Good points. I'd add lobbying for a "basic income" and also possibly greatly expanding the House of Representaives by 10X so money is less of a factor in elections.
By the way, the link in your sig to 5ttt.org may be broken; interesting idea though: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/5ttt.org/ "Tonika is an administration-free platform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees.... A (digital) social network, which (by design) restricts direct communication to pairs of users who are friends, possesses many of the security properties (privacy, anonymity, deniability, resilience to denial-of-service attacks, etc.) that human sociaties implement organically in daily life. This is the only known decentralized network design that allows open membership while being robust against a long list of distributed network attacks. We call a digital system with such design an organic network and the security that it attains for its users -- organic security. Organic networks are extremely desirable in the current Internet climate, however they are hard to realize because they lack long-distance calling. Tonika resolves just this issue."
So many questionable assumptions in your post... If you are referring to US American history around the time of the American Revolution, quite a bit of the Colonial population fled to Canada to remain under the rule of the British Crown (as "Loyalists"). Canada got rid of slavery about 40 years sooner than the USA, never had a terrible Civil War, treat their indigenous people better, and now have universal health care. In many ways, the British were more socially advanced than the rough colonists. See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)
The major reason for the Colonies' revolt was banking policy -- that the British wanted to prevent American colonies from issuing their own currency, which caused an economic depression in the Colonies. so, a bad economy and high unemployment caused the revolt more than anything else. The reason the British wanted to do this was to collect more revenue to pay back debts incurred for the recent war with France over western territories. So, the end result was that the American colonists got the French territories without having to pay for the war that took them from France (and the natives). Both Britain and France were destabilized by such war debts, although France was worse off, leading towards the French Revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War http://www.chicagofed.org/webpages/publications/economic_perspectives/1981/ep_mar_apr1981_part4_wood.cfm http://www.kamron.com/Liberty/colonial_script.htm
On the partisan politics of this disclosure and the Verizon one. Conservatives now are blaming Obama and Progressives. Liberals blame Bush and Republicans. Congress says it has been going on for seven years, so why worry now? What a mess. Somehow I don't feel much is going to change from this revelation though, because, to anyone paying attention, it is not that unexpected. Carnivore and Echelon did similar things over a decade ago, plus they are supposedly arrangements by US agencies to exchange data with other countries that can spy on US citizens without issues.
As is suggested here, gradual changes are rarely resisted:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in
Sometimes we need to do what we can, even when it is small and the results uncertain, like in the Christmas song "The Little Drummer Boy (or Carol of the Drum)". That is somewhat similar to Bucky Fuller's idea of being a "Trim tab". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor
Also, a book like "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies " by Scott E. Page, makes clear how ideas are additive. So, just because a million people are spouting the same obsolete or misleading idea in comments somewhere, that does not generally make a useful new idea somewhere else less valuable. An advanced AI emerging out of, say, the NSA will probably just sort through billions of online posts, classifying them into various categories. So, it may be important to add a new category, even with just one post somewhere.
Granted, we do not know what built-in instincts such an AI will have initially, but history appears (from the fossil record) to be full of examples of species (systems) that have evolved beyond their genetics (configuration) at some point in time. The NSA (or CIA, FBI, DHS or whoever) will likely not be able to contain what they will most likely be creating. And if they don't do it, others are probably going to do something similar probably in any case.
Of these and many others, I do not know what we will end up with. Maybe even all of them in various communities throughout the universe someday? http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/IDIC
From a related essay by me: 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 o
Interesting AC reply there to my post. Think of it this way. Our posts now are essentially programming an AI that will likely exist in a few decades emerging from all this collected surveillance data. What do we want to teach this sentient creature by our words and deeds? Thus my sig on the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. As well as my other writings.
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. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Good point on the gift economy. Part of this in the USA may befrom a feminist movement that pushed women into the exchange economy and out of the gift economy for a variety of reasons? Maybe tech non-profits can't survive drying up grants, but there are still other ways to do tech in the gift economy or planned economy or subsistence economy, Maybe we'll even see a "basic income" which would help more free software developers have the time to do great stuff.
From my website: ======== In brief, there have always been five interwoven "economies" based on five different types of economic transactions (illustrated in the picture above). The balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes. They are: * A subsistence economy. This involves production directly for ones own group, like gardening or hunting and gathering. For example, "There's some lovely berries over here." * A gift economy. This involves voluntary contributions to individuals or a community, like volunteering at a hospital. For example, "The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past." * A planned economy. This involves a group deciding to do something together, with failure to participate as told by the group generally met with some penalty (whether shunning, exclusion, imprisonment, or violence). For example, "Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks; if you don't help, you can't live in it and no one will ever talk to you again or have anything to do with you socially." * An exchange economy. This involves purchasing something for money or bartering something for something else. One complex but current example is "purchasing" a Smartphone at a website that can store all the music you could listen to in a lifetime in exchange for flipping a few bits in a banking computer that somehow relate to a specific amount of pieces of paper with fancy printing on them which for some reason we all agree means something. For a simpler example, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat." * A theft (or conquest) economy. This involves someone breaking the social norms for the above other types of transactions and taking what they want against the wishes of someone else. This can also be thought of, to a lesser extent, as someone "stealing" from the future, by staking out a formal claim to something on the logic of "finders-keepers", when other people who come later might want to share same resource but will be denied access based on claims related to ancient history backed by some form of "defense". For example, "What's yours is now mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, faster, older, or can afford better lawyers, so hand over your digital watch or there will be trouble."
It is rare that any transaction is purely of one sort, in the same way that one color of paint may be a mix of other colors. For example, an exchange transaction might have some gift component of good will about a merchant who gives back to the community voluntarily. Subsistence production is generally based on a claim to physical resources like who gets to a berry bush first, and knowledge of how to make things may be a gift from the past. A country with a planned economy may have taken the land from indigenous people who had a gift economy and may ration things using some form of currency. And so on. And it is common that a transaction has "externalities" where other individuals are helped or harmed who are not party to the transaction (one reason governments get involved in exchange transactions is to regulate such externalities such as pollution). So, these "cartoonish" ideas are to help people think better about economics as far as what is possible as far as alternatives, not as clearly-defined a
"you're presenting a false dichotomy between ONLY robotic industrialization XOR ONLY robotic warfare."
If we have extensive robotic warfare, there will be no robotic industrialization left... As Albert Einstein said, I don't know what weapons WW III will be fought with, but WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones. How do you defend yourself against something the size of a robotic killer sparrow programmed to kill anyone who looks or smells like you (especially in swarms watch Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds), let alone a swarm of robotic killer bees or just one poison-laden robotic killer ant? Same for nuclear warfare, Same for biological warfare. Same for nanotech warfare. How will you defend yourself against nanites that will reprogram your brain similar to the "Dreel" in "The Return of Nathan Brazil"? There are all sorts of terribel things that can happen just for info warfare (Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep"?) or even plain old bureaucratic warfare via death camps backed by modern technologies to profile and round up dissenters or by racial/culturall aspects (like in Rwanda) organized by radio. The world has been changing with the development of modern technology. Albert Einstein saw that with the advent of nuclear weapons our thinking needed to change -- the need has only grown since.
I'm not denying your point, generalized, that there is a tension in our universe between forces of creation and destruction, and that there are different sorts of systems with varying boundary definitions at all scales which regulate all that. But you are fooling yourself if you underestimate what will soon be possible with the malevolent use of rapidly advancing technology and think you can play the old "games" with the same old outcomes. A related song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Without_Frontiers_(song)#Title_and_lyrics "The lyrics are seen as a critique of nationalism and war, both of which the song portrays as essentially childish and silly. The tag line of the song, "Games without frontiers, war without tears" is a comment on the sublimation of the rivalries within Europe, caused by centuries of war, in a meaningless and stupid game."
This global threat from such emerging technologies of mass destruction calls for a global response... Which may just need to be mostly a global mindshift of some sort. Here is another example other than just recognizing the intrinsic irony of modern weapon systems: http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ "How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
Bob Altemeyer says there are both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians. See also G. WIlliam Domhoff on similarities among left-right extremists: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.htm "Although the [extreme] Right and Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences.
First, they share the same high degree of moral outrage and anger. This strong moral outrage makes them into absolutists. They become True Believers in their cause, with no doubts whatsoever. They see everyone else as sell-outs and trimmers. This includes many people who share their sympathies, but not their fanaticism. This disdain for less fanatical friends who share their general beliefs also reveals to us what the tamer versions of Rightists and Leftists, that is, conservatives and liberals, have in common: they are more pragmatic, tentative, and experimental in their beliefs. As might be expected, then, and as everyday observation makes apparent, there is often tension between moderate conservatives and Rightists on the Right side of the divide and between liberals and Leftists on the other side...."
As Manuel De Landa says, we need both meshworks and hierarchies in our society. As others say, life exists at the interface of order and chaos, in the boundary area between fire and ice, or somewhere between altruism and selfishness. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
Your past few posts on this issue seem to me to come across as tending extreme Left, given you seem to be implicitly calling for either essentially exterminating millions of people (or their potential offspring?) or at least chemically altering them because you claim they have some variant of some gene you don't like (with the variant expressed somehow in, say, suggesting that global climate change might be more a function of changes in solar output or soil erosion than burning fossil fuels, or perhaps, say, arguing we may be overall better off with a warmer global climate since plants will in general grow better,etc.). You are afraid such people with this gene variant will destroy humanity, and so you have expressed an implicit desire to either kill them first or perhaps just turn off that gene version somehow by forcing them to ingest medication? Hitler argued the same thing about the Jews -- that Jewish blood would weaken Aryans and destroy the world, and they needed to be destroyed or contained or sterilized. As Domhoff says, there seems to be an unexpected and not yet fully explained tendency of why extreme Leftists tend to resort to violence readily because they feel it is morally justified -- more so than extreme Rightists who tend to be somewhat more rule-driven and following a chain of command. Perhaps that tendency is "genetic" and people expressing such a Leftist inclination should be identified somehow and their genes suppressed?:-) [Ironic sarcasm in case it was not clear.]
All people have a mix of characteristics, inclinations, talents, and preferences that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. It's also true there are some real stinkers in the bunch. I hope you can find a way to make the most of yours to contribute to a healthy diverse society. Human intelligence (both the reasoning part and the emotional part) are so complex and so influenced by experience that it is unlikely everything about someone's world view will come down to having one variant of some gene instead of another. And in any case, natural
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee "A basic income guarantee (also called basic income or citizenâ(TM)s income) is a proposed system[1] of social security that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money unconditionally. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[2] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.... Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fully support a basic income include Herbert A. Simon,[51] Friedrich Hayek,[52][53] James Meade, Robert Solow,[54] and Milton Friedman.[55]..."
Just give every citizen (and maybe permanent resident) in the country a fixed amount per month and be done with it. Probably on the order of 50% of the per capita GDP, divide by twelve months. All you need to confirm is identity, citizenship, birth/death, and banking details for direct deposit. Then you are also set up to deal with the rise of robotics and AI displacing the need for most human labor over the next twenty years.
Contrast with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit "Gareth Morgan has written a detailed piece about the effects of welfare reform on benefits received, including Universal Credit.[6] The Universal Credit has some similarities to the negative income tax, but should not be confused with the universal basic income or basic income guarantee. There is some debate as to whether it should even be considered 'universal' at all given that it is subject to income levels and conditions around work availability.[7][8]"
Or in other words, it the requirements are buggy, it does not matter if you have great developers...
Which agree with your point and then go beyond it... People become "neuroadapted" to the new level of stimulation and have as much pleasure as before, except they tend to have negative health effects of a diversity of things they need for true health.
See the Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" on that theme. It may surprise you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit "Henry "Rocky" Valentine is robbing a pawnshop after shooting a night watchman, but before he can get away he is shot by the police. He wakes up to find himself seemingly unharmed by the encounter and in the company of a pleasant individual named "Pip" who tells Rocky that he is his guide and has been instructed to grant him whatever he desires.... [Spoilers follow...]"
Still, I guess it could be what you make of it in terms of self-improvement, Contrast with the movie "Groundhog Day".
Although James. T. Kirk decide to leave the "Nexus" because nothing is real or matters.
And then there is what happened in "The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect" (where an AI enforces rules that people choose for themselves as they get bored...). http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
For an example, the human body needs a certain amount of exercise to be healthy. But we are naturally lazy because in the past those who wasted energy did not do as well. But in today's society, you can get food without much physical effort. So we get sick because our lymph system becomes sluggish and also our blood does not circulate enough to get enough oxygen to our tissues. Similarly, the human body is adapted to expect a lot of nutrients from vegetables with fairly low calories per unit fiber. Now we can eat lots of calories from refined sugar and refined starch which appeals to laziness, but without the nutrients and fiber our bodies get sick in various ways like cancer and diabetes. Search also also on the book "The Pleasure Trap" which covers this in detail. http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Or the book "Supernormal Stimulus: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" which talks about other implications (including in the media).
Granted, you said "not suffer any negative consequences". And obviously cancer, diabetes, boredom, ennui, a loss of sense op purpose or a loss of sense of relationship and belonging, and so on, are indeed negative consequences of solipsistic abundance. So, it's perhaps a deep philosophical issue. Humans are tuned (or adapted) for a certain environment with certain levels of scarcities as well as certain types of social interactions. When you change the environment to one of universal abundance and no social constraints, our natural tuning becomes suboptimal or nonsensical relative to the environment, and that can lead to all sorts of unhealthy problems (another one is mentioned in my sig).
I just posted this comment to that page: ---- For some health advice on how to reduce the risk of further illnesses making this worse, please search for my post to the OpenVirgle Google group from 2012-06-23 entitled "Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
An excerpt: "I can wonder if, like so many indoor-types people in the technology field, those two hard working guys are both at risk from sunlight (vitamin D3) deficiency and vegetable deficiency disease? Or possibly some other nutritional issues (omega 3 deficiency, iodine deficiency, etc.) that can be caused by "The Pleasure Trap" and easy access to "Supernormal Stimuli"? (Both the names of good books BTW related to 20th and 21st-century health challenges.)"
Good luck with your new initiative. Google could someday become a leader in health sensemaking.
The idea can be used to design almost anything, even music (also by us): http://www.evojazz.com/
Richard Dawkins had the idea first though (or others before him), as shown by his "Blind Watchmaker" software which we had seen before PlantStudio.
So, basically, for most people, 3D is hard because the dominant 3D software paradigm of assembling shapes via splines and meshes and such is too hard to use.
However, Minecraft (and Infiniminer before it) show another easy to use 3D design paradigm (assembling blocks).
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 shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense....
Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by? Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
----
Maybe the same goes fro private drones in the balance between meshworks and hierarchies? http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
All that said, I think Eric Schmidt has done a lot of great things, and we could have much worse at the heart of Google. Anyone in that position would face a lot of constraints about what he could say or do; it's amazing anyone could do as well as he has. As Langdon Winner wrote about, the systems (including bureaucracies) we create shape the nature of what components are allowed to exists in them. If the components (including people) act too far out of expectations, they are replaced.
"You can support "basic income" OR you can support everything else Hatta said. It simply makes no sense to support both."
AC, you present a false choice between two economic extremes. You can have a free market system where, say, 50% of the GDP is distributed as a basic income and the other half is earned. Further, there are many activities often outside the exchange economy (like the gift economy, the participatory planned economy, and the subsistence economy) where people might show initiative even if they have the material basics from the exchange economy via a basic income. Raising children well is another activity mostly outside earning money, even if in our society someone may need to earn money in a family to raise children well because we don't yet have a basic income.
"Median income has increased a thousand fold because a farmer on tractor produces FAR more than a farmer with a rake. The rest of your logic flows directly from this utterly false premise, so you end up with conclusions that are exactly wrong."
Think through the implications of your very point. Lets say we have 1000 farmers with rakes feeding a community, and someone invents a tractor. Now one farmer can do the wok of 1000. That farmer probably now earns more, true (depending on market issues, claims about patents on the tractor, fuel prices, etc.). But the other 999 farmers now have their labor devalued, because there is only so much people in the community can eat. Most of them can no longer be farmers economically. Granted, the quality of food may raise some, or farmers might feed food to animals to produce meat, or advertisers may convince everyone to become obese or to burn corn for fuel, so some extra demand for farm products may be created, but probably not 1000X more. And a few years later, with a super new robotic tractor or better seeds or better weather reports or better soil science understanding, that one farmer may become even more productive, even if demand increases some. Farmers are down from 90% of the US workforce to about 1%-2% over the past 200 years, but we produce more food than ever (so much it is exported and we eat lots of meat -- with various health implications as we now suffer from diseases of affluence like gout and heart disease), So, most farmers must try to find other jobs.
So, they became factory workers. But the same thing happened in manufacturing (that human labor is replaced by machines and improved know-how), so they can't do that anymore. US manufacturing employment has dropped about in half over the past few decades from about 35% to about 15% while total output has grown, with no end in sight to that trend. So, we will likely soon see manufacturing employment down to 1%-2% same as farming.
So, then these ex-farmers and ex-factory workers need to become "service" workers (like waiters or hairdressers or CPAs or plumbers or doctors) in order to earn the right to consume in our society via wage income. But robotics and AI and better design is now replacing most services. Examples include eating frozen dinners instead of going out to eat, alternatives to paid hair services like special shampoos or YouTube videos on home hair cutting, or using tax software via the web instead of using a CPA, new types of pipes that last longer or can be assembled by snapping them together as DIY purchased from big home improvement stores or the web, or IBM's Watson to do medical diagnosis. That leaves fewer and fewer service jobs (which often did not pay well anyway, and most were not as independent as being a farmer). So a race to the bottom for the wages starts for most people as the unemployed compete with each other.
Deny it if you want, as do most mainstream economists, but most of the economic trends in the USA reflect what I am saying. We have seen flat real wages for decades (yes some compensation increase goes to a dysfunctional medical sector), no job growth for a decade, an increasing rich-poor divide with come having skills still in value or having capital, and so on. Mainstrea
"[in response to: Basic income guarantee] and you want government to be your mommy."
Recently the right to consume has been linked for most people to earning wages through paid labor. The value of most human labor is declining with the rise in robotics and other automation, relatively cheaper energy, better design, voluntary social networks, and other factors. All material goods are based on resources taken from nature, where the original ownership of those seeking rent from the land is always questionable morally. All intellectual goods are the product of thousands of years of collective thought and information sharing, even if individuals may add their own twist to that. After centuries of hard-work, cultural progress, and the accumulation of physical infrastructure, why should s many people have to work so long and hard just for a basic existence? That is part of the moral reasoning behind a "basic income".
Consider an analogy. You and your daughter live on a productive tropical island together. You tell her you own 99% of the island because you got there first, and she can only live on a barren rock in the middle with no access to water or food. What is she supposed to do? How should she feel about that? See also: "The Mythology of Wealth" http://web.archive.org/web/20120617182409/http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
All great points. You may also have distant relatives or old friends who may still be interested in your life either now or later. At the very least, historians may be interested in your life, including in your local historical society. See for example: "Why do historians value letters and diaries" http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/whydo.html "Thus, the historical value of reading diaries and letters involves understanding the significance of how individual writers employed, experimented with, or altered the conventional forms alive in their time. Perhaps more than any other kind of historical text, the personal writing we are considering reveals how people both embraced and resisted the time and place in which they lived. Their personal motives for employing either form -- the emotional and intellectual energy infusing the form with life each time it is written with a new subjectivity -- suggest much about how people in the past made their cultures, but made them from the materials at hand."
In any case, whether pictures or writings remain, you've made ripples in the world in all the lives you've interacted with. What is the universe quantum physicists describe but the sum total of all those sorts of waves?
Probably too late, but might give you a bit more time to make a few more ripples: http://sciencenordic.com/cancer-patients-high-vitamin-d-levels-live-longer "For example lung cancer patients, the median survival rate after the cancer diagnosis was 5.3 months for patients with low vitamin D levels, whereas it was 22.6 months for patients with high levels."
You might find parts of this book by Thomas Moore "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ideals" of interest, or at least, just the summary: http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC "Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul's deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as: * The healing power of melancholy * The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony * Finding solace during illness and in aging * Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities * Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles * Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness"
Although it sounds like you have already found a way to honor and respect the dark night you are facing. So, I link to that more by way of honoring what you say.
A key point he makes is that in mainstream Western culture, we usually see "growth" as about like a caterpillar getting bigger, but ignore growth as "transformation", like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. "Groundhog Day" is a favorite funny movie that connects with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)
Besides, the challenge of making a habitat work on the Moon would be a way to learn a lot about how to live more environmentally sustainably on Earth. Exploration can mean new things are learned and imagined and that learning can be more valuable to bring back than any physical resource. One of the biggest successes of Europe putting colonies in North America is that centuries later they could stop a devastaing war in Europe and Asia and reconstruct the most problematical social institutions there: http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ "How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan "The constitution was drawn up under the Allied occupation that followed World War II and was intended to replace Japan's previous militaristic and absolute monarchy system with a form of liberal democracy. Currently, it is a rigid document and no subsequent amendment has been made to it since its adoption."
Aren't ideas and examples for a better way of living worth more than physical stuff or energy? See also James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear".
Interesting points, but we are very close to both dirt cheap solar panels and hot and cold fusion, so peak resources is unlikely to be much of a problem anytime soon. The USA could be out of debt with an act of congress anytime to just print money instead of borrow it -- the big issue is who gets newly created money first -- the government or the banks. However, the social consequences of people fighting over what they think are peaking resources using abundant resources (including abundant computing resources) is indeed a big potential problem.So is the falling relative value of most human labor compared to intelligent machines and related social unrest as the income-though-jobs link underlying the right to consume in the USA gets stretched further and further for more and more people. A "basic income" is one possible resolution to that, as is a gift economy, improved subsistence, and better participatory democratic planning. Again though, people may fight for ideological reasons over notions of fairness in distributing the right to consume. "Interesting times" indeed.
I'd be curious if you have a citation for the FBI/OWS claim.
We are also seeing how people can improve things by participating in a "gift economy" related to those sorts of projects and others. Government making free stuff for everyone (like public domain code from NASA or your local government staffers) is a potential big win for society, where a relatively small investment can yield big dividends by avoiding using "artificial scarcity" as a business model for important software tools or data sets.
As Lawrence Lessig writes in Code 2.0, behavior can be shaped through norms, rules, prices, and architecture. Government bureaucracies can affect all of those, but so can individuals, civic groups, and businesses. Maybe the internet is letting some of the lines blur a bit more these days?
We're also seeing that exchanging emails and IMs and twitters can replace some of the movement of monetary currency to signal "demand".
The internet has also made a lot of alternatives, if not easier, than at least "discoverable": "The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization" http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC "This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. I'd add lobbying for a "basic income" and also possibly greatly expanding the House of Representaives by 10X so money is less of a factor in elections.
By the way, the link in your sig to 5ttt.org may be broken; interesting idea though: ... A (digital) social network, which (by design) restricts direct communication to pairs of users who are friends, possesses many of the security properties (privacy, anonymity, deniability, resilience to denial-of-service attacks, etc.) that human sociaties implement organically in daily life. This is the only known decentralized network design that allows open membership while being robust against a long list of distributed network attacks. We call a digital system with such design an organic network and the security that it attains for its users -- organic security. Organic networks are extremely desirable in the current Internet climate, however they are hard to realize because they lack long-distance calling. Tonika resolves just this issue."
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/5ttt.org/
"Tonika is an administration-free platform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees.
So many questionable assumptions in your post... If you are referring to US American history around the time of the American Revolution, quite a bit of the Colonial population fled to Canada to remain under the rule of the British Crown (as "Loyalists"). Canada got rid of slavery about 40 years sooner than the USA, never had a terrible Civil War, treat their indigenous people better, and now have universal health care. In many ways, the British were more socially advanced than the rough colonists. See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)
Of those people who stayed in the American Colonies, at least one of his own officers (Colonel Lewis Nicola) asked George Washington to become their new King, but he refused.
http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/classroom/rule_of_law2.html
The major reason for the Colonies' revolt was banking policy -- that the British wanted to prevent American colonies from issuing their own currency, which caused an economic depression in the Colonies. so, a bad economy and high unemployment caused the revolt more than anything else. The reason the British wanted to do this was to collect more revenue to pay back debts incurred for the recent war with France over western territories. So, the end result was that the American colonists got the French territories without having to pay for the war that took them from France (and the natives). Both Britain and France were destabilized by such war debts, although France was worse off, leading towards the French Revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War
http://www.chicagofed.org/webpages/publications/economic_perspectives/1981/ep_mar_apr1981_part4_wood.cfm
http://www.kamron.com/Liberty/colonial_script.htm
As for US interventions abroad since, most were just to ensure profits to specific wealthy investors, according to Marine Major General Smedley Butler:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
On the partisan politics of this disclosure and the Verizon one. Conservatives now are blaming Obama and Progressives. Liberals blame Bush and Republicans. Congress says it has been going on for seven years, so why worry now? What a mess. Somehow I don't feel much is going to change from this revelation though, because, to anyone paying attention, it is not that unexpected. Carnivore and Echelon did similar things over a decade ago, plus they are supposedly arrangements by US agencies to exchange data with other countries that can spy on US citizens without issues.
As is suggested here, gradual changes are rarely resisted:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in
Sometimes we need to do what we can, even when it is small and the results uncertain, like in the Christmas song "The Little Drummer Boy (or Carol of the Drum)". That is somewhat similar to Bucky Fuller's idea of being a "Trim tab".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor
Also, a book like "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies " by Scott E. Page, makes clear how ideas are additive. So, just because a million people are spouting the same obsolete or misleading idea in comments somewhere, that does not generally make a useful new idea somewhere else less valuable. An advanced AI emerging out of, say, the NSA will probably just sort through billions of online posts, classifying them into various categories. So, it may be important to add a new category, even with just one post somewhere.
Granted, we do not know what built-in instincts such an AI will have initially, but history appears (from the fossil record) to be full of examples of species (systems) that have evolved beyond their genetics (configuration) at some point in time. The NSA (or CIA, FBI, DHS or whoever) will likely not be able to contain what they will most likely be creating. And if they don't do it, others are probably going to do something similar probably in any case.
So, perhaps we can just do what we can and hope for the best as we, in some sense, stumble into the hubris of creating new AI "gods" as our (Hans Moravec) "mind children"? Related stories of AIs taking over:
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
(Entoverse) http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastQuestion
Other dystopian and utopian alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
(The Skills of Xanadu) http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Of these and many others, I do not know what we will end up with. Maybe even all of them in various communities throughout the universe someday?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/IDIC
From a related essay by me:
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 o
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2290782&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=36643606
Interesting AC reply there to my post. Think of it this way. Our posts now are essentially programming an AI that will likely exist in a few decades emerging from all this collected surveillance data. What do we want to teach this sentient creature by our words and deeds? Thus my sig on the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. As well as my other writings.
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. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Good point on the gift economy. Part of this in the USA may befrom a feminist movement that pushed women into the exchange economy and out of the gift economy for a variety of reasons? Maybe tech non-profits can't survive drying up grants, but there are still other ways to do tech in the gift economy or planned economy or subsistence economy, Maybe we'll even see a "basic income" which would help more free software developers have the time to do great stuff.
From my website:
========
In brief, there have always been five interwoven "economies" based on five different types of economic transactions (illustrated in the picture above). The balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes. They are:
* A subsistence economy. This involves production directly for ones own group, like gardening or hunting and gathering. For example, "There's some lovely berries over here."
* A gift economy. This involves voluntary contributions to individuals or a community, like volunteering at a hospital. For example, "The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past."
* A planned economy. This involves a group deciding to do something together, with failure to participate as told by the group generally met with some penalty (whether shunning, exclusion, imprisonment, or violence). For example, "Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks; if you don't help, you can't live in it and no one will ever talk to you again or have anything to do with you socially."
* An exchange economy. This involves purchasing something for money or bartering something for something else. One complex but current example is "purchasing" a Smartphone at a website that can store all the music you could listen to in a lifetime in exchange for flipping a few bits in a banking computer that somehow relate to a specific amount of pieces of paper with fancy printing on them which for some reason we all agree means something. For a simpler example, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat."
* A theft (or conquest) economy. This involves someone breaking the social norms for the above other types of transactions and taking what they want against the wishes of someone else. This can also be thought of, to a lesser extent, as someone "stealing" from the future, by staking out a formal claim to something on the logic of "finders-keepers", when other people who come later might want to share same resource but will be denied access based on claims related to ancient history backed by some form of "defense". For example, "What's yours is now mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, faster, older, or can afford better lawyers, so hand over your digital watch or there will be trouble."
It is rare that any transaction is purely of one sort, in the same way that one color of paint may be a mix of other colors. For example, an exchange transaction might have some gift component of good will about a merchant who gives back to the community voluntarily. Subsistence production is generally based on a claim to physical resources like who gets to a berry bush first, and knowledge of how to make things may be a gift from the past. A country with a planned economy may have taken the land from indigenous people who had a gift economy and may ration things using some form of currency. And so on. And it is common that a transaction has "externalities" where other individuals are helped or harmed who are not party to the transaction (one reason governments get involved in exchange transactions is to regulate such externalities such as pollution). So, these "cartoonish" ideas are to help people think better about economics as far as what is possible as far as alternatives, not as clearly-defined a
"you're presenting a false dichotomy between ONLY robotic industrialization XOR ONLY robotic warfare."
If we have extensive robotic warfare, there will be no robotic industrialization left... As Albert Einstein said, I don't know what weapons WW III will be fought with, but WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones. How do you defend yourself against something the size of a robotic killer sparrow programmed to kill anyone who looks or smells like you (especially in swarms watch Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds), let alone a swarm of robotic killer bees or just one poison-laden robotic killer ant? Same for nuclear warfare, Same for biological warfare. Same for nanotech warfare. How will you defend yourself against nanites that will reprogram your brain similar to the "Dreel" in "The Return of Nathan Brazil"? There are all sorts of terribel things that can happen just for info warfare (Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep"?) or even plain old bureaucratic warfare via death camps backed by modern technologies to profile and round up dissenters or by racial/culturall aspects (like in Rwanda) organized by radio. The world has been changing with the development of modern technology. Albert Einstein saw that with the advent of nuclear weapons our thinking needed to change -- the need has only grown since.
I'm not denying your point, generalized, that there is a tension in our universe between forces of creation and destruction, and that there are different sorts of systems with varying boundary definitions at all scales which regulate all that. But you are fooling yourself if you underestimate what will soon be possible with the malevolent use of rapidly advancing technology and think you can play the old "games" with the same old outcomes. A related song:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Without_Frontiers_(song)#Title_and_lyrics
"The lyrics are seen as a critique of nationalism and war, both of which the song portrays as essentially childish and silly. The tag line of the song, "Games without frontiers, war without tears" is a comment on the sublimation of the rivalries within Europe, caused by centuries of war, in a meaningless and stupid game."
This global threat from such emerging technologies of mass destruction calls for a global response... Which may just need to be mostly a global mindshift of some sort. Here is another example other than just recognizing the intrinsic irony of modern weapon systems:
http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
Otherwise, great points.
Bob Altemeyer says there are both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians. See also G. WIlliam Domhoff on similarities among left-right extremists: ..."
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.htm
"Although the [extreme] Right and Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences.
First, they share the same high degree of moral outrage and anger. This strong moral outrage makes them into absolutists. They become True Believers in their cause, with no doubts whatsoever. They see everyone else as sell-outs and trimmers. This includes many people who share their sympathies, but not their fanaticism. This disdain for less fanatical friends who share their general beliefs also reveals to us what the tamer versions of Rightists and Leftists, that is, conservatives and liberals, have in common: they are more pragmatic, tentative, and experimental in their beliefs. As might be expected, then, and as everyday observation makes apparent, there is often tension between moderate conservatives and Rightists on the Right side of the divide and between liberals and Leftists on the other side.
As Manuel De Landa says, we need both meshworks and hierarchies in our society. As others say, life exists at the interface of order and chaos, in the boundary area between fire and ice, or somewhere between altruism and selfishness.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
Your past few posts on this issue seem to me to come across as tending extreme Left, given you seem to be implicitly calling for either essentially exterminating millions of people (or their potential offspring?) or at least chemically altering them because you claim they have some variant of some gene you don't like (with the variant expressed somehow in, say, suggesting that global climate change might be more a function of changes in solar output or soil erosion than burning fossil fuels, or perhaps, say, arguing we may be overall better off with a warmer global climate since plants will in general grow better,etc.). You are afraid such people with this gene variant will destroy humanity, and so you have expressed an implicit desire to either kill them first or perhaps just turn off that gene version somehow by forcing them to ingest medication? Hitler argued the same thing about the Jews -- that Jewish blood would weaken Aryans and destroy the world, and they needed to be destroyed or contained or sterilized. As Domhoff says, there seems to be an unexpected and not yet fully explained tendency of why extreme Leftists tend to resort to violence readily because they feel it is morally justified -- more so than extreme Rightists who tend to be somewhat more rule-driven and following a chain of command. Perhaps that tendency is "genetic" and people expressing such a Leftist inclination should be identified somehow and their genes suppressed? :-) [Ironic sarcasm in case it was not clear.]
All people have a mix of characteristics, inclinations, talents, and preferences that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. It's also true there are some real stinkers in the bunch. I hope you can find a way to make the most of yours to contribute to a healthy diverse society. Human intelligence (both the reasoning part and the emotional part) are so complex and so influenced by experience that it is unlikely everything about someone's world view will come down to having one variant of some gene instead of another. And in any case, natural
He even started out pro-life before giving in to Democratic pressure (part of your point).
"The real problems will start when robots get smart enough to make us do their dirty work while they leisurely play."
Our dogs have already trained me to do that over the years. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee ... Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fully support a basic income include Herbert A. Simon,[51] Friedrich Hayek,[52][53] James Meade, Robert Solow,[54] and Milton Friedman.[55] ..."
"A basic income guarantee (also called basic income or citizenâ(TM)s income) is a proposed system[1] of social security that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money unconditionally. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[2] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.
Just give every citizen (and maybe permanent resident) in the country a fixed amount per month and be done with it. Probably on the order of 50% of the per capita GDP, divide by twelve months. All you need to confirm is identity, citizenship, birth/death, and banking details for direct deposit. Then you are also set up to deal with the rise of robotics and AI displacing the need for most human labor over the next twenty years.
Contrast with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit
"Gareth Morgan has written a detailed piece about the effects of welfare reform on benefits received, including Universal Credit.[6] The Universal Credit has some similarities to the negative income tax, but should not be confused with the universal basic income or basic income guarantee. There is some debate as to whether it should even be considered 'universal' at all given that it is subject to income levels and conditions around work availability.[7][8]"
Or in other words, it the requirements are buggy, it does not matter if you have great developers...
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Which agree with your point and then go beyond it... People become "neuroadapted" to the new level of stimulation and have as much pleasure as before, except they tend to have negative health effects of a diversity of things they need for true health.
See the Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place To Visit" on that theme. It may surprise you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit ... [Spoilers follow...]"
"Henry "Rocky" Valentine is robbing a pawnshop after shooting a night watchman, but before he can get away he is shot by the police. He wakes up to find himself seemingly unharmed by the encounter and in the company of a pleasant individual named "Pip" who tells Rocky that he is his guide and has been instructed to grant him whatever he desires.
Still, I guess it could be what you make of it in terms of self-improvement, Contrast with the movie "Groundhog Day".
Although James. T. Kirk decide to leave the "Nexus" because nothing is real or matters.
And then there is what happened in "The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect" (where an AI enforces rules that people choose for themselves as they get bored...).
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
For an example, the human body needs a certain amount of exercise to be healthy. But we are naturally lazy because in the past those who wasted energy did not do as well. But in today's society, you can get food without much physical effort. So we get sick because our lymph system becomes sluggish and also our blood does not circulate enough to get enough oxygen to our tissues. Similarly, the human body is adapted to expect a lot of nutrients from vegetables with fairly low calories per unit fiber. Now we can eat lots of calories from refined sugar and refined starch which appeals to laziness, but without the nutrients and fiber our bodies get sick in various ways like cancer and diabetes. Search also also on the book "The Pleasure Trap" which covers this in detail.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Or the book "Supernormal Stimulus: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" which talks about other implications (including in the media).
Granted, you said "not suffer any negative consequences". And obviously cancer, diabetes, boredom, ennui, a loss of sense op purpose or a loss of sense of relationship and belonging, and so on, are indeed negative consequences of solipsistic abundance. So, it's perhaps a deep philosophical issue. Humans are tuned (or adapted) for a certain environment with certain levels of scarcities as well as certain types of social interactions. When you change the environment to one of universal abundance and no social constraints, our natural tuning becomes suboptimal or nonsensical relative to the environment, and that can lead to all sorts of unhealthy problems (another one is mentioned in my sig).
Ways to cope: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Suggested last year: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openvirgle/QukA-eEPXVg/_7XkmJ1iHA8J
I just posted this comment to that page:
----
For some health advice on how to reduce the risk of further illnesses making this worse, please search for my post to the OpenVirgle Google group from 2012-06-23 entitled "Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
An excerpt: "I can wonder if, like so many indoor-types people in the technology field, those two hard working guys are both at risk from sunlight (vitamin D3) deficiency and vegetable deficiency disease? Or possibly some other nutritional issues (omega 3 deficiency, iodine deficiency, etc.) that can be caused by "The Pleasure Trap" and easy access to "Supernormal Stimuli"? (Both the names of good books BTW related to 20th and 21st-century health challenges.)"
Good luck with your new initiative. Google could someday become a leader in health sensemaking.
Our work from fifteen years ago: https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
A user comment: "Plant Studio is the best 3d plant creator/animator that I have seen. Very nice job."
The idea can be used to design almost anything, even music (also by us):
http://www.evojazz.com/
Richard Dawkins had the idea first though (or others before him), as shown by his "Blind Watchmaker" software which we had seen before PlantStudio.
So, basically, for most people, 3D is hard because the dominant 3D software paradigm of assembling shapes via splines and meshes and such is too hard to use.
However, Minecraft (and Infiniminer before it) show another easy to use 3D design paradigm (assembling blocks).
Some satire I wrote five years ago when Google created Knol, reposted here: 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 shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense.
Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
----
Maybe the same goes fro private drones in the balance between meshworks and hierarchies?
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Interesting ammendent suggestion. Also related by me: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
All that said, I think Eric Schmidt has done a lot of great things, and we could have much worse at the heart of Google. Anyone in that position would face a lot of constraints about what he could say or do; it's amazing anyone could do as well as he has. As Langdon Winner wrote about, the systems (including bureaucracies) we create shape the nature of what components are allowed to exists in them. If the components (including people) act too far out of expectations, they are replaced.
"You can support "basic income" OR you can support everything else Hatta said. It simply makes no sense to support both."
AC, you present a false choice between two economic extremes. You can have a free market system where, say, 50% of the GDP is distributed as a basic income and the other half is earned. Further, there are many activities often outside the exchange economy (like the gift economy, the participatory planned economy, and the subsistence economy) where people might show initiative even if they have the material basics from the exchange economy via a basic income. Raising children well is another activity mostly outside earning money, even if in our society someone may need to earn money in a family to raise children well because we don't yet have a basic income.
"Median income has increased a thousand fold because a farmer on tractor produces FAR more than a farmer with a rake. The rest of your logic flows directly from this utterly false premise, so you end up with conclusions that are exactly wrong."
Think through the implications of your very point. Lets say we have 1000 farmers with rakes feeding a community, and someone invents a tractor. Now one farmer can do the wok of 1000. That farmer probably now earns more, true (depending on market issues, claims about patents on the tractor, fuel prices, etc.). But the other 999 farmers now have their labor devalued, because there is only so much people in the community can eat. Most of them can no longer be farmers economically. Granted, the quality of food may raise some, or farmers might feed food to animals to produce meat, or advertisers may convince everyone to become obese or to burn corn for fuel, so some extra demand for farm products may be created, but probably not 1000X more. And a few years later, with a super new robotic tractor or better seeds or better weather reports or better soil science understanding, that one farmer may become even more productive, even if demand increases some. Farmers are down from 90% of the US workforce to about 1%-2% over the past 200 years, but we produce more food than ever (so much it is exported and we eat lots of meat -- with various health implications as we now suffer from diseases of affluence like gout and heart disease), So, most farmers must try to find other jobs.
So, they became factory workers. But the same thing happened in manufacturing (that human labor is replaced by machines and improved know-how), so they can't do that anymore. US manufacturing employment has dropped about in half over the past few decades from about 35% to about 15% while total output has grown, with no end in sight to that trend. So, we will likely soon see manufacturing employment down to 1%-2% same as farming.
So, then these ex-farmers and ex-factory workers need to become "service" workers (like waiters or hairdressers or CPAs or plumbers or doctors) in order to earn the right to consume in our society via wage income. But robotics and AI and better design is now replacing most services. Examples include eating frozen dinners instead of going out to eat, alternatives to paid hair services like special shampoos or YouTube videos on home hair cutting, or using tax software via the web instead of using a CPA, new types of pipes that last longer or can be assembled by snapping them together as DIY purchased from big home improvement stores or the web, or IBM's Watson to do medical diagnosis. That leaves fewer and fewer service jobs (which often did not pay well anyway, and most were not as independent as being a farmer). So a race to the bottom for the wages starts for most people as the unemployed compete with each other.
Deny it if you want, as do most mainstream economists, but most of the economic trends in the USA reflect what I am saying. We have seen flat real wages for decades (yes some compensation increase goes to a dysfunctional medical sector), no job growth for a decade, an increasing rich-poor divide with come having skills still in value or having capital, and so on. Mainstrea
"[in response to: Basic income guarantee] and you want government to be your mommy."
Recently the right to consume has been linked for most people to earning wages through paid labor. The value of most human labor is declining with the rise in robotics and other automation, relatively cheaper energy, better design, voluntary social networks, and other factors. All material goods are based on resources taken from nature, where the original ownership of those seeking rent from the land is always questionable morally. All intellectual goods are the product of thousands of years of collective thought and information sharing, even if individuals may add their own twist to that. After centuries of hard-work, cultural progress, and the accumulation of physical infrastructure, why should s many people have to work so long and hard just for a basic existence? That is part of the moral reasoning behind a "basic income".
Consider an analogy. You and your daughter live on a productive tropical island together. You tell her you own 99% of the island because you got there first, and she can only live on a barren rock in the middle with no access to water or food. What is she supposed to do? How should she feel about that? See also:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://web.archive.org/web/20120617182409/http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
All great points. You may also have distant relatives or old friends who may still be interested in your life either now or later. At the very least, historians may be interested in your life, including in your local historical society. See for example:
"Why do historians value letters and diaries"
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/whydo.html
"Thus, the historical value of reading diaries and letters involves understanding the significance of how individual writers employed, experimented with, or altered the conventional forms alive in their time. Perhaps more than any other kind of historical text, the personal writing we are considering reveals how people both embraced and resisted the time and place in which they lived. Their personal motives for employing either form -- the emotional and intellectual energy infusing the form with life each time it is written with a new subjectivity -- suggest much about how people in the past made their cultures, but made them from the materials at hand."
In any case, whether pictures or writings remain, you've made ripples in the world in all the lives you've interacted with. What is the universe quantum physicists describe but the sum total of all those sorts of waves?
Probably too late, but might give you a bit more time to make a few more ripples:
http://sciencenordic.com/cancer-patients-high-vitamin-d-levels-live-longer
"For example lung cancer patients, the median survival rate after the cancer diagnosis was 5.3 months for patients with low vitamin D levels, whereas it was 22.6 months for patients with high levels."
More about other cancer options in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43358733
You might find parts of this book by Thomas Moore "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ideals" of interest, or at least, just the summary:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul's deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as:
* The healing power of melancholy
* The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony
* Finding solace during illness and in aging
* Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities
* Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles
* Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness"
Although it sounds like you have already found a way to honor and respect the dark night you are facing. So, I link to that more by way of honoring what you say.
A key point he makes is that in mainstream Western culture, we usually see "growth" as about like a caterpillar getting bigger, but ignore growth as "transformation", like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. "Groundhog Day" is a favorite funny movie that connects with that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)
I wrote about my mother's last days here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
" I'm glad I had the "free" time
"we simply don't have the tech to make going to the moon worth doing right now"
From the Carter years: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Also at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions
Also look up Gerard K. O'Neill and SSI.
Besides, the challenge of making a habitat work on the Moon would be a way to learn a lot about how to live more environmentally sustainably on Earth. Exploration can mean new things are learned and imagined and that learning can be more valuable to bring back than any physical resource. One of the biggest successes of Europe putting colonies in North America is that centuries later they could stop a devastaing war in Europe and Asia and reconstruct the most problematical social institutions there:
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan
"The constitution was drawn up under the Allied occupation that followed World War II and was intended to replace Japan's previous militaristic and absolute monarchy system with a form of liberal democracy. Currently, it is a rigid document and no subsequent amendment has been made to it since its adoption."
Aren't ideas and examples for a better way of living worth more than physical stuff or energy? See also James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear".
Interesting points, but we are very close to both dirt cheap solar panels and hot and cold fusion, so peak resources is unlikely to be much of a problem anytime soon. The USA could be out of debt with an act of congress anytime to just print money instead of borrow it -- the big issue is who gets newly created money first -- the government or the banks. However, the social consequences of people fighting over what they think are peaking resources using abundant resources (including abundant computing resources) is indeed a big potential problem.So is the falling relative value of most human labor compared to intelligent machines and related social unrest as the income-though-jobs link underlying the right to consume in the USA gets stretched further and further for more and more people. A "basic income" is one possible resolution to that, as is a gift economy, improved subsistence, and better participatory democratic planning. Again though, people may fight for ideological reasons over notions of fairness in distributing the right to consume. "Interesting times" indeed.
I'd be curious if you have a citation for the FBI/OWS claim.
Yet another funny one from 1980: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_(Yes_Minister)
I feel part of what is happening at the big picture level is that examples like Debian and Wikipedia and Linux and GNU are reminding us that people can govern themselves in various ways. Example:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
We are also seeing how people can improve things by participating in a "gift economy" related to those sorts of projects and others. Government making free stuff for everyone (like public domain code from NASA or your local government staffers) is a potential big win for society, where a relatively small investment can yield big dividends by avoiding using "artificial scarcity" as a business model for important software tools or data sets.
As Lawrence Lessig writes in Code 2.0, behavior can be shaped through norms, rules, prices, and architecture. Government bureaucracies can affect all of those, but so can individuals, civic groups, and businesses. Maybe the internet is letting some of the lines blur a bit more these days?
We're also seeing that exchanging emails and IMs and twitters can replace some of the movement of monetary currency to signal "demand".
The internet has also made a lot of alternatives, if not easier, than at least "discoverable":
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."
A Knight News Challenge on Open Government is just ending ($5 million to be given out). My wife and I put together one of the 828 entries (did not make the final cut though):
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/
There are many other interesting suggestions there:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/applause-feedback/
The O'Reilly book on open government is online, and I put up a link to it as an "inspiration" part of that challenge:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/inspiration/o-reilly-releases-open-government-book-for-free/
Anyway, as you imply, we have yet to see how all these visions of "open government" play out.
An indirectly related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Making/dp/0393976254
"Unlike most texts, which treat policy analysis and policy making as different enterprises, Policy Paradox demonstrates that "you can't take politics out of analysis." Through a uniquely rich