http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "Still, even with no net new jobs created during the 2000-2009 decade, the US GDP increased from about US$10 trillion a year in 2000 to about US$14 trillion a year in 2009 (according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis). This increase in GDP came from several sources. Much came from increased productivity (more produced per worker through automation) and from improved design (with new designs being easier to make or use). Some came through technical issues with GDP calculation, since goods or services produced mostly abroad are still credited to the USA's GDP when they are resold locally with some value added (like when Walmart sells goods made in China with some markup to cover profit and the cost of operating distribution centers in the USA, so the markup contributes to the GDP). Some came from what Jane Jacobs termed "transactions of decline" like increased spending on prisons, wars, and care for those sickened from things like pollution or vitamin D deficiency, which is why GDP is a problematical indicator as to societal well-being."
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm "Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of today's database systems.... the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"
And also: http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2003/Kent01/EML2003Kent01.html "The identity problem is intractable. To shed light on the problem, which currently is a swirl of interlocking problems that tend to get tumbled together in any discussion, we separate out the various issues so they can be rationally addressed one at a time as much as possible. We explore various aspects of the problem, pick one aspect to focus on, pose an idealized theoretical solution, and then explore the factors rendering this solution impractical. The success of this endeavor depends on our agreement that the selected aspect is a good one to focus on, and that the idealized solution represents a desirable target to try to approximate as well as we can. If we achieve consensus here, then we at least have a unifying framework for coordinating the various partial solutions to fragments of the problem. "
I thought you were going to also make a point about non-Western cultures often being less "object oriented" in their language learning (and perhaps more "relation-oriented" which I've heard in the past)...
Also, Alan Kay, who coined the term "object oriented" for Smalltalk, and said C++ was not what he had in mind, suggested later he should have used "message oriented", since message sending and processing is really at the heart of Smalltalk.
The cost trends for solar PV show it cheaper than coal real soon now (as in a few years, google on GE and solar power cheaper than coal), and at that tipping point our society will begin to switch over in a big way. There may be other energy solutions (including cold fusion) but that solar trend is happening and is pretty much unstoppable at this point. Solar PV is already cheaper than fossil fuels in many materially poorer countries.
Time and time again people predict forward only the negative exponential trends while ignoring the exponential good ones. People dismiss solar power because it is such a small percent, ignoring it has been growing exponentially for decades and there is no reason to think it will not continue to grow (barring something even better). Cheap electricity can produce cheap synthetic liquid fuels or hydrogen, so your argument about transport is weak.
Because you raise the issue of corruption, it is also true the current economic concentrations of power resists their displacement in various ways, including in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, using lobbying to get tax and regulatory preferences... If fossil fuels had paid their true costs up-front in pollution and risk, renewables and energy efficiency would have been economically cheaper since the 1970s.
Remember, at one point nuclear weapons were an impractical fantasy. Now we have to live with them, as they were brought into reality by cooperation and hard work and inspiration. So, today's Star Trek impractical fantasy (medical tricorders? portable small global communicators? matter printers?) may very well be tomorrow's reality (and do all exists in some form now). We should choose wisely what we want to make into reality of all the things we can imagine.
Still, overall I agree with you that: "There are solutions but they are not easy or simple and will take work." But they also take imagination and some optimism.
Good points. See also my essay: http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/e34f9013282af9d7 "The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) with strategic nuclear weapons policy is based on decision makers being rational and not wanting their own country destroyed (were they to use their nuclear weapons and receive reprisals or even just spreading radiation). This essay explores a few reasons why this MAD policy will ultimately fail due to irrationality or other reasons for bad decisions by humans or the bureaucracies they inhabit. This reasoning is also applicable to understanding why any similar policies about bioweapons or drones or nanotech and so on could also fail. Then the consequences of this are explored, and some alternatives suggested (including sharing information leading to healthier local communities and ultimately creating space habitats)."
You're right that the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons will never go away. That is why we need to learn to look at the issue differently: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "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?"
Mine::-) http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html "Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component -- in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought"... You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt" their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival.... These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient."
Please don't get too lost in the tree-like details (correct or not) of organizations implementing ever newer versions of AIs in various forms. The key point is that we've had "AIs" in the corporate sense as bureaucracies for thousands of years going back to ancient Egypt or earlier (maybe quadrillions of years if we live in a simulation). That is the "forest".
I do think we have more options though than the ones I outline there (including collections of "people" working together with advanced tools). See for example also Manuel De Landa on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces".
See also, another of my essays from a decade 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? "
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes: * A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here."); * A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past."); * A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks."); * An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat."); * A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including: * robotics, AI, and other automation, * better design, * the accumulation of physical infrastructure, * relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or * the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with: * A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else); * A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle; * A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; * An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and * Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
Thanks for the interesting video link of someone trying Windows 8 for the first time. First, it seems obvious that Windows 8 has picked a default style that hides context (like a hierarchy of system states), which makes it hard to discover things, which is especially important for novices. "Tune defaults for the novice." I see the same issue with "LCARS" Star Trek like displays that look beautiful on TV or the movies, but in practice might be hard to use if you only had one screen and needed to make it do a bunch of things (including at once). To do multitasking, you need to manage system state and you need to display context.
With that said, when personal computers first came out, unless you were a very technical person, it was often expected that you would need training in how to use them. In addition, it was expected that you would have to read one or more manuals, and you would need to ask your friends, family, and coworkers for help. So, more than anything, what that video shows me (in context of how it was made and what it is probably trying to show) is how much our expectations have changed over the last thirty years about "ease of use" for novices with computing devices.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx "The dietary style described in my books entitled, Eat To Live and Eat For Health, is a vegetable-based diet designed to maximize nutrient per calorie density. It is the most effective dietary approach for those with diabetes and is much more effective than drugs. For a Type 2 diabetic, this approach has resulted in complete reversal of the diabetic condition in the vast majority of my patients, and for a Type 1 diabetic it solves the problems with excessive highs and lows and prevents the typical dangerous complications that too frequently befall those with diabetes.
Of course, no dietary approach to diabetes will succeed without attention to other risk factors, especially sedentary lifestyle, smoking and lack of sleep. The road to wellness involves making the commitment to regular exercise as well. My clear message is that diabetics can't just "eat better." They have to go all the way and commit to nutritional excellence.
If you have diabetes, begin by reading my book, Eat To Live or Eat For Health"
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."
As I say here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. 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."
Ideas for helping the NSA and CIA transcend to a new paradigm: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful...."
"International politics changed massively when we invented weapons of mass destruction. Suddenly wars between countries that both wield weapons of mass destruction became a realistic impossibility. MAD as a concept did something that nothing did in our entire history - mandate peace."
A related essay I wrote: "Problems of the MAD doctrine, their consequences, and positive alternatives" http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/e34f9013282af9d7 "The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) with strategic nuclear weapons policy is based on decision makers being rational and not wanting their own country destroyed (were they to use their nuclear weapons and receive reprisals or even just spreading radiation). This essay explores a few reasons why this MAD policy will ultimately fail due to irrationality or other reasons for bad decisions by humans or the bureaucracies they inhabit. This reasoning is also applicable to understanding why any similar policies about bioweapons or drones or nanotech and so on could also fail. Then the consequences of this are explored, and some alternatives suggested (including sharing information leading to healthier local communities and ultimately creating space habitats)...."
Good point. And here is a way to move past this false choice: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
"... as an Australian taxpayer I also want to see the welfare using our tax dollars on those who are genuinely needy (given than most government benefits in this country are means-tested)."
Vitamin D deficiency is a hazard of indoors work, and contributes to why academia in general is messed up (along with other parts of the industrialized world). Likewise for people not getting enough good nutrition from omega 3s and vegetables -- poor health just makes people messed up. Other ideas I've collected on improving health: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Very insightful comment. For possible ways forward through a transformation of prespective, see 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 agree the human race remains at high risk of war, including over IMHO misperceived resource scarcity. Here are two examples of key representative issues, about copper (to pick just one item from your long list, but I could probably do the same for any other), and about the biosphere and biodiversity.
=== Copper as an example
Two things on copper from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Reserves "Copper has been in use at least 10,000 years, but more than 95% of all copper ever mined and smelted has been extracted since 1900. As with many natural resources, the total amount of copper on Earth is vast (around 10^14 tons just in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, or about 5 million years worth at the current rate of extraction). However, only a tiny fraction of these reserves is economically viable, given present-day prices and technologies. Various estimates of existing copper reserves available for mining vary from 25 years to 60 years, depending on core assumptions such as the growth rate. Recycling is a major source of copper in the modern world. Because of these and other factors, the future of copper production and supply is the subject of much debate, including the concept of Peak copper, analogous to Peak Oil."
And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Criticism "Julian Simon was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a professor of business and economics. In his book The Ultimate Resource 2 (first printed in 1981 and reprinted in 1998), he extensively criticizes the notion of "peak resources", and uses copper as one example. He argues that, even though "peak copper" has been a persistent scare since the early 20th century, "known reserves" grew at a rate that outpaced demand, and the price of copper was not rising but falling in the long run. For example, even though world production of copper in 1950 was only 1/8th of what it was today, known reserves were also much lower at the time -- around 100 million metric tons -- making it appear that the world would run out of copper in 40 to 50 years at most.
Simon's own explanation for this development is that the very notion of known reserves is deeply flawed, as it does not take into account changes in mining profitability. As richer mines are exhausted, developers turn their attention to poorer sources of the element and eventually develop cheap methods of extracting it, rising "known reserves". Thus, for example, copper was so abundant 5000 years ago, occurring in pure form as well as in highly concentrated copper ores, that prehistoric peoples were able to collect and process it with very basic technology. As of the early 21st century, copper is commonly mined from ores that contain 0.3% to 0.6% of copper by weight. Yet, despite the fact that the material is far less "widespread", the cost of, for example, a copper pot is vastly lower today in real terms than it was 5000 years ago.
Simon essentially states that all viable copper has been not been discovered and that all technological advancements in mining and refining have not occurred, so statements that the point of peak resources, in this case copper, have been or will be reached must be false. Simon supports his argument by showing that supplies copper have increased and prices have fallen. Simon's thesis of peak resources, however, is not based on current scientific analysis or geological measurements."
Beyond new mining techniques, we can also substitute materials for copper. For example, as as we move to fiber optics (mostly from sand) and to wireless communications, we may have a huge surplus of recycled copper wire.
Pretty much all the materials you listed will have a similar story; we can either improve our extraction techniques or find substitutes. And if it takes more energy to recycle some things, as I pointed out, PV is rapidly falling in price and we will likely also have other
AC wrote: "The post-scarcity society is not going to end this, even supposing it does turn from utopian dream to reality. If anything, it will make everything worse, because you'll have more resources with which to bestow your benevolence."
This is just about exactly the point I'm concerned about, as reflected in my sig of: "A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
And that is the nightmare we are actually living today! People tend to forget about all the nuclear missiles still ready to launch from a computer glitch in decades old hardware from the 1960s and 1970s.
That is exactly why we need some sort of global mindshift to a newer way of thinking in order to survive having discovered all kinds of new sorts of technological "fire" (like nanotechnology, robotics, biotech, nuclear, networked bureaucracy, etc). http://www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewmeme.asp?memeid=239 http://anwot.org/
"Exporting pollution isn't a technological "fix". US may be cleaner today, but the most important reason is that polluting production was moved abroad where there are no environmental regulations."
Most people who write on this sort of stuff do not understand that the USA produces as much as it did decades ago, just using less people and better technologies (in the same way that US agriculture produces more food than ever, but with 2% of the population instead of 50% like a century ago).
We do buy additional stuff from China, true, but the price difference between clean and dirty production does not have to be as big, and often the costs can eventually be lower to be clean through innovation. Again, this is a political issue, especially because the costs of cleaning up a mess is generally much more than the costs of preventing it, which someone eventually has to pay either for remediation or health costs. So, we don't have to have this level of pollution. As you point out in your example from Japan, we know how to do better. The main issue with that cost difference BTW is much more likely to be mostly about wages and working conditions than about overall pollution.
"It is exactly the other way around. By praying that "future technological development" will solve anything, you're not addressing the real and significant costs imposed by reckless current consumption. And you're very likely contributing to the undermining of development of future technologies."
This would be an insightful point if not applied to me in this discussion.:-) I suggest that both extremes are problematical -- both saying we don't have problems because someone else will fix them in the future, and also saying our problems are unfixable so there is no point in trying. But I have pointed to solar PV being cheaper than coal in a few years, as just an extension of a trend that goes back decades. That is about as solid a prediction as one can make, and it's much more solid than predictions about societal collapse from lack of "resources" many decades from now -- even as I'd readily agree there is a huge risk we will blow ourselves up fighting over mis-perceived scarcity (or other related issues).
By the way, I don't know what you would accept as a technological contribution towards reforestation (better shovels? seed vaults?), but certainly using the internet to lobby for it and coordinate it would seem like an improvement.:-) Like human health, most doctoring is just about letting nature do its thing. I agree with you that habitat destruction is a big thing, but again, about 50% of the USA is devoted to producing grain for livestock agriculture, which is entirely unnecessary; so this is a lifestyle choice thing or political-socioeconomic issue with unpaid externalities. India has a billion+ people in a much smaller area who are mostly vegetarian.
"I assume they [metals] go into the finished products, and unless you want to unravel your existing infrastructure, you'd need more."
Something like 98% of products are discarded within a year of production (perhaps a tragic waste, but that is the way it is right now). Things can be recycled, and they can be designed to be recycled. Nature is constantly recycling materials like solar-collecting leaves into soil into trees into leaves again, so it is possible. You obviously know a lot about all these topics, but I'd encourage you to look a lot deeper and question even your most basic assumptions about this.
One way to do that is to try to quantify all these issues. You might ask, how much metal is in our infrastructure in kilograms in the USA? How much new metal do add to that every year? Unless you can answer such basic questions, everything is just potentially erroneous assumptions. And even then, you would need to ask, can we substitute more common things for metal, like fiber optics from sand instead of copper wire?
Or maybe even do transmutation of one material to another at the nuclear level, like Mitsubishi-Toy
So, for the tl;dr crowd, I agree with many of your points, but you miss the big picture on solar PV in a big way. It is inconsistent for you to predict forward pessimistic trends while dismissing optimistic ones. The truth is more that both sets of trends are happening together, and we need to make related political and economic choices. More on that below.
You make some good points, and I agree that much of what humanity is doing to our nature world is both immoral and short sighted. One point of the Gaia essay is to address the assumptions of those who think keeping things just the way they are is "natural", when any inspection of natural history shows how much change is constantly going on -- as well as to suggest hat those who claim to speak for Gaia may have taken a rather narrow short-term view of things.
You're also correct that a technological possibility does not mean that something is proven, and indeed almost all those more exotic technologies including space habitats would require significant investment. However, given the world GDP is around US$70 trillion a year, and it has been suggested we are just $100 billion dollars away from hot fusion and such, there is plenty of resources potentially to invest in alternative technologies (including space) if we collectively wanted to. But instead we use up much of the surplus that could go into resolving these problems when we collectively put trillions of dollars a year into military spending, and then trillions more into "guarding" of other sorts -- and worse, get most of our best and brightest to devote all their time, emotion, and imagination to think up even better ways to kill people, disrupt their infrastructure (like with Stuxnet), to create computer software that competes in a zero sum financial game on wall street, and so on. So, in many ways we are probably much closer to agreement than you might think at first.
The place where I most strongly have to disagree with you though, beyond your assumption that we are running out of metal given how recyclable it is even from landfills, is when you write something like: "We have no solar power tech that can deploy in space and provide cheap energy to the Earth, and the one we use on Earth is manufactured cheaply only in places where the environment is the victim."
Have you spent any time investigating this? Seriously investigating what is going on? Did you twenty years ago, or even ten, look at the exponential growth of solar energy and the reduction of costs and predict the implications forward in the same way you are willing to project forward a notion of unchecked environmental damage? If not, why not? Why pay attention only to doomster trends and ignore optimistic ones? If you had looked into PV optimistically, you would see that, at market prices, the cost of solar energy from PV is generally now cheaper in the non-industrialized world than any other form of energy, and the cost of PV power is rapidly approaching grid parity in the industrialized world (as in, the head of GE R&D says by 2015 or so).
And further, if we include the costs of externalities, like remediating pollution, like dealing with the health consequences of air pollution, the cost of economic uncertainty, and the cost of military spending to secure long oil supply lines, renewables have been *cheaper* in real economic terms since at least the 1970s? The only reason we still use fossil fuels is political; they are way more expensive financially than renewables, all things considered. This is the fundamental thing most resource doomsters do not understand, in part because their is a vast legion of highly-paid mainstream economists involved in denying this every day in every way possible.
"What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago?"
Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner. The air is many places in the USA is cleaner from regulation of car exhaust. In general, North America has been reforesting over the last century now that most people no longer burn wood for heat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#Examples
Some fisheries in the oceans have been protected and started to recover. Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance, which given so many people live in cities in mainly a political issue at this point.
Right now, about half the land in the USA goes to raise grains to feed to livestock in factory farms, producing meat that overall is probably shortening our lives (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's website, the Rave Diet site, etc.). If we started eating more vegetables, we'd free up plenty of land for wilderness (half the USA) and be much healthier. So, both lifestyle and technology affect carrying capacity for humans on the Earth.
To reforest the Sahara might be a big project, but it is not clear that desertification is entirely human-caused, and it may relate more to global climate changes in thousand long year cycles. But, in any case, the way nature makes fertile soil is to weather rock, so we can grind up rock and spread it as slow acting fertilizer. Then we need to protect the appropriate succession of plants and make sure they have water until they change their climate to be water attracting. See the real: http://remineralize.org/ And the fictional: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees
However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually, so there are both good points and bad points about climate change. Overall, plants grow better with more CO2. The issue is more how to deal politically with the externality that, after lots of burning of fossil fuels by the USA and other industrialized countries, some people living on islands or in coastal areas or in areas with more storms will suffer, while people living in Canada and Siberia may end up much better off. That is a deep political question for a world with no unified government and no unified economic model that can account for externalities.
There are many solutions to environmental problems. Whether we decide to implement them is mainly a moral social choice about priorities (and to a lesser extent an issue of education that alternatives exists or imaginatively coming up with even better ones).
For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them? Yes, it takes energy to mine landfills, but the universe if full of energy, with a vast amount reaching the Earth's surface every day from the sun, and with people even working on ways to tap into fusion energy or the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum. Also, btw, right now I've heard the US automotive industry is a net producer of metal, as people switch to smaller cars and cars with more carbon fiber and plastic.
The big problem is that by claiming there are no solutions, you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology. There are plenty of solutions. The issue is just whether we implement them (or put our minds to imagining even better solutions).
"According to the Agenda 21 crowd, the carrying capacity of the world is actually only about 500 million."
Unlike for most animals, carrying capacity is a function of lifestyle and technology where humanity if concerned. The more people you have around, generally the more ideas you have for improving lifestyle and technology. For example, people are busy working on fusion energy technology and cheaper solar power, more energy efficient transportation, advanced bioremediation processes for toxic waste, ways to live in outer space or the oceans, and ways to grow vegetables and meat indoors in vertical farms. If 90-99% of people were killed off, there would be much less innovation, perhaps making that doomster agenda a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, as Julian Simon suggests, the human imagination is the ultimate resource. http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
That said, it might be a good idea to set an occupancy limit for the Earth at around a billion people or so when we have much nicer self-replicating space habitats to live in and the Earth becomes more of a tourist destination. Although, a limit might not be required because probably no one born in space would probably want to go there. After all, how many people living in the USA feel a need to take a pilgrimage to Africa to see where humanity came from?
I can't disagree that some crazy ignorant callous frightened scarcity-obsessed people could try what you mention with the technologies of abundance. Weaponized bird full is probably more likely, btw, as it would spread more easily than smallpox. It's a good idea to optimize your health with adequate vitamin D and phytonutrients from vegetables, which is a good thing to do regardless of fears about groups with such a regressive agenda: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Doomsterism can be seen as immoral because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy leading to lack of effort, as well as can lead to people fighting over perceived scarcity with the technologies of abundance (like using nuclear energy to fight over depleted oil fields, or using genetically engineered plagues to fight over poorly yielding farmland, or using killer robots to force other humans to work like robots in factories and plantations and such).
"The problem is that there are no "smart solutions" on the horizon to the energy problem,"
Hort term, solar power and probably cold fusion; logn term, hot fusion and space-based solar power used in space by trillions of people.
"to the global warming problem"
As above and by making the best of the changes by cooperation (since other planets may be warming too, some of this may also be from increased solar output).
"or to the biodiversity problem."
I agree what we are doing to the biosphere to is tragic and immoral (especially the depletion of fish stock in the oceans). However, much biodiversity is represented by bacteria who are not going away. Also, we are getting digital worlds and designed DNA sequences, so eventually the total genetic diversity may be much higher, maybe much much higher if we think about total information diversity.
"We are also running out of most finite natural resources, and we have no viable replacement options."
I'm not disagreeing that we have serious problems. We may also blow ourselves up fighting over them. But we have no irresolvable technical problems in giving every human on Earth a very high standard of living, and further expanding the human population to trillions living in space.
And just to help people move beyond a doomsterish ecofascist paradigm that seems to be growing all too common in the USA, here is something by me from twenty years ago, and some commentary on it: 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.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"Still, even with no net new jobs created during the 2000-2009 decade, the US GDP increased from about US$10 trillion a year in 2000 to about US$14 trillion a year in 2009 (according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis). This increase in GDP came from several sources. Much came from increased productivity (more produced per worker through automation) and from improved design (with new designs being easier to make or use). Some came through technical issues with GDP calculation, since goods or services produced mostly abroad are still credited to the USA's GDP when they are resold locally with some value added (like when Walmart sells goods made in China with some markup to cover profit and the cost of operating distribution centers in the USA, so the markup contributes to the GDP). Some came from what Jane Jacobs termed "transactions of decline" like increased spending on prisons, wars, and care for those sickened from things like pollution or vitamin D deficiency, which is why GDP is a problematical indicator as to societal well-being."
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm ... the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"
"Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of today's database systems.
And also:
http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2003/Kent01/EML2003Kent01.html
"The identity problem is intractable. To shed light on the problem, which currently is a swirl of interlocking problems that tend to get tumbled together in any discussion, we separate out the various issues so they can be rationally addressed one at a time as much as possible. We explore various aspects of the problem, pick one aspect to focus on, pose an idealized theoretical solution, and then explore the factors rendering this solution impractical. The success of this endeavor depends on our agreement that the selected aspect is a good one to focus on, and that the idealized solution represents a desirable target to try to approximate as well as we can. If we achieve consensus here, then we at least have a unifying framework for coordinating the various partial solutions to fragments of the problem. "
I thought you were going to also make a point about non-Western cultures often being less "object oriented" in their language learning (and perhaps more "relation-oriented" which I've heard in the past)...
Also, Alan Kay, who coined the term "object oriented" for Smalltalk, and said C++ was not what he had in mind, suggested later he should have used "message oriented", since message sending and processing is really at the heart of Smalltalk.
The cost trends for solar PV show it cheaper than coal real soon now (as in a few years, google on GE and solar power cheaper than coal), and at that tipping point our society will begin to switch over in a big way. There may be other energy solutions (including cold fusion) but that solar trend is happening and is pretty much unstoppable at this point. Solar PV is already cheaper than fossil fuels in many materially poorer countries.
Time and time again people predict forward only the negative exponential trends while ignoring the exponential good ones. People dismiss solar power because it is such a small percent, ignoring it has been growing exponentially for decades and there is no reason to think it will not continue to grow (barring something even better). Cheap electricity can produce cheap synthetic liquid fuels or hydrogen, so your argument about transport is weak.
Because you raise the issue of corruption, it is also true the current economic concentrations of power resists their displacement in various ways, including in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, using lobbying to get tax and regulatory preferences... If fossil fuels had paid their true costs up-front in pollution and risk, renewables and energy efficiency would have been economically cheaper since the 1970s.
Remember, at one point nuclear weapons were an impractical fantasy. Now we have to live with them, as they were brought into reality by cooperation and hard work and inspiration. So, today's Star Trek impractical fantasy (medical tricorders? portable small global communicators? matter printers?) may very well be tomorrow's reality (and do all exists in some form now). We should choose wisely what we want to make into reality of all the things we can imagine.
Still, overall I agree with you that: "There are solutions but they are not easy or simple and will take work." But they also take imagination and some optimism.
Good points. See also my essay: http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/e34f9013282af9d7
"The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) with strategic nuclear weapons policy is based on decision makers being rational and not wanting their own country destroyed (were they to use their nuclear weapons and receive reprisals or even just spreading radiation). This essay explores a few reasons why this MAD policy will ultimately fail due to irrationality or other reasons for bad decisions by humans or the bureaucracies they inhabit. This reasoning is also applicable to understanding why any similar policies about bioweapons or drones or nanotech and so on could also fail. Then the consequences of this are explored, and some alternatives suggested (including sharing information leading to healthier local communities and ultimately creating space habitats)."
I applied for a posted Thunderbird job at the Mozilla Foundation about a year ago, saying that, but I never heard back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop
My own fumbling efforts in that direction (I have some new stuff I've made recently that is not yet up there):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
More comments by me on the idea:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html
You're right that the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons will never go away. That is why we need to learn to look at the issue differently:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"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?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2DEG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUSCANNZUKUS
Yours? http://cryptome.org/2012/03/qc-footprint.htm
Mine: :-) http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html .. You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt" their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival. ... These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient."
"Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component -- in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought".
Please don't get too lost in the tree-like details (correct or not) of organizations implementing ever newer versions of AIs in various forms. The key point is that we've had "AIs" in the corporate sense as bureaucracies for thousands of years going back to ancient Egypt or earlier (maybe quadrillions of years if we live in a simulation). That is the "forest".
I do think we have more options though than the ones I outline there (including collections of "people" working together with advanced tools). See for example also Manuel De Landa on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces".
See also, another of my essays from a decade 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? "
From my website: http://pdfernhout.net/
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat.");
* A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including:
* robotics, AI, and other automation,
* better design,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
Thanks for the interesting video link of someone trying Windows 8 for the first time. First, it seems obvious that Windows 8 has picked a default style that hides context (like a hierarchy of system states), which makes it hard to discover things, which is especially important for novices. "Tune defaults for the novice." I see the same issue with "LCARS" Star Trek like displays that look beautiful on TV or the movies, but in practice might be hard to use if you only had one screen and needed to make it do a bunch of things (including at once). To do multitasking, you need to manage system state and you need to display context.
With that said, when personal computers first came out, unless you were a very technical person, it was often expected that you would need training in how to use them. In addition, it was expected that you would have to read one or more manuals, and you would need to ask your friends, family, and coworkers for help. So, more than anything, what that video shows me (in context of how it was made and what it is probably trying to show) is how much our expectations have changed over the last thirty years about "ease of use" for novices with computing devices.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx
"The dietary style described in my books entitled, Eat To Live and Eat For Health, is a vegetable-based diet designed to maximize nutrient per calorie density. It is the most effective dietary approach for those with diabetes and is much more effective than drugs. For a Type 2 diabetic, this approach has resulted in complete reversal of the diabetic condition in the vast majority of my patients, and for a Type 1 diabetic it solves the problems with excessive highs and lows and prevents the typical dangerous complications that too frequently befall those with diabetes.
Of course, no dietary approach to diabetes will succeed without attention to other risk factors, especially sedentary lifestyle, smoking and lack of sleep. The road to wellness involves making the commitment to regular exercise as well. My clear message is that diabetics can't just "eat better." They have to go all the way and commit to nutritional excellence.
If you have diabetes, begin by reading my book, Eat To Live or Eat For Health"
See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
And check out the book "The Pleasure Trap".
Make sure you get enough vitamin D, too (e.g. Dr. John Cannell).
Congrats on coming this far despite all the misinformation out there (including by MDs) and good luck moving forward...
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."
"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.
As I say here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. 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."
Ideas for helping the NSA and CIA transcend to a new paradigm: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
"International politics changed massively when we invented weapons of mass destruction. Suddenly wars between countries that both wield weapons of mass destruction became a realistic impossibility. MAD as a concept did something that nothing did in our entire history - mandate peace."
A related essay I wrote: "Problems of the MAD doctrine, their consequences, and positive alternatives" ...."
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/e34f9013282af9d7
"The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) with strategic nuclear weapons policy is based on decision makers being rational and not wanting their own country destroyed (were they to use their nuclear weapons and receive reprisals or even just spreading radiation). This essay explores a few reasons why this MAD policy will ultimately fail due to irrationality or other reasons for bad decisions by humans or the bureaucracies they inhabit. This reasoning is also applicable to understanding why any similar policies about bioweapons or drones or nanotech and so on could also fail. Then the consequences of this are explored, and some alternatives suggested (including sharing information leading to healthier local communities and ultimately creating space habitats)
Good point. And here is a way to move past this false choice:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
"... as an Australian taxpayer I also want to see the welfare using our tax dollars on those who are genuinely needy (given than most government benefits in this country are means-tested)."
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Vitamin D deficiency is a hazard of indoors work, and contributes to why academia in general is messed up (along with other parts of the industrialized world). Likewise for people not getting enough good nutrition from omega 3s and vegetables -- poor health just makes people messed up. Other ideas I've collected on improving health:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Here are some links I put together for context about current academia:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
See especially:
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
And one other that is not there:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Good luck.
Very insightful comment. For possible ways forward through a transformation of prespective, see 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 agree the human race remains at high risk of war, including over IMHO misperceived resource scarcity. Here are two examples of key representative issues, about copper (to pick just one item from your long list, but I could probably do the same for any other), and about the biosphere and biodiversity.
=== Copper as an example
Two things on copper from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Reserves
"Copper has been in use at least 10,000 years, but more than 95% of all copper ever mined and smelted has been extracted since 1900. As with many natural resources, the total amount of copper on Earth is vast (around 10^14 tons just in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, or about 5 million years worth at the current rate of extraction). However, only a tiny fraction of these reserves is economically viable, given present-day prices and technologies. Various estimates of existing copper reserves available for mining vary from 25 years to 60 years, depending on core assumptions such as the growth rate. Recycling is a major source of copper in the modern world. Because of these and other factors, the future of copper production and supply is the subject of much debate, including the concept of Peak copper, analogous to Peak Oil."
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper#Criticism
"Julian Simon was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a professor of business and economics. In his book The Ultimate Resource 2 (first printed in 1981 and reprinted in 1998), he extensively criticizes the notion of "peak resources", and uses copper as one example. He argues that, even though "peak copper" has been a persistent scare since the early 20th century, "known reserves" grew at a rate that outpaced demand, and the price of copper was not rising but falling in the long run. For example, even though world production of copper in 1950 was only 1/8th of what it was today, known reserves were also much lower at the time -- around 100 million metric tons -- making it appear that the world would run out of copper in 40 to 50 years at most.
Simon's own explanation for this development is that the very notion of known reserves is deeply flawed, as it does not take into account changes in mining profitability. As richer mines are exhausted, developers turn their attention to poorer sources of the element and eventually develop cheap methods of extracting it, rising "known reserves". Thus, for example, copper was so abundant 5000 years ago, occurring in pure form as well as in highly concentrated copper ores, that prehistoric peoples were able to collect and process it with very basic technology. As of the early 21st century, copper is commonly mined from ores that contain 0.3% to 0.6% of copper by weight. Yet, despite the fact that the material is far less "widespread", the cost of, for example, a copper pot is vastly lower today in real terms than it was 5000 years ago.
Simon essentially states that all viable copper has been not been discovered and that all technological advancements in mining and refining have not occurred, so statements that the point of peak resources, in this case copper, have been or will be reached must be false. Simon supports his argument by showing that supplies copper have increased and prices have fallen. Simon's thesis of peak resources, however, is not based on current scientific analysis or geological measurements."
Beyond new mining techniques, we can also substitute materials for copper. For example, as as we move to fiber optics (mostly from sand) and to wireless communications, we may have a huge surplus of recycled copper wire.
Pretty much all the materials you listed will have a similar story; we can either improve our extraction techniques or find substitutes. And if it takes more energy to recycle some things, as I pointed out, PV is rapidly falling in price and we will likely also have other
AC wrote: "The post-scarcity society is not going to end this, even supposing it does turn from utopian dream to reality. If anything, it will make everything worse, because you'll have more resources with which to bestow your benevolence."
This is just about exactly the point I'm concerned about, as reflected in my sig of: "A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
And that is the nightmare we are actually living today! People tend to forget about all the nuclear missiles still ready to launch from a computer glitch in decades old hardware from the 1960s and 1970s.
That is exactly why we need some sort of global mindshift to a newer way of thinking in order to survive having discovered all kinds of new sorts of technological "fire" (like nanotechnology, robotics, biotech, nuclear, networked bureaucracy, etc).
http://www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewmeme.asp?memeid=239
http://anwot.org/
By the way, on "education" which in practice means compulsory state-sponsored mass schooling, see:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
Or also on your theme:
"The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy: Why They Hate Our Kind Hearts, Too"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/13/why-they-hate-our-kind-hearts-too/
"Exporting pollution isn't a technological "fix". US may be cleaner today, but the most important reason is that polluting production was moved abroad where there are no environmental regulations."
Most people who write on this sort of stuff do not understand that the USA produces as much as it did decades ago, just using less people and better technologies (in the same way that US agriculture produces more food than ever, but with 2% of the population instead of 50% like a century ago).
We do buy additional stuff from China, true, but the price difference between clean and dirty production does not have to be as big, and often the costs can eventually be lower to be clean through innovation. Again, this is a political issue, especially because the costs of cleaning up a mess is generally much more than the costs of preventing it, which someone eventually has to pay either for remediation or health costs. So, we don't have to have this level of pollution. As you point out in your example from Japan, we know how to do better. The main issue with that cost difference BTW is much more likely to be mostly about wages and working conditions than about overall pollution.
"It is exactly the other way around. By praying that "future technological development" will solve anything, you're not addressing the real and significant costs imposed by reckless current consumption. And you're very likely contributing to the undermining of development of future technologies."
This would be an insightful point if not applied to me in this discussion. :-) I suggest that both extremes are problematical -- both saying we don't have problems because someone else will fix them in the future, and also saying our problems are unfixable so there is no point in trying. But I have pointed to solar PV being cheaper than coal in a few years, as just an extension of a trend that goes back decades. That is about as solid a prediction as one can make, and it's much more solid than predictions about societal collapse from lack of "resources" many decades from now -- even as I'd readily agree there is a huge risk we will blow ourselves up fighting over mis-perceived scarcity (or other related issues).
By the way, I don't know what you would accept as a technological contribution towards reforestation (better shovels? seed vaults?), but certainly using the internet to lobby for it and coordinate it would seem like an improvement. :-) Like human health, most doctoring is just about letting nature do its thing. I agree with you that habitat destruction is a big thing, but again, about 50% of the USA is devoted to producing grain for livestock agriculture, which is entirely unnecessary; so this is a lifestyle choice thing or political-socioeconomic issue with unpaid externalities. India has a billion+ people in a much smaller area who are mostly vegetarian.
"I assume they [metals] go into the finished products, and unless you want to unravel your existing infrastructure, you'd need more."
Something like 98% of products are discarded within a year of production (perhaps a tragic waste, but that is the way it is right now). Things can be recycled, and they can be designed to be recycled. Nature is constantly recycling materials like solar-collecting leaves into soil into trees into leaves again, so it is possible. You obviously know a lot about all these topics, but I'd encourage you to look a lot deeper and question even your most basic assumptions about this.
One way to do that is to try to quantify all these issues. You might ask, how much metal is in our infrastructure in kilograms in the USA? How much new metal do add to that every year? Unless you can answer such basic questions, everything is just potentially erroneous assumptions. And even then, you would need to ask, can we substitute more common things for metal, like fiber optics from sand instead of copper wire?
Or maybe even do transmutation of one material to another at the nuclear level, like Mitsubishi-Toy
So, for the tl;dr crowd, I agree with many of your points, but you miss the big picture on solar PV in a big way. It is inconsistent for you to predict forward pessimistic trends while dismissing optimistic ones. The truth is more that both sets of trends are happening together, and we need to make related political and economic choices. More on that below.
You make some good points, and I agree that much of what humanity is doing to our nature world is both immoral and short sighted. One point of the Gaia essay is to address the assumptions of those who think keeping things just the way they are is "natural", when any inspection of natural history shows how much change is constantly going on -- as well as to suggest hat those who claim to speak for Gaia may have taken a rather narrow short-term view of things.
You're also correct that a technological possibility does not mean that something is proven, and indeed almost all those more exotic technologies including space habitats would require significant investment. However, given the world GDP is around US$70 trillion a year, and it has been suggested we are just $100 billion dollars away from hot fusion and such, there is plenty of resources potentially to invest in alternative technologies (including space) if we collectively wanted to. But instead we use up much of the surplus that could go into resolving these problems when we collectively put trillions of dollars a year into military spending, and then trillions more into "guarding" of other sorts -- and worse, get most of our best and brightest to devote all their time, emotion, and imagination to think up even better ways to kill people, disrupt their infrastructure (like with Stuxnet), to create computer software that competes in a zero sum financial game on wall street, and so on. So, in many ways we are probably much closer to agreement than you might think at first.
The place where I most strongly have to disagree with you though, beyond your assumption that we are running out of metal given how recyclable it is even from landfills, is when you write something like: "We have no solar power tech that can deploy in space and provide cheap energy to the Earth, and the one we use on Earth is manufactured cheaply only in places where the environment is the victim."
Have you spent any time investigating this? Seriously investigating what is going on? Did you twenty years ago, or even ten, look at the exponential growth of solar energy and the reduction of costs and predict the implications forward in the same way you are willing to project forward a notion of unchecked environmental damage? If not, why not? Why pay attention only to doomster trends and ignore optimistic ones? If you had looked into PV optimistically, you would see that, at market prices, the cost of solar energy from PV is generally now cheaper in the non-industrialized world than any other form of energy, and the cost of PV power is rapidly approaching grid parity in the industrialized world (as in, the head of GE R&D says by 2015 or so).
And further, if we include the costs of externalities, like remediating pollution, like dealing with the health consequences of air pollution, the cost of economic uncertainty, and the cost of military spending to secure long oil supply lines, renewables have been *cheaper* in real economic terms since at least the 1970s? The only reason we still use fossil fuels is political; they are way more expensive financially than renewables, all things considered. This is the fundamental thing most resource doomsters do not understand, in part because their is a vast legion of highly-paid mainstream economists involved in denying this every day in every way possible.
As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warne
"What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago?"
Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner. The air is many places in the USA is cleaner from regulation of car exhaust. In general, North America has been reforesting over the last century now that most people no longer burn wood for heat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#Examples
Some fisheries in the oceans have been protected and started to recover. Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance, which given so many people live in cities in mainly a political issue at this point.
Right now, about half the land in the USA goes to raise grains to feed to livestock in factory farms, producing meat that overall is probably shortening our lives (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's website, the Rave Diet site, etc.). If we started eating more vegetables, we'd free up plenty of land for wilderness (half the USA) and be much healthier. So, both lifestyle and technology affect carrying capacity for humans on the Earth.
To reforest the Sahara might be a big project, but it is not clear that desertification is entirely human-caused, and it may relate more to global climate changes in thousand long year cycles. But, in any case, the way nature makes fertile soil is to weather rock, so we can grind up rock and spread it as slow acting fertilizer. Then we need to protect the appropriate succession of plants and make sure they have water until they change their climate to be water attracting. See the real:
http://remineralize.org/
And the fictional:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees
However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually, so there are both good points and bad points about climate change. Overall, plants grow better with more CO2. The issue is more how to deal politically with the externality that, after lots of burning of fossil fuels by the USA and other industrialized countries, some people living on islands or in coastal areas or in areas with more storms will suffer, while people living in Canada and Siberia may end up much better off. That is a deep political question for a world with no unified government and no unified economic model that can account for externalities.
There are many solutions to environmental problems. Whether we decide to implement them is mainly a moral social choice about priorities (and to a lesser extent an issue of education that alternatives exists or imaginatively coming up with even better ones).
For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them? Yes, it takes energy to mine landfills, but the universe if full of energy, with a vast amount reaching the Earth's surface every day from the sun, and with people even working on ways to tap into fusion energy or the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum. Also, btw, right now I've heard the US automotive industry is a net producer of metal, as people switch to smaller cars and cars with more carbon fiber and plastic.
Other ideas include "Plan B" by Lester Brown:
http://environment.about.com/od/activismvolunteering/a/lesterbrown.htm
The big problem is that by claiming there are no solutions, you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology. There are plenty of solutions. The issue is just whether we implement them (or put our minds to imagining even better solutions).
"According to the Agenda 21 crowd, the carrying capacity of the world is actually only about 500 million."
Unlike for most animals, carrying capacity is a function of lifestyle and technology where humanity if concerned. The more people you have around, generally the more ideas you have for improving lifestyle and technology. For example, people are busy working on fusion energy technology and cheaper solar power, more energy efficient transportation, advanced bioremediation processes for toxic waste, ways to live in outer space or the oceans, and ways to grow vegetables and meat indoors in vertical farms. If 90-99% of people were killed off, there would be much less innovation, perhaps making that doomster agenda a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, as Julian Simon suggests, the human imagination is the ultimate resource.
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
That said, it might be a good idea to set an occupancy limit for the Earth at around a billion people or so when we have much nicer self-replicating space habitats to live in and the Earth becomes more of a tourist destination. Although, a limit might not be required because probably no one born in space would probably want to go there. After all, how many people living in the USA feel a need to take a pilgrimage to Africa to see where humanity came from?
I can't disagree that some crazy ignorant callous frightened scarcity-obsessed people could try what you mention with the technologies of abundance. Weaponized bird full is probably more likely, btw, as it would spread more easily than smallpox. It's a good idea to optimize your health with adequate vitamin D and phytonutrients from vegetables, which is a good thing to do regardless of fears about groups with such a regressive agenda: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Doomsterism can be seen as immoral because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy leading to lack of effort, as well as can lead to people fighting over perceived scarcity with the technologies of abundance (like using nuclear energy to fight over depleted oil fields, or using genetically engineered plagues to fight over poorly yielding farmland, or using killer robots to force other humans to work like robots in factories and plantations and such).
"The problem is that there are no "smart solutions" on the horizon to the energy problem,"
Hort term, solar power and probably cold fusion; logn term, hot fusion and space-based solar power used in space by trillions of people.
"to the global warming problem"
As above and by making the best of the changes by cooperation (since other planets may be warming too, some of this may also be from increased solar output).
"or to the biodiversity problem."
I agree what we are doing to the biosphere to is tragic and immoral (especially the depletion of fish stock in the oceans). However, much biodiversity is represented by bacteria who are not going away. Also, we are getting digital worlds and designed DNA sequences, so eventually the total genetic diversity may be much higher, maybe much much higher if we think about total information diversity.
"We are also running out of most finite natural resources, and we have no viable replacement options."
Citation needed. Counter citation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
I'm not disagreeing that we have serious problems. We may also blow ourselves up fighting over them. But we have no irresolvable technical problems in giving every human on Earth a very high standard of living, and further expanding the human population to trillions living in space.
And just to help people move beyond a doomsterish ecofascist paradigm that seems to be growing all too common in the USA, here is something by me from twenty years ago, and some commentary on it:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/ac0ffaab1aa1c8ca
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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