence to such a degree. The US GDP in the first decade of the 21st century grew by about 33% without adding any net new jobs, even as the population grew. That is the new reality that you and many mainstream economists are ignoring. Paul Krugman is starting to get itt, as discussed here: "Sympathy for the Luddites" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5882422
Agriculture went from 90% of workers to 2% over 200 years. Manufacturing went from 35% to 15% or so over the past 50 years and continue to drop. Working hours per person have also dropped over that time, especially for children who used to be a big part of the labor force. Why should "services" not go the same way via AI and other automation and better design? Why employ a human if you don't have to?
Based on what you write, wouldn't you automate anything the first chance you get to maximize your profits? If everyone does that, who are your customers? Well, when there is 90% unemployment (possible in 20 years or so as AI really proliferates?), it may be too late to do anything about it, so it will mean little if you say "oops"... See also Martin Ford's book, "The Lights in the Tunnel". http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/
Anyway, you're assuming that we need most people to work to make the stuff we need. We don't. See Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work" for example.
Yes, family is important. But so is community and related non-profit charities. (Although charity just papers over a deep issue in our society about "human rights" in an age of 21st century technology.) So is good government. So is individual effort.
But in a capitalist consumer-oriented society it all comes to naught if you have no capital for whatever reasons and there are no jobs for you and the charities are exhausted. Your entire extended family can then be out of work and starving. Already the US food banks are overwhelmed. Food stamps you might say. But then why not a basic income instead for all, to be fairer?
Crank up unemployment further and stuff will really start to collapse. Much of the current collapse is in the USA us now so common as to not be newsworthy anymore, where decaying infrastructure or domestic violence or rising abortions or poor child nutrition or deferred medical care and so on. So, those in the USA who don't find a way to survive just die, either right away, or through some downward spiral of self-medication via drugs or via bad nutrition and disease, and that is hardly newsworthy. (Not to say the wealthy in the USA don't eat poorly too often.) And in any case, it does not account for all the needless suffering in a land overflowing with food and material goods... Why worry about trying to get everyone to be materially productive when there is so much? And also when the other sectors of our society like the voluntary gift economy or democratically planned economy or even local subsistence skills are let wither through lack of time to engage in those areas?
A basic income replaces a social safety net for the destitute or disabled with a human right for all to draw a small amount regularly from the productive commons. Then we don't have to have any needs based programs on things like minimum wage or SSI. It could also replace public schooling and so on with a free market for education. Already in the USA, the government (at all levels) spend an average of about US$600 a month per citizen between public schooling, health programs, and social security. Why not increase that a bit
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm "The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of corporations. It's true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It's dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on."
See also: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professionalâ(TM)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."
How could it be different? Seriously, as a question, can people suggest alternatives? I've suggested some things elsewhere in terms of rethinking security and in my sig. How can things be different while still preserving current security?
The argument that this surveillance apparatus may fall into the hands of "bad people" is still (mostly) an argument about the future, so it has less weight if people can't see how to feel reasonably secure now. I'd like to see a lot more playing around with ideas about potential alternatives to keep the USA secure and healthy in the face of the fact that technology allows individuals and small groups to do ever more damage to the whole.... From a 2007 slashdot post by an AC: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=261555&cid=20127487 "Ben Bova, a major science fiction writer, has a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox that startw with one of the side-effects of general technological advancement: The average person (of any intelligent species) acquires more and more power to do things. Well, on Earth it is well known that not all persons are emotionally stable, even as adults. Why should an assumption of stability be made for other worlds? Remember that if there is a technological cure for insanity, it is beyond our current technology, and it is
Think of Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses getting door after door slammed in their face, or getting laughed at, or challenged. Is that really likely to make them leave their tight knit social circle related to their professed faith? Look what happens to them when they do, by analogy with this Christian missionary who lost his job and family after being deconverted by the tribe he went to "help": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Don.27t_Sleep.2C_There_Are_Snakes:_Life_and_Language_in_the_Amazonian_Jungle "Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, his belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 90s;[9] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[10]"
I kind of cringed reading that back and forth on the blog with the recruiters the same way I do when watching a "Yes Men" action. Such narrow challenges rarely address the fundamental deep issues, like I tried to do here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
Or here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all."
relates to your point; from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement --- Selective enforcement is the ability that executors of the law (such as police officers or administrative agencies, in some cases) have to arbitrarily select choice individuals as being outside of the law. The use of enforcement discretion in an arbitrary way is referred to as selective enforcement or selective prosecution.
Historically, selective enforcement is recognized as a sign of tyranny, and an abuse of power, because it violates rule of law, allowing men to apply justice only when they choose.[citation needed] Aside from this being inherently unjust, it almost inevitably must lead to favoritism and extortion, with those empowered to choose being able to help their friends, take bribes, and threaten those from whom they desire favors.
However, the converse can also be true. Police officer discretion is sometimes warranted for minor offenses,[citation needed] for instance where a warning to a teenager could be quite effective without putting the teen through a legal process and also reduces costs of governmental legal resources. Another example is patrol officers parked on the side of a highway for speed enforcement. It may be impractical and cost prohibitive to ticket everyone who is going any amount over the speed limit, so the officer should watch for the more egregious cases and those drivers who are showing signs of driving recklessly.
Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886),[1] was the first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms "The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values: "As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone." In the second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy, which includes economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of "adequate health care". The first two freedoms of speech and religion are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and anticipated what would become known decades later as the "human security" paradigm in social science and economic development. He also included the "freedom from fear" against national aggression before the idea of a United Nations for this protection was envisioned or discussed by world leaders and allied nations."
Anyway, in theory, the point of constitutions and governments is to define and enforce rights in a society. Enforcing rights includes arbitrating between people with conflicting notions of boundaries, as in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". Such rights allow increased trust in a society, which reduces operating costs, as otherwise all your time and energy may need to go into protecting yourself against your neighbor, and that society will sicken and die relative to other societies with greater internal trust. If the USA continues to descend into distrustful paranoia, security costs go up, and the society begins to seize up.
Look up information about "Social Credit" and C. H. Douglas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization."
See also: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people’s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when suffi
The deregulation of children's media during the early 1980s (Reagan administration) led to an alliance of media companies and toy companies and other companies (like food companies); the result of this is an immersion for many children in an interlinked experience of seeing media about violence, purchasing related action figures and toys and video games, and having these items promoted every place they go (whether to buy fast-food or just in other kid's homes). This is a big change from the media environment from the 1960s and 1970s that many of today's parents grew up in.
The authors point out that the behaviors promoted by this alliance tend to be very sex-role stereotypical, as in boys need to be fighters and girls need to be princesses. For many children, the authors suggest they can get locked into a pattern of endless cycling through stereotyped behaviors. While it is true that knights and princesses have long been important parts of many children's play (so this is not intended to dismiss that), what has changed for some children is the tone and extremeness of those experience because of the high degree of continual interrelated media/toy/game/food saturation. Rather than children being able to express themselves building on those knight/princess themes in their own unique ways, because of the integrated marketing, for many children there becomes only one way to be a knight or a princess (as defined by some media and accompanying purchased toys to be used in only very precise and narrow ways). The book focuses mainly on the boy part of this equation. One of the authors has writings on the female stereotyping aspect of media and other issues, described here: http://www.dianeelevin.com/writing.html
The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.
They suggest younger kids have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and when children are getting hurt, they suggest pointing out to the children what is obvious to any adult, that some other child is just pretending to be a "bad guy" and they are not really a "bad guy". (It can also helps to try to break out of the bad guy / good guy mindset entirely, to talk about "bad actions" instead of "bad people".)
There are a variety of things one can say and do for children who have gotten locked into a repetitive cycle of war play. They give examples of questions to ask to try to help children broaden their behavioral options in regard to war play. These range from asking how the weapons are supposed to work, asking what if the weapon did some other thing (like sprayed foam instead of bullets), to asking what the "bad guy" does when he is not fighting.
Vitamin D deficiency related to depression can be a downward spiral if people then spend more and more time indoors, like in Japan. See my many posts on halth issues and autism including about Mark Hyman and mitochondrial dysfunction and John Cannell. Also look into unschooling for interest-lead learning.
Search also on "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addiction" for the pitfalls of 21st century living.
And, from a positive psychology point of view, try to help him build on his strengths, whatever those are.
Politically, lobby for a "basic income" for all. The fact is, most of us will soon be "unemployable" relative to AI, robotics, and other automation (see Marshall Brain), breaking the income-through jobs link that previously undergird the right to consume.
Sounds like a tough situation though. Good luck. Your son is lucky to have a caring involved father like you!
The citation is the WIkipedia article on zero-point energy I already posted. An examples from it: "In quantum field theory, the fabric of space is visualized as consisting of fields, with the field at every point in space and time being a quantum harmonic oscillator, with neighboring oscillators interacting. In this case, one has a contribution of from every point in space, resulting in a calculation of infinite zero-point energy in any finite volume; this is one reason renormalization is needed to make sense of quantum field theories."
See James P. Hogan's 'Voyage from Yesteryear" sci-fi novel for an example of the social effects of such a scientific observation on optimism about the future vs. today's pessimism about "running out of whale oil" or whatever the fashionable energy source is these days. http://www.science20.com/science_amp_supermodels/have_we_reached_peak_whale_oil-7699 "My main concern is that my calculations show we are approaching peak whale oil and no one seems to be listening. Inspect my numbers below. If my estimations are correct we have surpassed a population of 24,000,000 persons, far more than the estimates of 17.000,000 from the last census. There simply are not enough whales to..."
To go beyond what we can do with today's technology, quantum physics tells us that there is potentially an infinite amount of matter and energy in any finite volume of space. And visible space is vast (14 billion light years cubed, at least). There may be things that will still be fought over, but they are probably different things than access to matter and energy (aesthetics about hat colors?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Red_Dwarf) "The race eventually splits and descends into civil war, over what colour the hats at the hot dog and doughnut stand Lister planned to open on Fiji were going to be (in the later-published novelization "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" the cause of the cat civil war is whether their god was named Cloister or Clister). Ironically the two factions claimed they were going to be red or blue, whilst Lister had wanted them to be green."
Besides, methane breathers might find Earth fairly inhospitable, preferring, say, Saturn's moon Titan? And machine intelligence might prefer the Oort cloud for ready access to materials in zero gravity?
I can't disagree with your insightful point. However, so what? A lot of these trends are just happening via current social dynamics, so they are not directly something one person does. As I wrote here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 "To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality."
My comments in a way are just hopefully to ease the transition and prevent some needless suffering. And people or cultures can and do change for a variety of reasons. More by me on that theme: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. "
Lets say the NSA and CIA do not make this leap, and neither does the USA. Then the USA will likely eventually become a backwater compared to those countries or groups who do. Granted, it will be a backwater still armed with nuclear, bio, chemical, neuro, and other WMDs that can threaten a tantrum of global destruction if it does not get its way...
So what? It's true JP Hogan pushed he envelope on some things, but that does not make his other observations incorrect. Go look at some of the stuff someone like Isaac Newton wrote, where we just remember and honor what he was right about.
JP Hogan liked to support the underdog against the establishment, to ask for a fari hearing for ideas that he felt were unfairly dismissed as heretical. Sometimes the heretic ends up being right, sometimes they are indeed wrong. His concern was more about critical thinking and working from the evidence, as he makes clear in various novels, including his first.
Besides, if the universe is a computer simulation, it may well have been designed, and may well have been started recently (including from a backup) -- and I say that as someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution. http://www.simulation-argument.com/
See Marshall Brain's Manna for an example about "free": http://marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm ---- "It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, he believed that every human being should get an equal share of all of these free products that the robots are producing. He took the American phrase 'all men are created equal' quite literally." -----
A "basic income" (social security for all from birth) would be a way to do something in the "Manna" direction right away in the USA, where say, half the GDP would be distributed evenly among residents and half would be earned by those who chose to work.
By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ ---- The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy. ----
Can't say it has got very far in the past fourteen years or longer (including early incarnations like "STELLA") though. But at least the Maker movement is heading in that direction, even without the comprehensive organization or standards.
when all other funding was going to AI, Licklider also funded human-machine interaction via Doug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider "He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed", for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age. Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, noted that ""most of the significant advances in computer technology -- including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC -- were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all."[2]... Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. In 1960 his seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute and created the famous On-Line System where the computer mouse was invented."
But there were others even before that, from Norbert Weiner to Vannevar Bush to Theodore Sturgeon and others. Doug's life was a link in a chain that stretches back to the first idea of a "standing bear" cave painting made by the "Walking People" thousands of years ago to instruct the young. http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Walking_People.html?id=-kTrc1oSkycC
Just like our lives now are links in a chain the hopefully stretches out to new future possibilities.
But that is not to take away from the importance of what Doug did with his life. Otherwise maybe we'd have only AI and not human-machine symbiosis?
Re:Slashdot really messed up and could apologize
on
Doug Engelbart Passes Away
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Or is it about fourteen years I've been reading slashdot now that I think about it? Since around 1998-1999?
But one other point -- for anyone reading slashdot for so long, there is less and less that is new. And you know more and more other news sources, so stuff on slashdot is more often stuff you've seen before. So, it might seem less interesting, but to others, it may still be fascinating.
For example, I'm not a systems administrator except for my own equipment and projects, and I don't follow those trends that closely in other ways, but it seems like many hang out here, and I am still learning a lot about such stuff in various discussions that is close to cutting edge. It might be possible that there are less programmers overall though, as stuff like StackOverflow occupies a lot of programmer attention these days (but without the meta level discussions or tangential discussions possible on slashdot)?
I don't think I've looked up Slashdot on Wikipedia before, but from there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot "As of 2006, Slashdot had approximately 5.5 million users per month. As of January 2013, the site's Alexa rank is 2,000, with the average user spending 3 minutes and 18 seconds per day on the site and 82,665 sites linking in.[1] The primary stories on the site consist of a short synopsis paragraph, a link to the original story, and a lengthy discussion section, all contributed by users. Discussion on stories can get up to 10,000 posts per day. Slashdot has been considered a pioneer in user-driven content, influencing other sites such as Google News and Wikipedia.[65][66] However, there has been a dip in readership as of 2011, primarily due to the increase of technology-related blogs and Twitter feeds.[67]"
In a way, there may be some parallels to Doug Engelbart's life. He pioneered (with others) some amazing things, and then others took them and ran with them in different directions, and he began to be slowly forgotten. As an analogy, when you wake up in the middle of the night and turn on a lightbulb, it can seem glaringly bright, but then when the sun comes up, you may not even notice it is still on. Slashdot contributed in a variety of ways to the dawn of the web by supporting all the people who made it happen.
Ultimately though, I feel the answer may not be so much as to find better sites (and I still think it is hard to compare with slashdot), as to reinvent knowledge sharing such as with a social semantic desktop.
Yes, I agree not having a main article on Doug's death is saddening and disrespectful to Doug Engelbart's legacy -- or at least an indication of increasing cluelessness or lack of historic awareness among the slashdot editors. Slashdot still has its moments though, but I agree, having been reading slashdot for ten or so years (I would have had a lower user ID except I did not post for a long time), it has changed.
Yes, it is amazing how quickly the next generation or two can forget (or never learn) history. It is a constant struggle to keep the best of the past alive in our collective memories. And I say that not just as a trustee of a historical society. How many people who read slashdot have read "As We May Think" about a hypothetical "Memex" by Vannevar Bush that helped inspire Doug Engelbart's work, or "The Skills Of Xanadu" that helped inspire Ted Nelson's own work on hypertext that contributed to the World Wide Web among other things including research in nanotechnology? One of the things Doug made possible was potentially improving our collective memory, but it is hard to avoid getting weighed down in trivia.
It was one of the best on-line experiences I've had overall.
I feel Doug's story shows why our conventional means of funding computer research via companies and grants and such are flawed. Here is the inventor of the mouse and a variety of amazing things, a very nice guy personally, and he had lots of difficulty getting funding in later years to continue innovative work. If he couldn't funding to do work on computers to make the world a better place, better able to deal with pressing problems, than who can? So, that suggests a need for a basic income, a gift economy, or some other economic approach, so individuals who want to do such work will have the time to do it, regardless of a previous track record.
You make interesting points, AC. The reason my wife originally chose Google App engine originally (chosen in 2008, when Google has a better reputation) was to make something any community could use for free, and because my wife was comfortable with Python. It is open source, and the code coudl be ported, or the ideas reimplemented. See: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html "In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."
I had suggested using the Pointrel system I was working on, but Google was the bright big-name shiny thing, and I could not guarantee my experimental stuff was production ready. Neither could Google though for App Engine, apparently, at least back then.
She now thinks that App Engine approach was a mistake for several reasons, including that, say, a Drupal add-on would have been a better approach (as much as PHP is a crummy language).
Later work by me toward Rakontu 2.0 has been in other directions, including code you can run locally or on some server of your choice (like with the GitHub stuff). But we ran out of money funding it ourselves, so now I do unrelated stuff, but at least Cynthia still works towards finishing her free book on how communities can collect and organize their own stories in a variety of ways, available as a work-in-progress here http://www.workingwithstories.org/
Still, if you want to be concerned about privacy, and you assume the NSA monitors all internet traffic, then it really does not matter who hosts your content if you access it through the internet.
But even that is not really secure, since any collection of information can be compromised by an informant. So, ultimately, finding an innovative way to work within the system is still probably a safer bet.
This social transition may well all be over in twenty years with the pace of technological and social advancement -- in the sense of our employment-based economy imploding from advanced automation like AI-powered robotics, various group spreading Vinge-like (Deepness in the Sky) networked "smart dust" around the world (probably developed ironically by the NSA or CIA) some of which probably makes it into the NSA and CIA headquarters and all government offices by random chance (making Wikileaks and Snowden revelations seem tame by comparison), and tons of other trends.
Who knows for sure how it will all end? We can just do our best from a hopefully moral-enough strategic foundation and keep updating our tactics as we get new information or the world changes around us as it constantly does. But what that moral foundation should be for the 21st century might make for a good exploratory Slashdot discussion (my sig being a nod in that direction).
Why would you need money to trade for most things if you had a Star Trek replicator that could print out Mr. Fusion devices or solar panels or robot miners? Why would you need money to trade for software if, like with Debian GNU/Linux, production was planned by exchange of emails and IRC messages? Or why would you need money in a Native American Potlach gift economy?
By the way, on the intentional destruction of Potlach in America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch "At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the redistribution and reciprocity of wealth.... Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies....
Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[8] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to civilized values.[9]
The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized."[10] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."
But if we do use money, then a "basic income" is a way to make the system work better, given every human's moral claim on the fruits of the commons they are otherwise usually excluded from in various legal ways.
One other meme on this: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319 "As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Or look to groups like the Maker community or sustainable technology community inventing new ways of local subsistence.
Something I wrote thirteen years ago to Doug Engelbart's Unrev-II mailing list, and we are still more-or-less following predicted exponential trends: "[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html "Below are six "explosive" technology trends that all appear to culminate in around twenty years. Even if some of them don't pan out, the others will revolutionize our world (for good or bad)....
You may argue the dates -- ten years for some, forty for others. You may point out Y2K didn't melt things down, that AI researchers predicted AIs by now, that fusion power was supposed to be here by now, etc. And you would be right to be skeptical. My point is that these are trends in many different areas -- any one of which would make this world radically different. Together, they spell awesome change -- in economics, politics, lifestyle, relationships, and values.
It is quite likely we are heading for a singularity in
I agree with our points as far as they go, and your effort is something to be proud of, but here are some other things to consider which others have raised, plus my own spin.
Most schools do not have the IT staff needed to run secure networks. Neither do many big companies, judging by news reports of various cyber breakins that show up on slashdot regularly. It is not easy to keep on top of every emerging threat from outside or inside. So from a liability perspective, on might argue the school is safer with Google Apps.
Trying to run a local system well also may cost schools a lot of money that will then not go to other educational purposes.
Even when school networks are secure, they can be misused by school staff, such as in the articles a year or so back about a school using laptop webcams to spy on students. Of course, a Google Apps administrator can also read all email under the domain for any account.
I guess maybe the biggest issue is that, as John Taylor Gatto says, "Schooling is a form of adoption": http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html "Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree....".
Why did you let your daughter be thus adopted, and pay $30K a year for the privilege?
Also, sure, some paper could be used against her in a political career. But there is always something. And if it is not findable, people could just make it up. And everyone makes mistakes. So, yes, it could be an issue, but how big an issue may depend itself on power issues. Sometimes trying to dig up this stuff backfires, too. Remember, Hilary Clinton herself used to be a conservative. Did it really hurt her political future with democrats? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#Wellesley_College_years "In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.[16] During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans;[17][18] with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group,[19] she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke.[20] She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.[17]'"
Tthe NSA and who knows who else apparently snoops on everything. An (older) kid probably has a facebook profile or other online presence. So, in that regard, focusing on internet privacy in schools may be focusing on the less important issue, even if your points may be 100% valid as far as they go.
If you want freedom for your kid long term, you could advocate for stuff like a basic income to level the social playing field instead of compulsory schooling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link and more history. I'll have to check out the PowerPoint file when not on a ChromeBook (just trying to test out a possible future of computing). One of the best academic course I ever took was with Michael Mahoney related to the history of technology, although that was just before he was getting into the history of computing.
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/computing.html
I implemented a software version of Memex, mentioned here in 2005:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156379&cid=13111905
Memex seems like the first version of a "Social Semantic Desktop"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop
I've worked towards that on-and-off as time permits with my Pointrel system. I see you have a long list of related publications on technology and society it would be interesting to read through.
I don't know if he is connected to any of them, but William C. Norris who championed "PLATO" for computer-based education is another great example in that area of people trying to make computer innovations to help humanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris_(CEO)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_system
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) [1][2] was the first (ca. 1960, on ILLIAC I) generalized computer assisted instruction system, and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Originally, PLATO was built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary -- university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Several descendant systems still operate.
The PLATO project was assumed by the Control Data Corporation (CDC), who built the machines with which PLATO operated at the University. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world; the last production PLATO system was shut down in 2006 (coincidentally, just a month after Norris died), yet it established key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games."
Alan Kay and his colleagues working on Smalltalk are yet another, somewhat as a follow on to Doug's work.
I just watched the 1950s movie "The Invisible Boy" (with Robbie the Robot") and it is interesting how it presaged so much later thinking on dangerous out-of-control AI. Human-machine symbiosis may have its own issues, but still seems more hopefull somehow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Boy
Still, I got that with the 1950s "Forbidden Planet", and I guess that shows the dark side of human-machine symbiosis, :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet
Technology is an amplifier. So what do we want it to amplify?
Soft humanities things like morality and aesthetics and stories we tell ourselves to make a mythology become very important in that context.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/06/26/023212/why-engineering-freshmen-should-take-humanities-courses
The 1950s story The Skills of Xanadu by Theodore Sturgeon is the most hopeful in that sense. It would be great to know whether Sturgeon was thinking about Weiner's or Bush's writings?
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=
First, what people get paid often has very little connection with productivity. On top of that, it may even dis-incentivize them -- see Dan Pink on that. So, the assumptions implicit in your post are problematical.
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Also, never before have we been automating intelligence to such a degree. The US GDP in the first decade of the 21st century grew by about 33% without adding any net new jobs, even as the population grew. That is the new reality that you and many mainstream economists are ignoring. Paul Krugman is starting to get itt, as discussed here:
"Sympathy for the Luddites"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5882422
Agriculture went from 90% of workers to 2% over 200 years. Manufacturing went from 35% to 15% or so over the past 50 years and continue to drop. Working hours per person have also dropped over that time, especially for children who used to be a big part of the labor force. Why should "services" not go the same way via AI and other automation and better design? Why employ a human if you don't have to?
Based on what you write, wouldn't you automate anything the first chance you get to maximize your profits? If everyone does that, who are your customers? Well, when there is 90% unemployment (possible in 20 years or so as AI really proliferates?), it may be too late to do anything about it, so it will mean little if you say "oops"... See also Martin Ford's book, "The Lights in the Tunnel".
http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/
Anyway, you're assuming that we need most people to work to make the stuff we need. We don't. See Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work" for example.
Yes, family is important. But so is community and related non-profit charities. (Although charity just papers over a deep issue in our society about "human rights" in an age of 21st century technology.) So is good government. So is individual effort.
But in a capitalist consumer-oriented society it all comes to naught if you have no capital for whatever reasons and there are no jobs for you and the charities are exhausted. Your entire extended family can then be out of work and starving. Already the US food banks are overwhelmed. Food stamps you might say. But then why not a basic income instead for all, to be fairer?
Crank up unemployment further and stuff will really start to collapse. Much of the current collapse is in the USA us now so common as to not be newsworthy anymore, where decaying infrastructure or domestic violence or rising abortions or poor child nutrition or deferred medical care and so on. So, those in the USA who don't find a way to survive just die, either right away, or through some downward spiral of self-medication via drugs or via bad nutrition and disease, and that is hardly newsworthy. (Not to say the wealthy in the USA don't eat poorly too often.) And in any case, it does not account for all the needless suffering in a land overflowing with food and material goods... Why worry about trying to get everyone to be materially productive when there is so much? And also when the other sectors of our society like the voluntary gift economy or democratically planned economy or even local subsistence skills are let wither through lack of time to engage in those areas?
A basic income replaces a social safety net for the destitute or disabled with a human right for all to draw a small amount regularly from the productive commons. Then we don't have to have any needs based programs on things like minimum wage or SSI. It could also replace public schooling and so on with a free market for education. Already in the USA, the government (at all levels) spend an average of about US$600 a month per citizen between public schooling, health programs, and social security. Why not increase that a bit
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of corporations. It's true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It's dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on."
See also: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professionalâ(TM)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."
And in recent history in relation to the run up to the Iraq war: http://fair.org/press-release/some-critical-media-voices-face-censorship/
How could it be different? Seriously, as a question, can people suggest alternatives? I've suggested some things elsewhere in terms of rethinking security and in my sig. How can things be different while still preserving current security?
The argument that this surveillance apparatus may fall into the hands of "bad people" is still (mostly) an argument about the future, so it has less weight if people can't see how to feel reasonably secure now. I'd like to see a lot more playing around with ideas about potential alternatives to keep the USA secure and healthy in the face of the fact that technology allows individuals and small groups to do ever more damage to the whole.... From a 2007 slashdot post by an AC:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=261555&cid=20127487
"Ben Bova, a major science fiction writer, has a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox that startw with one of the side-effects of general technological advancement: The average person (of any intelligent species) acquires more and more power to do things. Well, on Earth it is well known that not all persons are emotionally stable, even as adults. Why should an assumption of stability be made for other worlds? Remember that if there is a technological cure for insanity, it is beyond our current technology, and it is
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Think of Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses getting door after door slammed in their face, or getting laughed at, or challenged. Is that really likely to make them leave their tight knit social circle related to their professed faith? Look what happens to them when they do, by analogy with this Christian missionary who lost his job and family after being deconverted by the tribe he went to "help":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3q6Cid1po
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett#Don.27t_Sleep.2C_There_Are_Snakes:_Life_and_Language_in_the_Amazonian_Jungle
"Influenced by the Pirahã's concept of truth, his belief in Christianity slowly diminished and he became an atheist. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost all faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 90s;[9] when he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and two of his three children broke off all contact. However, by 2008 full contact and relations have been restored with his children, who now seem to accept his viewpoint on theism.[10]"
90% of jobs are probably either useless of harmful these days. There are not enough for everyone as long as people need jobs to get income to survive, absent deeper changes:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
I kind of cringed reading that back and forth on the blog with the recruiters the same way I do when watching a "Yes Men" action. Such narrow challenges rarely address the fundamental deep issues, like I tried to do here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
Or here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all."
There were some easy answers th
relates to your point; from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement
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Selective enforcement is the ability that executors of the law (such as police officers or administrative agencies, in some cases) have to arbitrarily select choice individuals as being outside of the law. The use of enforcement discretion in an arbitrary way is referred to as selective enforcement or selective prosecution.
Historically, selective enforcement is recognized as a sign of tyranny, and an abuse of power, because it violates rule of law, allowing men to apply justice only when they choose.[citation needed] Aside from this being inherently unjust, it almost inevitably must lead to favoritism and extortion, with those empowered to choose being able to help their friends, take bribes, and threaten those from whom they desire favors.
However, the converse can also be true. Police officer discretion is sometimes warranted for minor offenses,[citation needed] for instance where a warning to a teenager could be quite effective without putting the teen through a legal process and also reduces costs of governmental legal resources. Another example is patrol officers parked on the side of a highway for speed enforcement. It may be impractical and cost prohibitive to ticket everyone who is going any amount over the speed limit, so the officer should watch for the more egregious cases and those drivers who are showing signs of driving recklessly.
Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886),[1] was the first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
"The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values: "As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone." In the second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy, which includes economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of "adequate health care". The first two freedoms of speech and religion are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and anticipated what would become known decades later as the "human security" paradigm in social science and economic development. He also included the "freedom from fear" against national aggression before the idea of a United Nations for this protection was envisioned or discussed by world leaders and allied nations."
Anyway, in theory, the point of constitutions and governments is to define and enforce rights in a society. Enforcing rights includes arbitrating between people with conflicting notions of boundaries, as in, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". Such rights allow increased trust in a society, which reduces operating costs, as otherwise all your time and energy may need to go into protecting yourself against your neighbor, and that society will sicken and die relative to other societies with greater internal trust. If the USA continues to descend into distrustful paranoia, security costs go up, and the society begins to seize up.
Look up information about "Social Credit" and C. H. Douglas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization."
See also: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people’s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when suffi
From my review: http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
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A few key ideas from the book:
The deregulation of children's media during the early 1980s (Reagan administration) led to an alliance of media companies and toy companies and other companies (like food companies); the result of this is an immersion for many children in an interlinked experience of seeing media about violence, purchasing related action figures and toys and video games, and having these items promoted every place they go (whether to buy fast-food or just in other kid's homes). This is a big change from the media environment from the 1960s and 1970s that many of today's parents grew up in.
The authors point out that the behaviors promoted by this alliance tend to be very sex-role stereotypical, as in boys need to be fighters and girls need to be princesses. For many children, the authors suggest they can get locked into a pattern of endless cycling through stereotyped behaviors. While it is true that knights and princesses have long been important parts of many children's play (so this is not intended to dismiss that), what has changed for some children is the tone and extremeness of those experience because of the high degree of continual interrelated media/toy/game/food saturation. Rather than children being able to express themselves building on those knight/princess themes in their own unique ways, because of the integrated marketing, for many children there becomes only one way to be a knight or a princess (as defined by some media and accompanying purchased toys to be used in only very precise and narrow ways). The book focuses mainly on the boy part of this equation. One of the authors has writings on the female stereotyping aspect of media and other issues, described here:
http://www.dianeelevin.com/writing.html
The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.
They suggest younger kids have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and when children are getting hurt, they suggest pointing out to the children what is obvious to any adult, that some other child is just pretending to be a "bad guy" and they are not really a "bad guy". (It can also helps to try to break out of the bad guy / good guy mindset entirely, to talk about "bad actions" instead of "bad people".)
There are a variety of things one can say and do for children who have gotten locked into a repetitive cycle of war play. They give examples of questions to ask to try to help children broaden their behavioral options in regard to war play. These range from asking how the weapons are supposed to work, asking what if the weapon did some other thing (like sprayed foam instead of bullets), to asking what the "bad guy" does when he is not fighting.
Vitamin D deficiency related to depression can be a downward spiral if people then spend more and more time indoors, like in Japan. See my many posts on halth issues and autism including about Mark Hyman and mitochondrial dysfunction and John Cannell. Also look into unschooling for interest-lead learning.
Search also on "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addiction" for the pitfalls of 21st century living.
And, from a positive psychology point of view, try to help him build on his strengths, whatever those are.
Politically, lobby for a "basic income" for all. The fact is, most of us will soon be "unemployable" relative to AI, robotics, and other automation (see Marshall Brain), breaking the income-through jobs link that previously undergird the right to consume.
Sounds like a tough situation though. Good luck. Your son is lucky to have a caring involved father like you!
The citation is the WIkipedia article on zero-point energy I already posted. An examples from it: "In quantum field theory, the fabric of space is visualized as consisting of fields, with the field at every point in space and time being a quantum harmonic oscillator, with neighboring oscillators interacting. In this case, one has a contribution of from every point in space, resulting in a calculation of infinite zero-point energy in any finite volume; this is one reason renormalization is needed to make sense of quantum field theories."
See James P. Hogan's 'Voyage from Yesteryear" sci-fi novel for an example of the social effects of such a scientific observation on optimism about the future vs. today's pessimism about "running out of whale oil" or whatever the fashionable energy source is these days. ..."
http://www.science20.com/science_amp_supermodels/have_we_reached_peak_whale_oil-7699
"My main concern is that my calculations show we are approaching peak whale oil and no one seems to be listening. Inspect my numbers below. If my estimations are correct we have surpassed a population of 24,000,000 persons, far more than the estimates of 17.000,000 from the last census. There simply are not enough whales to
See this 2007 discussion form more on this: http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/05/1450217/the-fermi-paradox-is-back
Really, who wold want to live in a gravity well if they don't have to?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
http://space.mike-combs.com/l5-fcis.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
To go beyond what we can do with today's technology, quantum physics tells us that there is potentially an infinite amount of matter and energy in any finite volume of space. And visible space is vast (14 billion light years cubed, at least). There may be things that will still be fought over, but they are probably different things than access to matter and energy (aesthetics about hat colors?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy#Utilization_Controversy
"As a scientific concept, the existence of zero-point energy is not controversial although the ability to harness it is."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Red_Dwarf)
"The race eventually splits and descends into civil war, over what colour the hats at the hot dog and doughnut stand Lister planned to open on Fiji were going to be (in the later-published novelization "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" the cause of the cat civil war is whether their god was named Cloister or Clister). Ironically the two factions claimed they were going to be red or blue, whilst Lister had wanted them to be green."
Besides, methane breathers might find Earth fairly inhospitable, preferring, say, Saturn's moon Titan? And machine intelligence might prefer the Oort cloud for ready access to materials in zero gravity?
I can't disagree with your insightful point. However, so what? A lot of these trends are just happening via current social dynamics, so they are not directly something one person does. As I wrote here:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality."
My comments in a way are just hopefully to ease the transition and prevent some needless suffering. And people or cultures can and do change for a variety of reasons. More by me on that theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. "
Lets say the NSA and CIA do not make this leap, and neither does the USA. Then the USA will likely eventually become a backwater compared to those countries or groups who do. Granted, it will be a backwater still armed with nuclear, bio, chemical, neuro, and other WMDs that can threaten a tantrum of global destruction if it does not get its way...
So what? It's true JP Hogan pushed he envelope on some things, but that does not make his other observations incorrect. Go look at some of the stuff someone like Isaac Newton wrote, where we just remember and honor what he was right about.
JP Hogan liked to support the underdog against the establishment, to ask for a fari hearing for ideas that he felt were unfairly dismissed as heretical. Sometimes the heretic ends up being right, sometimes they are indeed wrong. His concern was more about critical thinking and working from the evidence, as he makes clear in various novels, including his first.
Besides, if the universe is a computer simulation, it may well have been designed, and may well have been started recently (including from a backup) -- and I say that as someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
See Marshall Brain's Manna for an example about "free":
http://marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
----
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, he believed that every human being should get an equal share of all of these free products that the robots are producing. He took the American phrase 'all men are created equal' quite literally."
-----
Attempts I've made (not very successfully) to help bring something like that about include:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
A "basic income" (social security for all from birth) would be a way to do something in the "Manna" direction right away in the USA, where say, half the GDP would be distributed evenly among residents and half would be earned by those who chose to work.
Mentions Doug: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Some criticism of that: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/05/23/gladwell-on-innovation-truths-confusions-part-1/
By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
----
The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy.
----
Can't say it has got very far in the past fourteen years or longer (including early incarnations like "STELLA") though. But at least the Maker movement is heading in that direction, even without the comprehensive organization or standards.
when all other funding was going to AI, Licklider also funded human-machine interaction via Doug. ... Licklider was instrumental in conceiving, funding and managing the research that led to modern personal computers and the Internet. In 1960 his seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute and created the famous On-Line System where the computer mouse was invented."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider
"He has been called "computing's Johnny Appleseed", for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age. Robert Taylor, founder of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory and Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, noted that ""most of the significant advances in computer technology -- including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC -- were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all."[2]
But there were others even before that, from Norbert Weiner to Vannevar Bush to Theodore Sturgeon and others. Doug's life was a link in a chain that stretches back to the first idea of a "standing bear" cave painting made by the "Walking People" thousands of years ago to instruct the young.
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Walking_People.html?id=-kTrc1oSkycC
Just like our lives now are links in a chain the hopefully stretches out to new future possibilities.
But that is not to take away from the importance of what Doug did with his life. Otherwise maybe we'd have only AI and not human-machine symbiosis?
See my other comment here: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3934063&cid=44184771
Or is it about fourteen years I've been reading slashdot now that I think about it? Since around 1998-1999?
But one other point -- for anyone reading slashdot for so long, there is less and less that is new. And you know more and more other news sources, so stuff on slashdot is more often stuff you've seen before. So, it might seem less interesting, but to others, it may still be fascinating.
For example, I'm not a systems administrator except for my own equipment and projects, and I don't follow those trends that closely in other ways, but it seems like many hang out here, and I am still learning a lot about such stuff in various discussions that is close to cutting edge. It might be possible that there are less programmers overall though, as stuff like StackOverflow occupies a lot of programmer attention these days (but without the meta level discussions or tangential discussions possible on slashdot)?
I don't think I've looked up Slashdot on Wikipedia before, but from there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
"As of 2006, Slashdot had approximately 5.5 million users per month. As of January 2013, the site's Alexa rank is 2,000, with the average user spending 3 minutes and 18 seconds per day on the site and 82,665 sites linking in.[1] The primary stories on the site consist of a short synopsis paragraph, a link to the original story, and a lengthy discussion section, all contributed by users. Discussion on stories can get up to 10,000 posts per day. Slashdot has been considered a pioneer in user-driven content, influencing other sites such as Google News and Wikipedia.[65][66] However, there has been a dip in readership as of 2011, primarily due to the increase of technology-related blogs and Twitter feeds.[67]"
In a way, there may be some parallels to Doug Engelbart's life. He pioneered (with others) some amazing things, and then others took them and ran with them in different directions, and he began to be slowly forgotten. As an analogy, when you wake up in the middle of the night and turn on a lightbulb, it can seem glaringly bright, but then when the sun comes up, you may not even notice it is still on. Slashdot contributed in a variety of ways to the dawn of the web by supporting all the people who made it happen.
Ultimately though, I feel the answer may not be so much as to find better sites (and I still think it is hard to compare with slashdot), as to reinvent knowledge sharing such as with a social semantic desktop.
Yes, I agree not having a main article on Doug's death is saddening and disrespectful to Doug Engelbart's legacy -- or at least an indication of increasing cluelessness or lack of historic awareness among the slashdot editors. Slashdot still has its moments though, but I agree, having been reading slashdot for ten or so years (I would have had a lower user ID except I did not post for a long time), it has changed.
Of course, people have been saying slashdot is dying since 2005 or maybe earlier, and Apple has been "dying" for decades, so, who knows what the future has in store? Contrast:
http://agilepartners.com/blog/2005/12/20/is-slashdot-dying/
with:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexbarn/archive/2006/01/12/512238.aspx
Yes, it is amazing how quickly the next generation or two can forget (or never learn) history. It is a constant struggle to keep the best of the past alive in our collective memories. And I say that not just as a trustee of a historical society. How many people who read slashdot have read "As We May Think" about a hypothetical "Memex" by Vannevar Bush that helped inspire Doug Engelbart's work, or "The Skills Of Xanadu" that helped inspire Ted Nelson's own work on hypertext that contributed to the World Wide Web among other things including research in nanotechnology? One of the things Doug made possible was potentially improving our collective memory, but it is hard to avoid getting weighed down in trivia.
I participated in Doug's Unfinished Revolution II colloquium (Unrev-II) run as ten sessions through Stanford and then the mailing list continued related discussions for a couple more years.
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/ba-unrev-talk/index.html
It was one of the best on-line experiences I've had overall.
I feel Doug's story shows why our conventional means of funding computer research via companies and grants and such are flawed. Here is the inventor of the mouse and a variety of amazing things, a very nice guy personally, and he had lots of difficulty getting funding in later years to continue innovative work. If he couldn't funding to do work on computers to make the world a better place, better able to deal with pressing problems, than who can? So, that suggests a need for a basic income, a gift economy, or some other economic approach, so individuals who want to do such work will have the time to do it, regardless of a previous track record.
A few of my many posts to those email lists, covering predicting the OLPC, talking about the singularity and S-curve limitations, asking about the moral basis of our innovations, and linking poetry and knowledge management:
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0061.html
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0754.html
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/1881.html
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/2168.html
Anyway, it's a sad day. But I'm glad he got his chance to work on really cool stuff in hopes of helping humanity.
You make interesting points, AC. The reason my wife originally chose Google App engine originally (chosen in 2008, when Google has a better reputation) was to make something any community could use for free, and because my wife was comfortable with Python. It is open source, and the code coudl be ported, or the ideas reimplemented. See:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
"In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."
I had suggested using the Pointrel system I was working on, but Google was the bright big-name shiny thing, and I could not guarantee my experimental stuff was production ready. Neither could Google though for App Engine, apparently, at least back then.
She now thinks that App Engine approach was a mistake for several reasons, including that, say, a Drupal add-on would have been a better approach (as much as PHP is a crummy language).
Later work by me toward Rakontu 2.0 has been in other directions, including code you can run locally or on some server of your choice (like with the GitHub stuff). But we ran out of money funding it ourselves, so now I do unrelated stuff, but at least Cynthia still works towards finishing her free book on how communities can collect and organize their own stories in a variety of ways, available as a work-in-progress here
http://www.workingwithstories.org/
Still, if you want to be concerned about privacy, and you assume the NSA monitors all internet traffic, then it really does not matter who hosts your content if you access it through the internet.
The distributed approach I was working towards included the option to exchange info via direct exchange like on flash drives (like is happening now in Cuba).
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/03/19/2351234/cubans-evade-censorship-by-exchanging-flash-drives
But even that is not really secure, since any collection of information can be compromised by an informant. So, ultimately, finding an innovative way to work within the system is still probably a safer bet.
This social transition may well all be over in twenty years with the pace of technological and social advancement -- in the sense of our employment-based economy imploding from advanced automation like AI-powered robotics, various group spreading Vinge-like (Deepness in the Sky) networked "smart dust" around the world (probably developed ironically by the NSA or CIA) some of which probably makes it into the NSA and CIA headquarters and all government offices by random chance (making Wikileaks and Snowden revelations seem tame by comparison), and tons of other trends.
Who knows for sure how it will all end? We can just do our best from a hopefully moral-enough strategic foundation and keep updating our tactics as we get new information or the world changes around us as it constantly does. But what that moral foundation should be for the 21st century might make for a good exploratory Slashdot discussion (my sig being a nod in that direction).
By the way, something I wrote about Schmidt and Knol:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a
Why would you need money to trade for most things if you had a Star Trek replicator that could print out Mr. Fusion devices or solar panels or robot miners? Why would you need money to trade for software if, like with Debian GNU/Linux, production was planned by exchange of emails and IRC messages? Or why would you need money in a Native American Potlach gift economy?
By the way, on the intentional destruction of Potlach in America: ... Within it, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the redistribution and reciprocity of wealth.
Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act[8] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to civilized values.[9]
The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized."[10] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice."
Money may be useful in an economy based mostly on exchange. My point is that other types of economies are possible -- and indeed have even existed in the past. Examples:
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
But if we do use money, then a "basic income" is a way to make the system work better, given every human's moral claim on the fruits of the commons they are otherwise usually excluded from in various legal ways.
One other meme on this: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
"As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Some attempts by us at such FOSS tools:
http://www.rakontu.org/
https://code.google.com/p/rakontu/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20130202
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623
We've built other stuff in the past, but sadly it is proprietary. Hopefully people can go beyond all this in their own ways.
A billion dollars could see a good start on this project. :-) Or a "basic income" for all, to give coders who want to do this the time to do it.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Going forward, there are many other implications of trends from "better, faster, cheaper". We should think about the positive trends and try to help amplify them. Related suggestions by me in areas of collective intelligence for mutual intrinsic security, space settlement, and health sensemaking:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
https://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
Or, read "The Skills of Xanadu" for ideas from the 1950s by Theodore Sturgeon which helped inspire Ted Nelson and hypertext and so the world wide web:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Or look to groups like the Maker community or sustainable technology community inventing new ways of local subsistence.
Something I wrote thirteen years ago to Doug Engelbart's Unrev-II mailing list, and we are still more-or-less following predicted exponential trends: ...
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
"Below are six "explosive" technology trends that all appear to culminate in around twenty years. Even if some of them don't pan out, the others will revolutionize our world (for good or bad).
You may argue the dates -- ten years for some, forty for others. You may point out Y2K didn't melt things down, that AI researchers predicted AIs by now, that fusion power was supposed to be here by now, etc. And you would be right to be skeptical. My point is that these are trends in many different areas -- any one of which would make this world radically different. Together, they spell awesome change -- in economics, politics, lifestyle, relationships, and values.
It is quite likely we are heading for a singularity in
I agree with our points as far as they go, and your effort is something to be proud of, but here are some other things to consider which others have raised, plus my own spin.
Most schools do not have the IT staff needed to run secure networks. Neither do many big companies, judging by news reports of various cyber breakins that show up on slashdot regularly. It is not easy to keep on top of every emerging threat from outside or inside. So from a liability perspective, on might argue the school is safer with Google Apps.
Trying to run a local system well also may cost schools a lot of money that will then not go to other educational purposes.
Even when school networks are secure, they can be misused by school staff, such as in the articles a year or so back about a school using laptop webcams to spy on students. Of course, a Google Apps administrator can also read all email under the domain for any account.
I guess maybe the biggest issue is that, as John Taylor Gatto says, "Schooling is a form of adoption": ...".
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
Why did you let your daughter be thus adopted, and pay $30K a year for the privilege?
Also, sure, some paper could be used against her in a political career. But there is always something. And if it is not findable, people could just make it up. And everyone makes mistakes. So, yes, it could be an issue, but how big an issue may depend itself on power issues. Sometimes trying to dig up this stuff backfires, too. Remember, Hilary Clinton herself used to be a conservative. Did it really hurt her political future with democrats?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#Wellesley_College_years
"In 1965, Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in political science.[16] During her freshman year, she served as president of the Wellesley Young Republicans;[17][18] with this Rockefeller Republican-oriented group,[19] she supported the elections of John Lindsay and Edward Brooke.[20] She later stepped down from this position, as her views changed regarding the American Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.[17]'"
Tthe NSA and who knows who else apparently snoops on everything. An (older) kid probably has a facebook profile or other online presence. So, in that regard, focusing on internet privacy in schools may be focusing on the less important issue, even if your points may be 100% valid as far as they go.
If you want freedom for your kid long term, you could advocate for stuff like a basic income to level the social playing field instead of compulsory schooling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee