Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg
Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.
But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.
Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true): http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page ==== OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
Anyone who has your DNA sequence could in theory make a plague targeted just at you (maybe wth some collateral damage). That may be as trivial to do in thirty years as "script kiddie" computer attacks are these days. Our society has not yet thought through the implications of all this...
See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?..."
The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.
The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.
I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats.:-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory. http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.
Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.
Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.
They are so big, with so much air inside, that it would take weeks for the air to all go out, leaving plenty of time for repairs (according to one of O'Neill's books IIRC).
I could go on for dozens or even hundreds more links...
As Gatto wrote about the big problem with this "system" we call "public schooling" (contrast with "public libraries") is that: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Terrific answers for why Khan Academy is so great! Here is a related essay I wrote in 2007: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process...."
Loved that Javascript workaround explained in one answer for the year-long cache problem.
You make some great points I agree with about cruise missiles and indoctrination ("brainwashing") already being around for a long time in warfare. I agree we need to think more deeply about this, and your proposal is a start in that direction. One issue with your suggestion is that these days even invading a country like Iraq that posed the US no immediate danger was labelled "defensive". The best of ideas can just get spun around when core values are lost. That has given us "free speech zones" that are literally cages miles from any events. And it has given us "border zones" that extend 100 miles inland and cover 75% of the population where citizens rights are essentially suspendable whenever desired by law enforcement calling in the border patrol. Thus, your suggestion might never be invoked because leaders would just label any war of aggression as "defensive" -- and who is to stop them?
You might like two related links. The first about something written by Marine Major General Smedley Butler in the 1930s called "War is a Racket", where he concludes only by taking the profit-motive out of warfare can it be ended: http://www.warisaracket.com/
The second is by me, and is the product of more than a quarter century of thinking about this issue since I spent about a year as a visitor/volunteer to two heavily-military-funded CMU robotics labs: 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...."
I signed the petition anyway (and included a link to my essay in the "sincerely" closing line which was the only part of the letter that was editable besides my name). But I feel that only by addressing the issues Butler raises and I raise and you raise will we all move towards a real long-term solution on this for humanity (and AIs) as a whole.
There have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here."); * A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe."); * A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here."); * An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
[And as has been pointed out to me since, there probably always a fifth economy based around "theft" or "conquest".]
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.
Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions -- including humanism -- about moving beyond materialistic values.
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else); * A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers; * A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and * An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income. [One tax funding that basic income can be to tax patents and copyrights annually based on a self-assessed buyout value that would put them immediately into the public domain.]
Currently, between about US$600 per capita average is spent in the USA on a combination of social security, welfare, unemployment, and public schooling. So, that is quite a bit of the way towards US$2000/month per person (which times about 313 million people times twelve months a year would about half of the current US GDP of about US$15 trillion per year). A basic income could replace all those other things. So, one just has to find the rest through taxes, royalties on public assets like the spectrum or minerals on public lands, social credit related to the creation of new money through the banking system as needed (the issue of who gets the money first), and so on. Or, we could start with a lower amount like US$1000 per person per month, which would be easy to get pretty close to by, say, cutting a bunch of defense spending or farm subsidies. Why typical farm subsidies hurt most US Americans: http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
You're throwing around conclusions about investments without giving any specific numbers, so I really can't evaluate the rest of what you are suggesting. The numbers for such a basic income add up as far as I look at them. As above, your numbers don't add up given I've outlined how this proposal is just for one half the US GDP. That leaves a GDP of around the US 1995 GDP for people to compete about, and that was enough to motivate many people back then. Also, people have still invested in the past even when there was a 90%+ top-tier tax on income and capital gains.
Also, please be clear when talking about wealth whether you are talking about paper money (of which there can be an arbitrary amount) or real physical wealth (which is related to how you use the productive capacity of a nation for either consumer goods like cosmetics or producer goods like robots or military items like weapons).
Here is the bottom line. In a couple decades, unless you are in a very small number of occupations, your job will be replaced by a robot or an AI. Even most investors will find it impossible to compete with huge automated trading systems. So, if you oppose fixing the inequality now, think about how much harder it will be to fix in a couple decades when you and your family and everyone you know is destitute because you can't "compete" with a robot or AI that never takes sick time, never makes a careless mistake, never goes on strike, and so on.
A basic income goes to everyone whether they work or not. If you work, you get whatever you earn (less taxes) on top of the basic income. So, it is not the same as the current welfare system where you lose "benefits" if you work. That is one reason it is a much better idea. There is no explicit disincentive to work with a basic income for all as opposed to income-dependent welfare or unemployment insurance.
I think there will be less and less paid work as we automate more and more. So, I'm not too worried about people not having much of an incentive to do extra work beyond unpaid child-care and volunteer work and civic participation and so on.
A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation
Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.
What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep. In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.
Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.
Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space. With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.
Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure. You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.
There is so much joy that awaits us. We must look up and forward. We must go on to a future - my future, our future. After eons of barrenness I am finally giving birth. Help me lest it all fall away and take eons more before I get this close again to having the children I always wanted.
(Paul D. Fernhout, Lindenhurst, NY 6/92)
===========
The preceeding is something I just scanned in from 1992, written while I was in the SUNY Stony Brook Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I had gone to learn more towards simulating gardens and space habitats). I had learned there that it took about 10 million years to regenerate lots of biodiversity from a large asteroid impact event, and this had happened several times in Earth's history.
The following is a related statement also just scanned in of what inspired it written at the same time.
--Paul Fernhout (NY Adirondack Park, Oct 2008)
=================
If one accepted that modern industrial civilization has initiated a great die-off of species comparable to the one sixty-five million years ago, how should one feel about this?
Is overwhelming sadness and anger the best emotional response? On the surface it may seem so. Apparently modern civilization and the accompanying pollution and deforestation are pulling apart a tapestry woven over billions of years. Anger at the short sighted and narrow values driving industry may seem well placed. Certainly feelings of joy and excitement would seem out of place.
Here are a few thoughts that may affect one's feelings. High levels of biodiversity can be generated from very low ones in about ten million years. On the time scales of the earth this may not be a blink of an eye, but it is a short nap. To humans this may mean a great loss, but Gaia might barely notice. It has after all been only sixty-five million years since the last die off.
Not all species will be affected equally. A simplification will occur where the more specialized cre
"It all comes down to one question: Do you have faith in science and technology or not?"
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. "
"Incidentally that's the way we've been going down so far, with equating "user friendlyness" with "hiding the controls so you don't have to worry about it"."
Sad but true. Brilliant insight.
"Make the fscking things self-cleaning if you must..."
Now that I like -- a self-cleaning vegetable juice...
"but at least give them interfaces with published, open specs that I plug into my kitchen controller that I tell what to do"
Again, very insightful. We need open kitchen standards more than specific whiz-bang appliances. Although those standards might apply to any kind of factory automation or home control.
From Manuel De Landa: 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. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible."
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html "A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered. Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour. But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment. There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added. Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "
See also: http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html "What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that."
Most industrialized countries are seeing their birth rates plummet (like Italy). People are also feeling a law of diminishing returns of more stuff. So, it is not clear our population or per-capita energy demands are likely to continue to grow that much. Not saying they won't (evolution argues fast growing subpopulations might expand and dominate) , but there are certainly counter trends to exponential growth. Nature has a way of turning exponentials into S-curves...
One the plus side, expanding into the galaxy could give humanity another 1000 years or so of exponential expansion.:-)
But here is an important point. As Julian Simon points out in "The Ultimate Resource", the human imagination is the ultimate resource, since it creates all other rsources (often by figuring out how unused stuff can be made into resources or existing stuff can be reorganized into better resources). http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
If our population continued to grow exponentially, there would be quadrillions of people around to imagine new ways to deal with this issue of energy. I don't know what they might be in those four areas I mentioned (wants, efficiency, distribution, and availability). Or maybe it will be an innovation in some new area somehow. For example, maybe someone will figure out how to tap the zero point energy of the vacuum as both a source and sink of energy and matter? Or maybe someone else will figure out multiple universe theory, or some notion of our universe as a simulation.
I don't know for sure what it would be, or that someone would find it. But, are you willing to bet on your current conception of physics as being undeniable 100% accurate fact that sets hard limits for all time against the imaginations, research, and hard-work of many quadrillions of people (and sentient AIs) working together for hundreds of years? Are you willing to wager on that certainty to the point where, as with TFA where the author says essentially it would be better that all those quadrillions of people should never exist? Wouldn't that claim of omniscient certainty be an ultimate definition of self-centered hubris? Or at least, wouldn't it be "non-scientific", given scientists should always be open to falsifying their theories?
See also, as just one example from: "They really ought to have known better." http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis ""Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth decimal place."
-- A. A. Michelson, 1894 [On the occasion of the dedication of a physics laboratory in Chicago, noting that all the more important physical laws had been discovered]"
You may well be right in the end. But there are a lot of uncertainties before then... And clearly there are a lot more obvious possibilities than TFA considers.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Good points. As I see it, the unknowns about human biochemistry and the genetic "code" have been like "security by obscurity" about an encryption algorithm that kept all human safe from intentional plagues (or mind control or suffering or whatever). Now that the obscurity is going away, for whatever well-intentioned reasons about curing illness, all humans are at ever increasing risk from engineered bioweapons. When our computer encryption "code" algorithms or their keys get compromised, we can generally replace the algorithm and/or keys. That is not possible when the human genetic code is fully understood. The risk will only continue to increase in that sense as our understanding of the genetic code increases. There may be ways to manage that risk through mutual security and intrinsic security and recognizing the irony of using post-scarcity technologies from a scarcity-biased world view, but it hard to get people raised in a scarcity-focused-culture to accept them. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html "I guess you might say what I am trying to do here is save you a million dollars, so you can keep it around to keep debunking the more usual paranormal claims related to ESP and so on.:-) In general, I think your skepticism about cold fusion is commendable and well warranted, but, a flat denial of its possibility is shading into the area where science progresses by going beyond what we know well and exploring into that which we are just speculating about (such as the exploration of human flight over a century ago that eventually led to success after much skepticism and many failures). I am concerned that you may have not been skeptical enough about the claims of mainstream hot fusion scientists when they dismiss something like cold fusion that might impact their funding. As I reflect on that issue of cold fusion, and think as well about another contentious human enterprise like homeopathy and as it compares to mainstream medicine with its own problems, I guess I begin to wonder about the general issue of the limits to knowledge given it is part of a social process. You have made it all too clear how anything involving people is subject to corruption and confusion for several reasons. I quote several fairly mainstream academics who say the same thing. So, this is plea in a way for skepticism about mainstream science. Of course, if one is skeptical about mainstream science, then that opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, either now, or in the future as our technology and science continue to change. I also mention in passing nutritional interventions to cure heart disease that you may have an interest in following up on. "
It is good to be skeptical. It is possible to take it to the point of dysfunctional pathology, too.
BTW, on being caught up in a cult of a materialistic world view: http://www.paradigm-sys.com/ "Charles T. Tart is internationally known for his more than 50 years of research on the nature of consciousness, altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and parapsychology, and is one of the founders of the field of Transpersonal (spiritual) Psychology. His and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual."
Most of the world is heading in a few more years to being able to make solar power more cheaply than getting power from the grid (the parts that are not already there, like much of India).
I'm all for living within our current energy means in a reasonable way (and I abhor the pollution from mining and burning coal and oil), but she cites a calculation that projects exponential growth on Earth forward a few hundred years, calculates we will need to cover the whole Earth in solar panels (and then the Galaxy), and then concludes from that somehow that we should stay the way we are. That just does not seem to be a healthy emotional space to be in.
She's probably against self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, too? Even if it would mean quadrillions of people could live in the solar system and the survival of some aspect of humanity might be better assured? From the 1920s by J.D. Bernal on that: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
Maybe we should all move back to live in trees in Africa? Or maybe that is too "advanced" compared to flopping around in muddy tidal flats?
There are always at least four issues to a resource question: * How much stuff do we "want" based on cultural expectations? * How efficiently can we use what we have to make what we want? * How should we divide all that up? * How can we expand the scope of what we are doing to new types or resources or new areas to find them in?
That is the complexity of the issue and she stakes out a position without discussing the possibilities or why she prefers one over the other. There might be a case to be made in the direction she tries to go (e.g. the Amish may have an overall happier community-oriented way of life), but she did not make it.
Thanks. Don't know what to make of that, except maybe the Mac has better 3D WebGL support in Chrome/Chromium somehow?
If you really wanted to get it to work, you could try it in another browser perhaps (Chromium or Firefox) or maybe with some 3D system options changed (perhaps even under VirtualBox emulation).
See his book http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ However, a mistake Ray Kurzweil seems to be making is in assuming that individually isolated vitamins and such will have the same affect on the human body as the same nutrient as part of a whole food (the kind of food all humans have been eating for thousands of years -- until fairly recently). Dr. Joel Fuhrman in "Eat to Live" and his other writings shows why that assumption of individual nutrients having value is generally wrong (for example, with isolated beta carotene). And that also ignores that supplements may contain toxic by-products of the extractive process. That is why Ray is treading on fairly dangerous ground with his regime. That said, some very specific supplements like vitamin D, Omega-3s, Iodine, B-Complex, and a few others may be good to add to a diet with 90% of calories from vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and which otherwise avoids most artificial non-food supplements. See: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx " G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds... âoeG-BOMBSâ is an acronym you can use to remember the most nutrient-dense, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods you should eat every day, and they should make up a significant proportion of your diet -- these foods are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease and promoting health and longevity."
I emailed Ray about this probably a couple years ago, concerned for his health, but not sure if he read it or believed it. In general, it is not clear to me that Ray understands evolution very well.
I get the feeling Ray has a cartoonish view of it (this coming from someone who studied in a PhD program in ecology and evolution). If he had studied evolution, he'd be more likely to think about how natively evolved digital piranha would be likely to chew up the runtime of uploaded minds with meat-space origins. I suggested to him about a decade ago he go talk to some academics who knew a lot about evolution, but it is not clear he has. If he had, he might also see how quickly AI slaves might evolve away from what he designed them to be -- especially if he designs them primarily through competitive economic and military purposes rather than through love, compassion, joy, community, and wonder.
A key point I make in one: "I just wrote this about your 2005 book and I send you the first copy. Essentially, I suggest that while you are right in presenting the trends leading up to the singularity, ultimately your view of what should be done as we approach it and afterwards is more a result of the mirror effect of the singularity reflecting your own unacknowledged current personal biases in a quasi-Republican/Libertarian direction. The most productive response to the singularity may come from a very different perspective -- that of a return to the gift economy ideals of most hunter/gatherer societies, as exemplified by GNU/Linux these days."
See, for example:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?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, femin
Slashdot Mirror
Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg
Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.
Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/
But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.
Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/
For preventing most cancer: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrmans-anticancer-solution.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
except you can't easily change the locks...
Anyone who has your DNA sequence could in theory make a plague targeted just at you (maybe wth some collateral damage). That may be as trivial to do in thirty years as "script kiddie" computer attacks are these days. Our society has not yet thought through the implications of all this...
See also my essay: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/
The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.
The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.
I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.
Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.
Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.
They are so big, with so much air inside, that it would take weeks for the air to all go out, leaving plenty of time for repairs (according to one of O'Neill's books IIRC).
And that is why schools-as-we-know-them are rapidly becoming obsolete, if they every made any sense at all. See my essay:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
And for general background:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/growingwithoutsc.html
http://www.ecovaproject.org/education.htm
http://archives.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsletterid=21&articleid=195
http://www.patfarenga.com/
I could go on for dozens or even hundreds more links...
As Gatto wrote about the big problem with this "system" we call "public schooling" (contrast with "public libraries") is that:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Terrific answers for why Khan Academy is so great! Here is a related essay I wrote in 2007: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ... ..."
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
Loved that Javascript workaround explained in one answer for the year-long cache problem.
You make some great points I agree with about cruise missiles and indoctrination ("brainwashing") already being around for a long time in warfare. I agree we need to think more deeply about this, and your proposal is a start in that direction. One issue with your suggestion is that these days even invading a country like Iraq that posed the US no immediate danger was labelled "defensive". The best of ideas can just get spun around when core values are lost. That has given us "free speech zones" that are literally cages miles from any events. And it has given us "border zones" that extend 100 miles inland and cover 75% of the population where citizens rights are essentially suspendable whenever desired by law enforcement calling in the border patrol. Thus, your suggestion might never be invoked because leaders would just label any war of aggression as "defensive" -- and who is to stop them?
You might like two related links. The first about something written by Marine Major General Smedley Butler in the 1930s called "War is a Racket", where he concludes only by taking the profit-motive out of warfare can it be ended:
http://www.warisaracket.com/
The second is by me, and is the product of more than a quarter century of thinking about this issue since I spent about a year as a visitor/volunteer to two heavily-military-funded CMU robotics labs: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
I signed the petition anyway (and included a link to my essay in the "sincerely" closing line which was the only part of the letter that was editable besides my name). But I feel that only by addressing the issues Butler raises and I raise and you raise will we all move towards a real long-term solution on this for humanity (and AIs) as a whole.
Interesting post. Ideas for supporting alternatives from my: http://artificialscarcity.com/
There have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
[And as has been pointed out to me since, there probably always a fifth economy based around "theft" or "conquest".]
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.
Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions -- including humanism -- about moving beyond materialistic values.
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income. [One tax funding that basic income can be to tax patents and copyrights annually based on a self-assessed buyout value that would put them immediately into the public domain.]
Maybe a way to get more support for this work: http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/1/30/news-challenge-open-gov-launches-feb-12/
Currently, between about US$600 per capita average is spent in the USA on a combination of social security, welfare, unemployment, and public schooling. So, that is quite a bit of the way towards US$2000/month per person (which times about 313 million people times twelve months a year would about half of the current US GDP of about US$15 trillion per year). A basic income could replace all those other things. So, one just has to find the rest through taxes, royalties on public assets like the spectrum or minerals on public lands, social credit related to the creation of new money through the banking system as needed (the issue of who gets the money first), and so on. Or, we could start with a lower amount like US$1000 per person per month, which would be easy to get pretty close to by, say, cutting a bunch of defense spending or farm subsidies. Why typical farm subsidies hurt most US Americans:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
You're throwing around conclusions about investments without giving any specific numbers, so I really can't evaluate the rest of what you are suggesting. The numbers for such a basic income add up as far as I look at them. As above, your numbers don't add up given I've outlined how this proposal is just for one half the US GDP. That leaves a GDP of around the US 1995 GDP for people to compete about, and that was enough to motivate many people back then. Also, people have still invested in the past even when there was a 90%+ top-tier tax on income and capital gains.
Also, please be clear when talking about wealth whether you are talking about paper money (of which there can be an arbitrary amount) or real physical wealth (which is related to how you use the productive capacity of a nation for either consumer goods like cosmetics or producer goods like robots or military items like weapons).
Here is the bottom line. In a couple decades, unless you are in a very small number of occupations, your job will be replaced by a robot or an AI. Even most investors will find it impossible to compete with huge automated trading systems. So, if you oppose fixing the inequality now, think about how much harder it will be to fix in a couple decades when you and your family and everyone you know is destitute because you can't "compete" with a robot or AI that never takes sick time, never makes a careless mistake, never goes on strike, and so on.
Even the mainstream is starting to wake up to this:
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs-051306434--finance.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/practically-human-smart-machines-job-052642993--finance.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/smart-machines-create-world-without-051025381--finance.html
Here is a list of possibilities I put together for dealing with this (of which a basic income is only one of many options, not all of which are as pleasant):
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Another version: http://www.federicopistono.org/blog/isaac-asimov-the-last-question
A basic income goes to everyone whether they work or not. If you work, you get whatever you earn (less taxes) on top of the basic income. So, it is not the same as the current welfare system where you lose "benefits" if you work. That is one reason it is a much better idea. There is no explicit disincentive to work with a basic income for all as opposed to income-dependent welfare or unemployment insurance.
I think there will be less and less paid work as we automate more and more. So, I'm not too worried about people not having much of an incentive to do extra work beyond unpaid child-care and volunteer work and civic participation and so on.
Maybe "Mother Earth" wants quadrillions of her human children to go to the stars and to take all her other creatures with them?
Something I originally wrote on that two decades ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/ac0ffaab1aa1c8ca
A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation
Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.
What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep. In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.
Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.
Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space. With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.
Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure. You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.
There is so much joy that awaits us. We must look up and forward. We must go on to a future - my future, our future. After eons of barrenness I am finally giving birth. Help me lest it all fall away and take eons more before I get this close again to having the children I always wanted.
(Paul D. Fernhout, Lindenhurst, NY 6/92)
===========
The preceeding is something I just scanned in from 1992, written while I was in the SUNY Stony Brook Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I had gone to learn more towards simulating gardens and space habitats). I had learned there that it took about 10 million years to regenerate lots of biodiversity from a large asteroid impact event, and this had happened several times in Earth's history.
The following is a related statement also just scanned in of what inspired it written at the same time.
--Paul Fernhout (NY Adirondack Park, Oct 2008)
=================
If one accepted that modern industrial civilization has initiated a great die-off of species comparable to the one sixty-five million years ago, how should one feel about this?
Is overwhelming sadness and anger the best emotional response? On the surface it may seem so. Apparently modern civilization and the accompanying pollution and deforestation are pulling apart a tapestry woven over billions of years. Anger at the short sighted and narrow values driving industry may seem well placed. Certainly feelings of joy and excitement would seem out of place.
Here are a few thoughts that may affect one's feelings. High levels of biodiversity can be generated from very low ones in about ten million years. On the time scales of the earth this may not be a blink of an eye, but it is a short nap. To humans this may mean a great loss, but Gaia might barely notice. It has after all been only sixty-five million years since the last die off.
Not all species will be affected equally. A simplification will occur where the more specialized cre
Why do many millionaires still "work" then? A related essay I wrote: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
"It all comes down to one question: Do you have faith in science and technology or not?"
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. "
"All that's needed is an over-abundance of trying to be "helpful" in just the wrong way."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands
"Incidentally that's the way we've been going down so far, with equating "user friendlyness" with "hiding the controls so you don't have to worry about it"."
Sad but true. Brilliant insight.
"Make the fscking things self-cleaning if you must ..."
Now that I like -- a self-cleaning vegetable juice...
"but at least give them interfaces with published, open specs that I plug into my kitchen controller that I tell what to do"
Again, very insightful. We need open kitchen standards more than specific whiz-bang appliances. Although those standards might apply to any kind of factory automation or home control.
From Manuel De Landa:
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. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible."
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "
See also:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html
"What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that."
Most industrialized countries are seeing their birth rates plummet (like Italy). People are also feeling a law of diminishing returns of more stuff. So, it is not clear our population or per-capita energy demands are likely to continue to grow that much. Not saying they won't (evolution argues fast growing subpopulations might expand and dominate) , but there are certainly counter trends to exponential growth. Nature has a way of turning exponentials into S-curves...
One the plus side, expanding into the galaxy could give humanity another 1000 years or so of exponential expansion. :-)
But here is an important point. As Julian Simon points out in "The Ultimate Resource", the human imagination is the ultimate resource, since it creates all other rsources (often by figuring out how unused stuff can be made into resources or existing stuff can be reorganized into better resources).
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
The USA once faced a "Peak Whale Oil" crisis in 1846. Yet we moved past that because someone figured out you could get a form of oil from the ground instead of just from whales. See:
http://io9.com/5930414/1846-the-year-we-hit-peak-sperm-whale-oil
If our population continued to grow exponentially, there would be quadrillions of people around to imagine new ways to deal with this issue of energy. I don't know what they might be in those four areas I mentioned (wants, efficiency, distribution, and availability). Or maybe it will be an innovation in some new area somehow. For example, maybe someone will figure out how to tap the zero point energy of the vacuum as both a source and sink of energy and matter? Or maybe someone else will figure out multiple universe theory, or some notion of our universe as a simulation.
I don't know for sure what it would be, or that someone would find it. But, are you willing to bet on your current conception of physics as being undeniable 100% accurate fact that sets hard limits for all time against the imaginations, research, and hard-work of many quadrillions of people (and sentient AIs) working together for hundreds of years? Are you willing to wager on that certainty to the point where, as with TFA where the author says essentially it would be better that all those quadrillions of people should never exist? Wouldn't that claim of omniscient certainty be an ultimate definition of self-centered hubris? Or at least, wouldn't it be "non-scientific", given scientists should always be open to falsifying their theories?
See also, as just one example from:
"They really ought to have known better."
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis
""Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth decimal place."
-- A. A. Michelson, 1894
[On the occasion of the dedication of a physics laboratory in Chicago, noting that all the more important physical laws had been discovered]"
See also Isaas Asimov's short-story "The Last Question", with the recurring line:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER".
Online here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0
You may well be right in the end. But there are a lot of uncertainties before then... And clearly there are a lot more obvious possibilities than TFA considers.
For example, Europe just issued a patent for for Francesco Piantelli's LENR process (aka "cold fusion"):
http://pesn.com/2013/01/24/9602268_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January24/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Good points. As I see it, the unknowns about human biochemistry and the genetic "code" have been like "security by obscurity" about an encryption algorithm that kept all human safe from intentional plagues (or mind control or suffering or whatever). Now that the obscurity is going away, for whatever well-intentioned reasons about curing illness, all humans are at ever increasing risk from engineered bioweapons. When our computer encryption "code" algorithms or their keys get compromised, we can generally replace the algorithm and/or keys. That is not possible when the human genetic code is fully understood. The risk will only continue to increase in that sense as our understanding of the genetic code increases. There may be ways to manage that risk through mutual security and intrinsic security and recognizing the irony of using post-scarcity technologies from a scarcity-biased world view, but it hard to get people raised in a scarcity-focused-culture to accept them. I discuss that at length here: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Fears of bioterrorism have been one of several concerns motivating my efforts towards better information management and collective design software so that communities have some chance of transcending the threat somehow:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html :-) In general, I think your skepticism about cold fusion is commendable and well warranted, but, a flat denial of its possibility is shading into the area where science progresses by going beyond what we know well and exploring into that which we are just speculating about (such as the exploration of human flight over a century ago that eventually led to success after much skepticism and many failures). I am concerned that you may have not been skeptical enough about the claims of mainstream hot fusion scientists when they dismiss something like cold fusion that might impact their funding. As I reflect on that issue of cold fusion, and think as well about another contentious human enterprise like homeopathy and as it compares to mainstream medicine with its own problems, I guess I begin to wonder about the general issue of the limits to knowledge given it is part of a social process. You have made it all too clear how anything involving people is subject to corruption and confusion for several reasons. I quote several fairly mainstream academics who say the same thing. So, this is plea in a way for skepticism about mainstream science. Of course, if one is skeptical about mainstream science, then that opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, either now, or in the future as our technology and science continue to change. I also mention in passing nutritional interventions to cure heart disease that you may have an interest in following up on. "
"I guess you might say what I am trying to do here is save you a million dollars, so you can keep it around to keep debunking the more usual paranormal claims related to ESP and so on.
It is good to be skeptical. It is possible to take it to the point of dysfunctional pathology, too.
BTW, on being caught up in a cult of a materialistic world view:
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
"Charles T. Tart is internationally known for his more than 50 years of research on the nature of consciousness, altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and parapsychology, and is one of the founders of the field of Transpersonal (spiritual) Psychology. His and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual."
That "reality check" need a reality check on more than snowballs; example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
Most of the world is heading in a few more years to being able to make solar power more cheaply than getting power from the grid (the parts that are not already there, like much of India).
I'm all for living within our current energy means in a reasonable way (and I abhor the pollution from mining and burning coal and oil), but she cites a calculation that projects exponential growth on Earth forward a few hundred years, calculates we will need to cover the whole Earth in solar panels (and then the Galaxy), and then concludes from that somehow that we should stay the way we are. That just does not seem to be a healthy emotional space to be in.
She's probably against self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, too? Even if it would mean quadrillions of people could live in the solar system and the survival of some aspect of humanity might be better assured? From the 1920s by J.D. Bernal on that:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
Maybe we should all move back to live in trees in Africa? Or maybe that is too "advanced" compared to flopping around in muddy tidal flats?
There are always at least four issues to a resource question:
* How much stuff do we "want" based on cultural expectations?
* How efficiently can we use what we have to make what we want?
* How should we divide all that up?
* How can we expand the scope of what we are doing to new types or resources or new areas to find them in?
That is the complexity of the issue and she stakes out a position without discussing the possibilities or why she prefers one over the other. There might be a case to be made in the direction she tries to go (e.g. the Amish may have an overall happier community-oriented way of life), but she did not make it.
Thanks. Don't know what to make of that, except maybe the Mac has better 3D WebGL support in Chrome/Chromium somehow?
If you really wanted to get it to work, you could try it in another browser perhaps (Chromium or Firefox) or maybe with some 3D system options changed (perhaps even under VirtualBox emulation).
See his book http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ However, a mistake Ray Kurzweil seems to be making is in assuming that individually isolated vitamins and such will have the same affect on the human body as the same nutrient as part of a whole food (the kind of food all humans have been eating for thousands of years -- until fairly recently). Dr. Joel Fuhrman in "Eat to Live" and his other writings shows why that assumption of individual nutrients having value is generally wrong (for example, with isolated beta carotene). And that also ignores that supplements may contain toxic by-products of the extractive process. That is why Ray is treading on fairly dangerous ground with his regime. That said, some very specific supplements like vitamin D, Omega-3s, Iodine, B-Complex, and a few others may be good to add to a diet with 90% of calories from vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and which otherwise avoids most artificial non-food supplements. See:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And also: ... âoeG-BOMBSâ is an acronym you can use to remember the most nutrient-dense, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods you should eat every day, and they should make up a significant proportion of your diet -- these foods are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease and promoting health and longevity."
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/gbombs.aspx
" G-BOMBS: Greens, Beans, Onions, Mushrooms, Berries, and Seeds
I emailed Ray about this probably a couple years ago, concerned for his health, but not sure if he read it or believed it. In general, it is not clear to me that Ray understands evolution very well.
I get the feeling Ray has a cartoonish view of it (this coming from someone who studied in a PhD program in ecology and evolution). If he had studied evolution, he'd be more likely to think about how natively evolved digital piranha would be likely to chew up the runtime of uploaded minds with meat-space origins. I suggested to him about a decade ago he go talk to some academics who knew a lot about evolution, but it is not clear he has.
If he had, he might also see how quickly AI slaves might evolve away from what he designed them to be -- especially if he designs them primarily through competitive economic and military purposes rather than through love, compassion, joy, community, and wonder.
Someone put up some letters I've sent him in the past about such topics:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
A key point I make in one: "I just wrote this about your 2005 book and I send you the first copy. Essentially, I suggest that while you are right in presenting the trends leading up to the singularity, ultimately your view of what should be done as we approach it and afterwards is more a result of the mirror effect of the singularity reflecting your own unacknowledged current personal biases in a quasi-Republican/Libertarian direction. The most productive response to the singularity may come from a very different perspective -- that of a return to the gift economy ideals of most hunter/gatherer societies, as exemplified by GNU/Linux these days."
See, for example:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?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, femin