Maybe we'll get to a better society eventually as more and more people realize the irony of using the technologies of abundance to fight over misperceptions of scarcity. Bucky Fuller said much the same thing. Ursula K. Le Guin says something similar in some ways in her books too (like "Always Coming Home"), about balance and community and appropriate use of technology.
So much can get forgotten from one generation of engineers to another -- especially all the things that did not work. Even assuming all the information is publicly available, the effort spent collecting it, organizing it, and filtering it from a vast amount of other information at the time is potentially valuable.
Why would you not want to help a next generation to build on the hard-won successes of the previous? As is said here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.""
Switzerland is a terrible example because it is a relatively small country with a large banking sector that essentially prospered in part by skimming a percentage off of huge global economic flows (including historically shielding transactions of dubious legality via their privacy laws). Such a pattern of success can't work that way for everyone, as nice a country as Switzerland may be in many respects.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland
The central issue regardless of what jobs people do is that so much wealth has become concentrated in so few hands. This has happened in big part because the value of automated capital managed by large bureaucratic systems with monopolies over markets is triumphing over the value of individual human labor. See Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" article for more details: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
You can't have a "service" economy when robotics and AI is better than most people for most tasks. You can't have a service economy when most things become manufactured so well they don't need much servicing or it is just cheaper to replace them with new things fresh from the automated factory.
That said, I feel that your other points on the US/Roman comparison are insightful.
Headlines like "Internet accounts for 5 million jobs and 4% of the economy" are misleading because they do not say how many jobs the internet made obsolete or how much older economic activity is no longer needed. In the same way that agricultural labor went from 90% of the US workforce (200 years ago) to about 2% (although lots of people still garden as a hobby), manufacturing etc. is going from around 35% of the US workforce (50 years ago) to around 10% now and probably, like agriculture, around 2% fairly soon. The decline of paid manufacturing labor is inevitable given flexible robotics and 3D printers and so on. Just look at a stream of slashdot articles on robotics and such. I agree that thinking the "service" economy is going to provide jobs, like some say, is ridiculous -- but I feel it is because service robotics and AI and free information exchange is proliferating. We need to fundamentally rethink the notion of an income-through-jobs link as the main thing granting a right to consume the fruits of our increasingly automated agricultural, industrial, and service sectors (see the 1964 "Triple Revolution Memorandum" and Marshall Brain's recent story "Manna"). We need to some combination of a "basic income", a proliferation of personally-owned means of production (like gardening robots, 3D printers, and solar panels), an expanded gift economy like via GNU/Linux and Wikipedia and the Creative Commons, and better internet-facilitated participatory government planning at all levels. More details are here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
For good or bad, the wage-based economy as we knew it is in its final death spiral. The stronger the demand for decent wages and good working conditions, the faster most jobs of any sort will be automated. For example, here is a robotic system under development that can replace most fast-food workers: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/fast-food-robotics-an-update/ There may be some jobs that will be exceptions to automation for longer periods of time (for example, ones at Google developing AI to replace more jobs), but overall that is the trend. Here is a related video parable I made about that: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"In an article last month, I argued that users would be better served by a *centralized* social networking system where users could store profiles on a server of their choice, rather than a centralized system like Facebook that stores everyone's accounts for them."
Should be "decentralized" or "distributed".
See also my post here: "Raising the bar to a Social Semantic Desktop" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3161201&cid=41545181 "Here are some general thoughts about how Diaspora might relate to the Semantic Web and a Social Semantic Desktop, and how that might make it even more awesome to encourage everyone to migrate to it...."
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm "Cropland- About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are primarily used to feed livestock. The amount of land used to produce all vegetables in the U.S. is less than 3 million acres.... Range and Pasture Land- Some 788 million acres, or 41.4 percent of the U. S. excluding Alaska, are grazed by livestock. This is an area the size of 8.3 states the size of Montana. Grazed lands include rangeland, pasture and cropland pasture. More than 309 million acres of federal, state and other public lands are grazed by domestic livestock. Another 140 million acres are forested lands that are grazed.... The real message here is that we can afford to restore hundreds of millions of acres in the U.S. if we simply shift our diets away from meat...."
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary "An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.
In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"
Expanding on your great points: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Just sounding like a broken record, sorry: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Interesting post as is the one you replied to. I've learned so much from Slashdot over the past thirteen or fourteen years and really enjoyed the community. Personally, I feel something like a social semantic desktop, based around emerging standards for exchanging semantic information, may be in our near future though.
Here is something I posted to the Diaspora list on that about two years ago, included here in its entirety: "Raising the bar to supporting a Social Semantic Desktop" https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/diaspora-dev/TNNpvfFqNG8 ======== Here are some general thoughts about how Diaspora might relate to the Semantic Web and a Social Semantic Desktop, and how that might make it even more awesome to encourage everyone to migrate to it.
Please consider this document under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license (same as Wikipedia or content on the joindiaspora.com site) -- except for quoted material which is assumed to be under fair use in this context.
=== Overview with a semantic example
What I propose is that Diaspora emphasize either supporting or directly integrating semantic technologies based mostly around exchanging collections of ad-hoc semantic "triples" like RDF (the Resource Description Framework) is built around. Such triples define essentially a database of ad-hoc objects with field names and values (although triples can be used in other ways, too).
(There might actually be more than three components in a "triple" in practice, like a context, namespaces, a timestamp, a reified uuid, and an author, and triples themselves might be embedded in transactions.)
Here is an example of using triples to define two different objects that are related at the end:
And, in case it was not obvious, the above defines two objects (each with a different uuid), one representing a user with a routing method and the other representing a design document that has been sent to that first user.
In practice there would probably be higher levels of abstraction used eventually rather than embedding people's names in there like that, or to support timestamped encrypted versions of documents, or to represent the act of transmitting as an object, and so on... This was just to illustrate the basic idea of ad hoc objects.
One could imagine that Dispora would have some general support for moving such triples around (maybe in transactions
To agree first with your second point, that none of us are morally perfect (and taking "perfect" as meaning some paragon of altruistic virtue?), there are two aspects of that I might call metaphysical and economic. After commenting on those, I will respond to your first point on defectors or parasites.
A metaphysical point about moral imperfection is that some level of competition seems inherent in our physical and temporal universe. This seems to derive from the limits of physical resources in an area at a particular time as processed by a sense of identity with certain biochemical and intellectual limits (and in the presence of other entities with a different sense of identity to some degree). For example, an oak tree may be a wonder of trillions of cells cooperating to reach up hundreds of feet in the air, but a tree will also brutally shade out all other plant life below it causing a dead zone underneath with no other plants. So, a tree is passively competitive for the resource of sunlight even when it seems like nothing is going on. A tree may also put put chemicals in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plants, and yet it may invest massive amounts of resources as seeds like acorns to create a next generation of on average just one more tree (while also feeding a bunch of squirrels). The human condition is no different. The human body is also a miracle of cooperation of trillions of cells, but the human immune system of even the most altruistic soul will still kill off bacteria and viruses that it identifies as "not self". Some cells go "cancerous" and start multiplying on their own at a cost to the whole. So cancer is basically an individual cell defecting from an obedient cooperative role in the body. The human "body" is also something like 90% bacteria by numbers (mostly in the gut). The human immune system and human cellular matrix essentially acts a bit like a constitution and infrastructure to support that bacterial ecosystem (including rejecting some bacterial processes). So, this issue of life (identity?) seems to involve in practice some mix of cooperation and competition. This complexity of both cooperation and competition seems inherent in the metaphysics of this plane of realty as best we know. Whether we can fully transcend that competitive aspect on this plane of existence is a deep spiritual question to which I do not have a definitive answer. Even a choice to stop killing plant cells by eating them is a choice to let trillions of human and bacterial cells die in your own body, as well as a choice to limit future thoughts for possible better solution or future actions to help others and the planet (like by creating lunar greenhouses for more plant life). There just is, so far as I know, no easy answer to this metaphysical issue of competition amidst cooperation -- even though plenty of people would be more than happy to supply such an answer or to accept one as some form of a pre-thought-out religion. Since a life lived in existential angst and conflict will generally reduce fecundity, there are even evolutionary arguments for the success of religions that deny evolution::-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
The economic point about moral imperfection is that as long as we try to be an economic actor in the current economic system, we are essentially morally compromised due to what is easy or difficult economically as we make various tradeoffs. For example, if you are a plumber, you are in a noble profession that has probably done more for human health over the last century (through improved sanitation) than all the doctors in the world. But if the plastic piping you install today did not have all of the true costs of oil paid up front (pollution, war, uncertainty), then you are to some extent contributing to the problem of an immoral economy via an "externality" (an unpaid cost passed on to others). If you are a software developer making entertaining games
Thanks for the comment, and you make several good points. Still, the fictional character "Atticus Finch" said in "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun". These days, the easiest way to get nuked (or invaded or quarantined) is to have a nuclear ICBM or start building one. With one ICBM, you'd be the world's next North Korea. I know you were probably just saying that to make a point, but as a counter-point, is nuclear blackmail really the way you would want to get your liveliehood if you could do it? Do you want to be the next tin-pot dictator always waiting for the assassin's blow? Do you want to preside over a land where people are starving to death (like North Korea in the past) because you care more about power than the people? Here you are using the most advanced communications system for sharing knowledge the world has ever known (the internet, and sites like slashdot) and what you have shared right now is a strategy for nuclear blackmail. It also sounds a bit like you are trying to dissuade others from trying to make the world a more joyful and healthy and more secure place (by over-emphasizing the point that there are some anti-social people out there)?
As I write in that essay, there are new ways of thinking about security. http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."
The balance is changing. The world is a smaller place. I don't like to use "overpopulation" to describe the process because that implies the solution is to get rid of lots of people. I better term might be "under-resourced" or "under-landed" or "under-expanded". http://www.juliansimon.com
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
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....
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality ( http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html ) and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off: * totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead * with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?
"When you think of it, with things like the Boston tea party and other disruption, I'm sure all the founding father's would be branded terrorists today."
Or as has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Still, the fact is, Canada never revolted against the crown, and they still got independence eventually, and it seems like a great country in a lot of ways. It has universal health care, for example.
By the way, being able to print local currencies is one motivation for the US American Revolution that is rarely talked about: http://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/fraud/how-benjamin-franklin-made-new-england-prosperous/ "Franklin, who was one of the chief architects of the American independence, wrote it clearly: "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.""
By revolting, the American colonists overall managed to shuck off that war-related tax burden (related to public debt incurred in the UK for empire and conquest) while still gaining the land benefits won in that war by the British from the French and Natives Americans.
Of course, some Native Americans might suggest that they have been fighting terrorism since 1492... http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html "But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By
On April 1st, 2008, a fierce discussion started at Google's latest effort, Project Virgle. It proposed a grassroots effort to get a colony on Mars. What they didn't expect is that the Internet would respond so positively to what was hastily discovered as an April Fools Joke. Dissatisfied with what that first 24 hours of discussion and work represented, a number of members struck out to do what Google thought was only a joke, and start a real grassroots effort to inhabit space. Thus OpenVirgle was born, with every intention of gathering talent from across the globe, and focusing it all on creating ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology.
This project remains a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate in a playful learning community of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations, which lay the groundwork for humanity's eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe), and also pool our current resources to make all of these ideas a physical reality. We believe that humanity works much better when they work together, and that the fastest way to advance knowledge rapidly is to have it shared equally amongst the largest group possible.
OpenVirgle's mission is, first and foremost, the consolidation of information. There are many pro-space-settlement groups out there, each with great ideas. The problem is, they are all competitive for funding, and they can't seem to agree on space settlement tactics and technologies. We will attempt to bring together all of these ideas and all of this information, and put it all up for proper comparison and discussion. Hopefully, future groups, or future iterations of OpenVirgle ourselves, will be able to use this collected knowledge to "put our eggs into a few more baskets" than just Earth.
We hope to end a history of secrecy and paranoia surrounding high technology development, and bring us all together towards a larger shared purpose, pooling resources and sharing the benefits of our combined work with the entirety of the human race. Yes, it's idealistic, but all the best grassroots efforts are, and if you don't shoot for the stars, you will never leave the planet.
====
In practice though, over the last couple years, that energy has moved into the Open Manufacturing and DIY and Maker movements, which are more general. But the geenral idea is stil what will get us there. An SSI conference paper I presented on this theme in 2001: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded."
I agree that human population now likely exceeds the capacity for traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyles (maybe by several times). Increasing population density leading to more structured bureaucratic militarized societies is probably a big reason most hunter/gatherer societies were lost (attacked or assimilated or pushed away onto marginal lands to fade away). But that does not invalidate the truths that according to Marshall Sahlins hunter/gatherers had *more* free time than most of us today, and what work they did was very self-directed, often more like professional work of today.
So, figure out a way that we can stop doing all that 95%+ of excess wasteful labor, and we then would indeed have free time, and our collective standard of living would go up. But then how would people be able to afford to buy food and pay rent? (Thus a basic income or other alternatives become needed...)
My point is not that hunter/gather low-tech is better than high-tech. It is that both our current high-tech existence and our historical low-tech existence have different good and bad points. There are many forms of technology, too, (e.e.g the "appropriate technology" idea) so even high-tech and low-tech is a crude distinction when we are talking about com
"That's certainly a different way of looking at it. Primitive people had it good because they were unaware of how bad they had it."
Well, aspects of that are true. A Forrest Gump or "Being There" sort of happiness?
"To them it was natural to bear four children in hopes that one might mature to adulthood - although a fifth child was unlikely, as the mother's chances of surviving that many childbirths were not high."
Since just to maintain the human population requires two children per woman on average, that statement be correct as it. But yes, its been said that hunter/gather societies have higher infant mortality, but it is still nowhere near as bad as you say; see: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/life-expectancy-hunter-gatherer/ "On average, 57%, 64%, and 67% of children make it to 15 years among "untouched" hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively.... Of folks who hit age 15, the percentage of hunter-gatherers who make it to age 45 is higher than the percentage of forager-horticulturalists who make it to age 45, but not by much -- 64% to 61%. Acculturated hunter-gatherers excel here; 79% of their 15 year-olds make it to age 45. You might even say the study's acculturated hunter-gatherers were essentially Primal, eating and moving traditionally while enjoying access to modern medicine. From age 45, the mean number of expected remaining years of life is 20.7, 19.8, and 24.6 for hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. Give or take a few years, they could all "expect" to live about two decades if they were still alive by age 45 â" a far cry from a "nasty, short, and brutish" existence."
Just because people living in 1800s era crowded cities in England full of disease and starvation died young, and things have improved since then, that does not mean if you go back 20,000 years that it just stays the same or keeps getting worse. Consider: "Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology" by Clark Spencer Larsen http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html "For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
"People didn't die from the nasty age-related diseases like cancer or heart disease because they died much earlier due to injury, hardship, or violence"
It is true that many did die of injury, hardship and violence. But, our best science now tells us that cancer and heart disease are diet and lifestyle related (e.g. The China Study and others). Cancer and heart disease are not for the most part age-related (well, cancer a little). Kids are not getting cancer in the USA because they are old; they are getting cancer because of diet, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, and exposure to toxins. Old hunter/gathers essentially do not have these diseases (well, maybe some cancer but not like in the USA). Only people who start eating a Western diet get these diseases in appreciable numbers. http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
Slashdot Mirror
a short story that inspired Ted Nelson and so the hypertext web: http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
I'd second that recommendation, and his other books too:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Maybe we'll get to a better society eventually as more and more people realize the irony of using the technologies of abundance to fight over misperceptions of scarcity. Bucky Fuller said much the same thing. Ursula K. Le Guin says something similar in some ways in her books too (like "Always Coming Home"), about balance and community and appropriate use of technology.
So much can get forgotten from one generation of engineers to another -- especially all the things that did not work. Even assuming all the information is publicly available, the effort spent collecting it, organizing it, and filtering it from a vast amount of other information at the time is potentially valuable.
Why would you not want to help a next generation to build on the hard-won successes of the previous? As is said here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.""
Switzerland is a terrible example because it is a relatively small country with a large banking sector that essentially prospered in part by skimming a percentage off of huge global economic flows (including historically shielding transactions of dubious legality via their privacy laws). Such a pattern of success can't work that way for everyone, as nice a country as Switzerland may be in many respects..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland
The central issue regardless of what jobs people do is that so much wealth has become concentrated in so few hands. This has happened in big part because the value of automated capital managed by large bureaucratic systems with monopolies over markets is triumphing over the value of individual human labor. See Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" article for more details:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
You can't have a "service" economy when robotics and AI is better than most people for most tasks. You can't have a service economy when most things become manufactured so well they don't need much servicing or it is just cheaper to replace them with new things fresh from the automated factory.
That said, I feel that your other points on the US/Roman comparison are insightful.
Headlines like "Internet accounts for 5 million jobs and 4% of the economy" are misleading because they do not say how many jobs the internet made obsolete or how much older economic activity is no longer needed. In the same way that agricultural labor went from 90% of the US workforce (200 years ago) to about 2% (although lots of people still garden as a hobby), manufacturing etc. is going from around 35% of the US workforce (50 years ago) to around 10% now and probably, like agriculture, around 2% fairly soon. The decline of paid manufacturing labor is inevitable given flexible robotics and 3D printers and so on. Just look at a stream of slashdot articles on robotics and such. I agree that thinking the "service" economy is going to provide jobs, like some say, is ridiculous -- but I feel it is because service robotics and AI and free information exchange is proliferating. We need to fundamentally rethink the notion of an income-through-jobs link as the main thing granting a right to consume the fruits of our increasingly automated agricultural, industrial, and service sectors (see the 1964 "Triple Revolution Memorandum" and Marshall Brain's recent story "Manna"). We need to some combination of a "basic income", a proliferation of personally-owned means of production (like gardening robots, 3D printers, and solar panels), an expanded gift economy like via GNU/Linux and Wikipedia and the Creative Commons, and better internet-facilitated participatory government planning at all levels. More details are here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
For good or bad, the wage-based economy as we knew it is in its final death spiral. The stronger the demand for decent wages and good working conditions, the faster most jobs of any sort will be automated. For example, here is a robotic system under development that can replace most fast-food workers:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/fast-food-robotics-an-update/
There may be some jobs that will be exceptions to automation for longer periods of time (for example, ones at Google developing AI to replace more jobs), but overall that is the trend. Here is a related video parable I made about that:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"In an article last month, I argued that users would be better served by a *centralized* social networking system where users could store profiles on a server of their choice, rather than a centralized system like Facebook that stores everyone's accounts for them."
Should be "decentralized" or "distributed".
See also my post here: ..."
"Raising the bar to a Social Semantic Desktop"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3161201&cid=41545181
"Here are some general thoughts about how Diaspora might relate to the Semantic Web and a Social Semantic Desktop, and how that might make it even more awesome to encourage everyone to migrate to it.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm ... Range and Pasture Land- Some 788 million acres, or 41.4 percent of the U. S. excluding Alaska, are grazed by livestock. This is an area the size of 8.3 states the size of Montana. Grazed lands include rangeland, pasture and cropland pasture. More than 309 million acres of federal, state and other public lands are grazed by domestic livestock. Another 140 million acres are forested lands that are grazed. ... The real message here is that we can afford to restore hundreds of millions of acres in the U.S. if we simply shift our diets away from meat. ..."
"Cropland- About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are primarily used to feed livestock. The amount of land used to produce all vegetables in the U.S. is less than 3 million acres.
See also:
http://www.ravediet.com/links.html
And how to grown lots of vegetables on little land, which could be roboticized no doubt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_foot_gardening
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.
In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Expanding on your great points: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Video of me using Compendium in real time to create a concept map of a discussion: http://barcamp.org/w/page/47221410/Desktop%20or%20Mobile%20or%20Web
No video, but here is the concept map made in real-time with Compendium in another workshop at the 2011 Capitol Camp:
http://barcamp.org/w/page/47222818/Tools%20for%20Collective%20Sensemaking%20and%20Civic%20Engagement
Just sounding like a broken record, sorry: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Interesting post as is the one you replied to. I've learned so much from Slashdot over the past thirteen or fourteen years and really enjoyed the community. Personally, I feel something like a social semantic desktop, based around emerging standards for exchanging semantic information, may be in our near future though.
Here is something I posted to the Diaspora list on that about two years ago, included here in its entirety:
"Raising the bar to supporting a Social Semantic Desktop"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/diaspora-dev/TNNpvfFqNG8
========
Here are some general thoughts about how Diaspora might relate to the
Semantic Web and a Social Semantic Desktop, and how that might make it even
more awesome to encourage everyone to migrate to it.
Please consider this document under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license (same as
Wikipedia or content on the joindiaspora.com site) -- except for quoted
material which is assumed to be under fair use in this context.
=== Overview with a semantic example
What I propose is that Diaspora emphasize either supporting or directly
integrating semantic technologies based mostly around exchanging collections
of ad-hoc semantic "triples" like RDF (the Resource Description Framework)
is built around. Such triples define essentially a database of ad-hoc
objects with field names and values (although triples can be used in other
ways, too).
(There might actually be more than three components in a "triple" in
practice, like a context, namespaces, a timestamp, a reified uuid, and an
author, and triples themselves might be embedded in transactions.)
Here is an example of using triples to define two different objects that are
related at the end:
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE represents-user "Daniel Grippi"
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE has-role DiasporaDeveloper
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE has-role DiasporaFounder
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE routed-by joindiaspora.com
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 type DesignDocument
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 title "Disapora Roadmap"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 content "Disapora is..."
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 author "Maxwell Salzberg"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 reviewed-by "Raphael Sofaer"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 reviewed-by "Ilya Zhitomirskiy"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 license CC-BY-SA
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 checksum 57AB28F91028
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 signature C39E5ADE93E4
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 encryption None
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 sent-to
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE
And, in case it was not obvious, the above defines two objects (each with a
different uuid), one representing a user with a routing method and the other
representing a design document that has been sent to that first user.
In practice there would probably be higher levels of abstraction used
eventually rather than embedding people's names in there like that, or to
support timestamped encrypted versions of documents, or to represent the act
of transmitting as an object, and so on... This was just to illustrate the
basic idea of ad hoc objects.
One could imagine that Dispora would have some general support for moving
such triples around (maybe in transactions
From RSA Animate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Which supports your point, depending on the nature of the task.
There are also some other somewhat differing ideas like on this Wikipedia page, especially this section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_motivation_and_the_16_basic_desires_theory
To agree first with your second point, that none of us are morally perfect (and taking "perfect" as meaning some paragon of altruistic virtue?), there are two aspects of that I might call metaphysical and economic. After commenting on those, I will respond to your first point on defectors or parasites.
A metaphysical point about moral imperfection is that some level of competition seems inherent in our physical and temporal universe. This seems to derive from the limits of physical resources in an area at a particular time as processed by a sense of identity with certain biochemical and intellectual limits (and in the presence of other entities with a different sense of identity to some degree). For example, an oak tree may be a wonder of trillions of cells cooperating to reach up hundreds of feet in the air, but a tree will also brutally shade out all other plant life below it causing a dead zone underneath with no other plants. So, a tree is passively competitive for the resource of sunlight even when it seems like nothing is going on. A tree may also put put chemicals in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plants, and yet it may invest massive amounts of resources as seeds like acorns to create a next generation of on average just one more tree (while also feeding a bunch of squirrels). The human condition is no different. The human body is also a miracle of cooperation of trillions of cells, but the human immune system of even the most altruistic soul will still kill off bacteria and viruses that it identifies as "not self". Some cells go "cancerous" and start multiplying on their own at a cost to the whole. So cancer is basically an individual cell defecting from an obedient cooperative role in the body. The human "body" is also something like 90% bacteria by numbers (mostly in the gut). The human immune system and human cellular matrix essentially acts a bit like a constitution and infrastructure to support that bacterial ecosystem (including rejecting some bacterial processes). So, this issue of life (identity?) seems to involve in practice some mix of cooperation and competition. This complexity of both cooperation and competition seems inherent in the metaphysics of this plane of realty as best we know. Whether we can fully transcend that competitive aspect on this plane of existence is a deep spiritual question to which I do not have a definitive answer. Even a choice to stop killing plant cells by eating them is a choice to let trillions of human and bacterial cells die in your own body, as well as a choice to limit future thoughts for possible better solution or future actions to help others and the planet (like by creating lunar greenhouses for more plant life). There just is, so far as I know, no easy answer to this metaphysical issue of competition amidst cooperation -- even though plenty of people would be more than happy to supply such an answer or to accept one as some form of a pre-thought-out religion. Since a life lived in existential angst and conflict will generally reduce fecundity, there are even evolutionary arguments for the success of religions that deny evolution: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
The economic point about moral imperfection is that as long as we try to be an economic actor in the current economic system, we are essentially morally compromised due to what is easy or difficult economically as we make various tradeoffs. For example, if you are a plumber, you are in a noble profession that has probably done more for human health over the last century (through improved sanitation) than all the doctors in the world. But if the plastic piping you install today did not have all of the true costs of oil paid up front (pollution, war, uncertainty), then you are to some extent contributing to the problem of an immoral economy via an "externality" (an unpaid cost passed on to others). If you are a software developer making entertaining games
Thanks for the comment, and you make several good points. Still, the fictional character "Atticus Finch" said in "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun". These days, the easiest way to get nuked (or invaded or quarantined) is to have a nuclear ICBM or start building one. With one ICBM, you'd be the world's next North Korea. I know you were probably just saying that to make a point, but as a counter-point, is nuclear blackmail really the way you would want to get your liveliehood if you could do it? Do you want to be the next tin-pot dictator always waiting for the assassin's blow? Do you want to preside over a land where people are starving to death (like North Korea in the past) because you care more about power than the people? Here you are using the most advanced communications system for sharing knowledge the world has ever known (the internet, and sites like slashdot) and what you have shared right now is a strategy for nuclear blackmail. It also sounds a bit like you are trying to dissuade others from trying to make the world a more joyful and healthy and more secure place (by over-emphasizing the point that there are some anti-social people out there)?
As I write in that essay, there are new ways of thinking about security.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."
I am advocating for mutual security and intrinsic security. It sounds to me like you are re-affirming the old ways towards security, like unilateral dominance through a big military, which will be ultimately self-defeating with modern technology. What good is a US aircraft carrier in battle when one small smart missile could sink it? :-)
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/chinese-kill-weapon
Or where it could someday be infiltrated by a nanotech-based rust monster?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_monster
What good is your nuclear ICBM when someone (or something) figures out how to explode it in the silo or retarget it at your home city to make you the slave?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
The balance is changing. The world is a smaller place. I don't like to use "overpopulation" to describe the process because that implies the solution is to get rid of lots of people. I better term might be "under-resourced" or "under-landed" or "under-expanded".
http://www.juliansimon.com
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
===
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
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. ...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
From 10 years ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#what_have_funding_policies_in_automotive_intelligence_wrought
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality ( http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html )
and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?
If, for ex
"When you think of it, with things like the Boston tea party and other disruption, I'm sure all the founding father's would be branded terrorists today."
Or as has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
So, if they had lost, they would have been hanged back then, which is essentially the same thing as being branded a terrorist at the time. So, history is written (or rewritten) by the victors:
http://www.weeklyramble.com/culture/history-is-written-by-the-victors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole
Still, the fact is, Canada never revolted against the crown, and they still got independence eventually, and it seems like a great country in a lot of ways. It has universal health care, for example.
British also were willing to free North American slaves during the Revolutionary war:
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/autumn07/slaves.cfm
By the way, being able to print local currencies is one motivation for the US American Revolution that is rarely talked about:
http://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/fraud/how-benjamin-franklin-made-new-england-prosperous/
"Franklin, who was one of the chief architects of the American independence, wrote it clearly: "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.""
Those taxes were to pay for the French-and-Indian war, whose costs ultimately proved ruinous to both the British and the French governments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War#Consequences
By revolting, the American colonists overall managed to shuck off that war-related tax burden (related to public debt incurred in the UK for empire and conquest) while still gaining the land benefits won in that war by the British from the French and Natives Americans.
Of course, some Native Americans might suggest that they have been fighting terrorism since 1492...
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By
From a site I maintain: http://www.openvirgle.net/
On April 1st, 2008, a fierce discussion started at Google's latest effort, Project Virgle. It proposed a grassroots effort to get a colony on Mars. What they didn't expect is that the Internet would respond so positively to what was hastily discovered as an April Fools Joke. Dissatisfied with what that first 24 hours of discussion and work represented, a number of members struck out to do what Google thought was only a joke, and start a real grassroots effort to inhabit space. Thus OpenVirgle was born, with every intention of gathering talent from across the globe, and focusing it all on creating ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology.
This project remains a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate in a playful learning community of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations, which lay the groundwork for humanity's eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe), and also pool our current resources to make all of these ideas a physical reality. We believe that humanity works much better when they work together, and that the fastest way to advance knowledge rapidly is to have it shared equally amongst the largest group possible.
OpenVirgle's mission is, first and foremost, the consolidation of information. There are many pro-space-settlement groups out there, each with great ideas. The problem is, they are all competitive for funding, and they can't seem to agree on space settlement tactics and technologies. We will attempt to bring together all of these ideas and all of this information, and put it all up for proper comparison and discussion. Hopefully, future groups, or future iterations of OpenVirgle ourselves, will be able to use this collected knowledge to "put our eggs into a few more baskets" than just Earth.
We hope to end a history of secrecy and paranoia surrounding high technology development, and bring us all together towards a larger shared purpose, pooling resources and sharing the benefits of our combined work with the entirety of the human race. Yes, it's idealistic, but all the best grassroots efforts are, and if you don't shoot for the stars, you will never leave the planet.
====
In practice though, over the last couple years, that energy has moved into the Open Manufacturing and DIY and Maker movements, which are more general. But the geenral idea is stil what will get us there. An SSI conference paper I presented on this theme in 2001:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
"Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded."
I agree that human population now likely exceeds the capacity for traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyles (maybe by several times). Increasing population density leading to more structured bureaucratic militarized societies is probably a big reason most hunter/gatherer societies were lost (attacked or assimilated or pushed away onto marginal lands to fade away). But that does not invalidate the truths that according to Marshall Sahlins hunter/gatherers had *more* free time than most of us today, and what work they did was very self-directed, often more like professional work of today.
Most (95%?) of the labor hours expended today in the USA tend to be about guarding, engaging in non-productive make-work, or is just destructive or competitively wasteful, or is trying to compensate for the other ills of the society from the previous problems. For example, most heart surgery is apparently worse than useless according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Most schooling is harming kids according to John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Most farming (mainly for animal product production) is killing us and destroying our land:
http://www.ravediet.com/reviews.html
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Much policing related to drug laws is destroying our communities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
Most of US military use is making us less safe:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/our-work/law-and-security/torture-on-tv/less-safe/
http://www.cato.org/store/books/power-problem-how-american-military-dominance-makes-us-less-safe-less-prosperous-less-free-har
Most computer software development is unneeded; for example IBM had a perfectly good in-house Forth they could have used as a command line interpreter rather than pay Bill Gated for MS-DOS which he bought from someone else. Most Wall Street computerized trading is of little-to-negative social value (just high stakes zero-sum horse racing and putting the whole unregulated derivatives system at risk of systemic collapse).
Most college degrees are not worth it either economically or educationally:
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/why-college-may-not-worth-133900551.html
I could go on... And on.. And on...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
So, figure out a way that we can stop doing all that 95%+ of excess wasteful labor, and we then would indeed have free time, and our collective standard of living would go up. But then how would people be able to afford to buy food and pay rent? (Thus a basic income or other alternatives become needed...)
My point is not that hunter/gather low-tech is better than high-tech. It is that both our current high-tech existence and our historical low-tech existence have different good and bad points. There are many forms of technology, too, (e.e.g the "appropriate technology" idea) so even high-tech and low-tech is a crude distinction when we are talking about com
I guess I had just a tiny bit more willpower than you. :-)
"That's certainly a different way of looking at it. Primitive people had it good because they were unaware of how bad they had it."
Well, aspects of that are true. A Forrest Gump or "Being There" sort of happiness?
"To them it was natural to bear four children in hopes that one might mature to adulthood - although a fifth child was unlikely, as the mother's chances of surviving that many childbirths were not high."
Since just to maintain the human population requires two children per woman on average, that statement be correct as it. But yes, its been said that hunter/gather societies have higher infant mortality, but it is still nowhere near as bad as you say; see: ... Of folks who hit age 15, the percentage of hunter-gatherers who make it to age 45 is higher than the percentage of forager-horticulturalists who make it to age 45, but not by much -- 64% to 61%. Acculturated hunter-gatherers excel here; 79% of their 15 year-olds make it to age 45. You might even say the study's acculturated hunter-gatherers were essentially Primal, eating and moving traditionally while enjoying access to modern medicine. From age 45, the mean number of expected remaining years of life is 20.7, 19.8, and 24.6 for hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively. Give or take a few years, they could all "expect" to live about two decades if they were still alive by age 45 â" a far cry from a "nasty, short, and brutish" existence."
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/life-expectancy-hunter-gatherer/
"On average, 57%, 64%, and 67% of children make it to 15 years among "untouched" hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, respectively.
Just because people living in 1800s era crowded cities in England full of disease and starvation died young, and things have improved since then, that does not mean if you go back 20,000 years that it just stays the same or keeps getting worse. Consider:
"Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology" by Clark Spencer Larsen
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
"People didn't die from the nasty age-related diseases like cancer or heart disease because they died much earlier due to injury, hardship, or violence"
It is true that many did die of injury, hardship and violence. But, our best science now tells us that cancer and heart disease are diet and lifestyle related (e.g. The China Study and others). Cancer and heart disease are not for the most part age-related (well, cancer a little). Kids are not getting cancer in the USA because they are old; they are getting cancer because of diet, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, and exposure to toxins. Old hunter/gathers essentially do not have these diseases (well, maybe some cancer but not like in the USA). Only people who start eating a Western diet get these diseases in appreciable numbers.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
"So no, I don't buy th