You make some good points, but why are so few people aware that solar energy from solar PV panels is exponentially becoming cheaper than power from coal? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
Consider that it would take about 1% of the USA's land area to produce all the energy it currently needs for all purpposes via solar PV at 10% efficiency, or about the amount of land currently devoted to either mining or roads directly or indirectly. If we cut back on meat consumption by 2%, that is enough land for PV panels to power the USA.
Beyond that, there are many exotic types of energy under investigation from thorium power to hot and cold fusion.
And that is not even thinking about what we could do in space, like with huge solar mirrors.
Good points. A fundamental question after 9/11 was "Why do they hate us?" The knee jerk response was "They hate us because we are free and wealthy and they hate freedom and wealth". But a truer answer is more likely "They hate us because we fund their oppressors and so have contributed to their relative unfreedom and poverty".
The biggest issue with all this is that advanced technologies of abundance like robotics, networked computing, nanotechnology, nuclear, aerospace, biotech and so on must be used from a perspective of abundance. Such technologies, like Bucky Fuller talked about, could create universal abundance for all of humanity -- and then some, as we spread into the solar system and to the stars, But, people are often using such technologies of abundance from the perspective of scarcity and so they are adapting advanced technology to fight the last century's wars over perceived resource scarcity. Thus we have ironies like people creating nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields, rather than using advanced materials and knowledge about how the atom works to make clean cheap energy for everyone (whether via nuclear means or solar panels or hot or cold fusion or whatever). I wrote a related essay here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
The same is happening with the misguided energy going into creating stuff like Stuxnet, especially given that what goes around comes around, and now everyone has access to Stuxnet as a prototype platform to build even worse stuff. Obama's escalations of the drone wars and the cyber wars just adds more ironies to his Nobel Peace Prize.
In general, everyone globally needs to totally rethink our collective economy and geopolitics for new 21st century realities. That will happen eventually because we can't survive the way we have been going on. It's only a question of how long until that change in mindset happens and how much suffering the world experences (including from nucelar war) until then. Here is another related website: http://anwot.org/
Albert Bartlett's anaysis is miguided because he ignores that while problems can grow exponentially, so can solutions, especially when you have a lot of people to think them up and implement them. Julian Simon's take on things in "[The human imagination as] The Ultimate Resource" was much better in that regard. That's one reason aluminum used to cost more than gold, but now it is so cheap we throw it away. Soon we will have dirt-cheap solar panels and maybe even hot and cold fusion power, all thanks to all those "too many" people using too much stuff that people like Bartlett or William Catton might just as soon be rid of because they use resources and make places crowded, ignoring that people also produce resources and make places worth being in. Same for robotics, 3D printing, and someday self-replicating space habitats. The solar system may have limits to growth, but we are nowhere near them. Carrying capacity is a function of both lifestyle and technology, both of which are affected by imagination.
The main problem humanity faces right now is more the other direction -- highly educated and affluent people tend to stop breeding; you can see that in the demographics. Having so many modern distractions just makes the Peak Population crisis problem worse due to "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli". Contributing to that is also a scarcity mythology, made very dangerous because people will then ironically fight over perceived scarcity with the technologies of abundance like nuclear power, rocket ships, robotics, and nanotechnology...
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html "A video instructional series for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 26 half-hour video programs and coordinated books"
I've watched it twice, once in my twenties, and once with my kid. It is hosted by a Nobel prize winning chemist (Roald Hoffman) with demos by Don Showalter. Holds up pretty well for something from 1990 as far as the basics, except maybe for touting the wonders of Bisphenol A in the last episode or so.
Great post. Something by me on a related theme: "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2 "This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
One example: http://www.etheric.com/LaViolette/Predict.html "Subsequent concurrence (1998): In 1988, when presented with Dr. LaViolette's Galactic explosion hypothesis, astronomer Mark Morris dismissed the idea as having no merit. However, in 1998 after ten years of observation, Morris was quoted as saying that the center of our Galaxy explodes about every 10,000 years with these events each lasting 100 years or so."
Imagine if you were to go outside one night and the sky suddenly lit up as bright as day and stayed that way for 100 years!
Maybe matter falls towards the galactic core, but interacts with the core to produce shock waves that push it away again, to form some sort of resonant process that happens every 10,000 years?
And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop "The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers...."
... across the USA (my modest proposal): http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319 "Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all."
A lot of life circumstances (especially lack of good sleep) can put us on a downward spiral where we let things slide and things get worse, especially as we turn to junky comfort foods. Here is some health advice I put together to help with an upward spiral, but it is true that it is easier to follow with more social support and community (and less worries over money): http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Watch out especially for vitamin D deficiency and how using the computer indoors to deal with aches and pains may just make that worse as a downward spiral. Many adults need 5000 IU D3 daily as a supplement, as the US RDA is too low and dermatologists have gotten us to fear the sun. Taking vitamin D supplements is at least an easy first step back to wellness.
Also, eating a lot more vegetables and taking omega 3 supplements may help, too.
People may become obese eating "empty calorie" junk food because the body keeps searching for nutrients and filling fiber that is not in junk food, so their "appestat" (your thermostat for appetite) is never satisfied. In the same way, people may turn to more and more computer use when what they really want is something else (more human contact, more time in nature, more hands on projects, more satisfying work, etc.) -- searching for something they can't find much of online.
"The problem is that there are hostile, sometimes crazy, nations that have nuclear weapons"
Like the USA?:-) If not today, maybe after the next election? What about a country that has institutionalized torture, that has about a quarter of its population food insecure, that is becoming completely dependent on other countries for consumer goods, and that is blowing up people around the world with killer robots, is sane?
You may be unable to see the forest of my point for the trees of your strategic reply, perhaps because you are caught up in short-term thinking about the rationality of military planning (each point making sense by itself) while missing the overall increasing systematic risk? That is the kind of thinking that lead to the recent global economic crisis --- every local economic decision making sense locally, but then the whole house of cards collapsing as the system collectively passes some phase change boundary (like heated water starting to turn into steam). Like pollution, increasing systemic risk is an externality often unaccounted for in local decision making (whether economically or militarily). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is based on rationality at all levels of the system (except that the whole approach is crazy for reasons I mention below). You just said there are crazy people out there. So MAD will not work. It can not keep working indefinitely for exactly the reasons you mention ("hostile, sometimes crazy"). Seriously, why should a crazy leader of either North Korea or the USA not just start nuking other countries because they think they are on some mission from god or something and everyone else is to terrified to stop them? Example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa "George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month."
Another source from before Bush's election: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html "''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.'' "
You're also ignoring the bigger issue is that WMDs is no longer purely a national problem. Like has happened so many times before, the technologies like nuclear weapons, designer plagues, nanotech, cyberwarfare, or killer robots, that once were only in the control of big countries are going to eventually filter down to the average small country or even small group or individual. Our entire military doctrine is out-of-sync with emerging 21st century realities.
Or, as George Orwell said: http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
http://www.facebook.com/drfuhrman "Joel Fuhrman M.D. is a board-certified family physician, best-selling author and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods."
Just saying... Even though I normally cite their direct websites... Both eating better and getting enough vitamin D have been show to prevent, and in some cases reverse, a variety of diseases including cancer.
Take rockets and advanced materials and social collaboration by engineers that could make the solar system rich through billions of self-replicating space habitats supporting trillions of human lives, and instead waste it all fighting over oil fields and on posturing about whose socioeconomic system is a little less broken given twenty-first century facts like advanced automation making most of the paid jobs go away...
The income-through-jobs link that grants the right to consume (for those 99% without significant capital) is about to be severely stretched... Which was predicted decades ago (like in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964).
If we can have semi-autonomous drones to watch people who might steal things, why not just use the same robotic technology to make lots more stuff for everybody so less people feel a need to steal?
James P. Hogan on Global Warming: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan2.html http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=1171 http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/category.php?id=21 "But even if the recent warming trends were shown to be largely of our own doing, there's more reason for celebration than the panic that we're witnessing. Warm worlds are cheerier, healthier, more secure, and better able to support a richer and more abundant biosphere than cold ones. On land and in the oceans, life thrives in the green equatorial and temperate zones, not the icy higher latitudes. A warmer world would transform the vast wastes of Siberia and northern Canada into forests, gardens, granaries, and habitats, opening up huge areas to accommodate the growing population that some view as a blight, and bring water back to such regions as the Sahara and Middle East, that were once verdant. So, if human activity is capable of making a measurable difference, one would think that a good policy to adopt would be to help things along by using the abundance of energy that the world offers, to increase wealth and living standards generally, and enjoy the environmental benefits."
The deeper issue is the unfairness that some people benefit from this (Canadians, Russians) while others lose out (islanders, those with beachfront property, those in places where the weather worsens, etc.). Our form of geographical sovereignty and related economics of real estate are not designed to deal with the consequences of global changes from "externalities". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality.
http://civicrm.org/casestudy/node/1390 "New York State Senate's Bluebird: Managing millions of constituents for 62 New York State Senate offices... With the backing of CiviCRM's community of developers, Bluebird's increased functional capabilities, streamlined workflows and refined user interface promises to move the State of New York forward and help improve the communication of representative governmentâs ultimately making the Senate more responsive to constituent needs.... Several open source CRM solutions were evaluated as platforms to help improve the New York State Senate's communication and responsiveness to constituent needs through streamlined workflows, increased functional capabilities and a user interface built on principles of simplicity and efficiency. CiviCRM stood out from the other available platforms due to it's robust feature set, open source license, eager and thriving community of developers and cooperative core team."
If CiviCRM/Bluebird can't do what the questioner asks, the feature could be added. It is a web-based PHP/Drupal application. The NYS Senate's technology group (a great group of people, who also run "Capitol Camp" http://blog.capitolcamp.org/ ) sometimes has openings for more open source developers, so for any expert PHP/Drupal developers out there who want to work in public service on open source, you might want to get your resume on file with them. http://groups.drupal.org/node/179504
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse "[Toynbee] argues that in this environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, as a Prophet)."
That just about sums up so much slashdot discussion?:-)
Your comment reminds me of: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm "An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars --- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism."
Anyway, the new battery sounds like an impressive innovation if it proves out in production. There are many innovative peopel at IBM Almaden; it is truly an amazing accomplishment. With that, and hydrigen storage in metal hydrides, both useful for storing intermittent renewable energy, and maybe hot or cold (LENR) fusion, our society is well on its way to ensuring an abundance of energy for all for basic needs.
Or, if you assume people are reading your emails, then you can write your email in such as way as might enlighten the human (or AI) readers so they could become part of a post-scarcity society that is emerging from the very technologies being used for eavesdropping, storing, indexing, and sensemaking... That's one reason my standard email sig says: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity. "
Or as I wrote here::-) http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.:-) And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.:-) And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.:-) Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.:-) "
Or, also from there: "As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card technology] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
So, we must continue to make the most of our advantages of a lack of credibility, a lack of resources, and our being under constant surveillance to help achieve the goal of a happier, healthier, abundant, and intrinsically&mutually secure society for all.:-) When you look at it that way, keeping the world from blowing itself up, or plaguing itself down, or roboticizing or bureaucratizing itself to death is not entirely impossible with the resources at hand.:-)
This article is about an example of an organization that can collect, index, and try to make sense of 20 trillion transactions from around the globe, but they not the only one (Google is another example). At some point, quantitative differences become qualitative differences. As our society deals in all sorts of abundances, we are moving into mostly uncharted waters (even as some people like James P. Hogan in "Voyage from Yesteryear" tried to paint us a possible picture of the difference between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking). We need to think about what that "societal phase change" means (to use JP Hogan's phrasing). But very few people are doing that, and the discussion to this article is just one more example of missing the forest for the trees. Whether or not encryption makes sense in any context is completely tangential to this much deeper and broader issue of abundance vs. scarcity thinking.
See also my essays on this: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Or: 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."
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?
From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. (from David Goostein, Vice Provost, Caltech, who testified to Congress back then about this)"
One solution would be a graduate-student level stipend of a "basic income" for *everyone* in the country, so those who were inclined to research could do that, or those who wanted to write free software could do that, or those who wanted to volunteer with local Emergency Medical Services could do that, and others could raise children, and so on. A gift economy could accomplish that too, as could advanced 3D printing, or also better government planning to create free or cheap life-support services related to housing and food. We'll probably see a mix of all that going forward, and there already are aspects of all of those already.
We also need to move beyond this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds "Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."
Slashdot Mirror
You make some good points, but why are so few people aware that solar energy from solar PV panels is exponentially becoming cheaper than power from coal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
Consider that about half the land in the USA is used for raising grain to feed to livestock in factory farms (where eating that sort of meat may be shortening our lives):
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Consider that it would take about 1% of the USA's land area to produce all the energy it currently needs for all purpposes via solar PV at 10% efficiency, or about the amount of land currently devoted to either mining or roads directly or indirectly. If we cut back on meat consumption by 2%, that is enough land for PV panels to power the USA.
Beyond that, there are many exotic types of energy under investigation from thorium power to hot and cold fusion.
And that is not even thinking about what we could do in space, like with huge solar mirrors.
So, why the doom and gloom about energy?
Good points. A fundamental question after 9/11 was "Why do they hate us?" The knee jerk response was "They hate us because we are free and wealthy and they hate freedom and wealth". But a truer answer is more likely "They hate us because we fund their oppressors and so have contributed to their relative unfreedom and poverty".
The biggest issue with all this is that advanced technologies of abundance like robotics, networked computing, nanotechnology, nuclear, aerospace, biotech and so on must be used from a perspective of abundance. Such technologies, like Bucky Fuller talked about, could create universal abundance for all of humanity -- and then some, as we spread into the solar system and to the stars, But, people are often using such technologies of abundance from the perspective of scarcity and so they are adapting advanced technology to fight the last century's wars over perceived resource scarcity. Thus we have ironies like people creating nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields, rather than using advanced materials and knowledge about how the atom works to make clean cheap energy for everyone (whether via nuclear means or solar panels or hot or cold fusion or whatever). I wrote a related essay here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
The same is happening with the misguided energy going into creating stuff like Stuxnet, especially given that what goes around comes around, and now everyone has access to Stuxnet as a prototype platform to build even worse stuff. Obama's escalations of the drone wars and the cyber wars just adds more ironies to his Nobel Peace Prize.
Still, ultimately, "war is a racket", and that racket sadly drives much of US foreign policy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
In general, everyone globally needs to totally rethink our collective economy and geopolitics for new 21st century realities. That will happen eventually because we can't survive the way we have been going on. It's only a question of how long until that change in mindset happens and how much suffering the world experences (including from nucelar war) until then. Here is another related website:
http://anwot.org/
Albert Bartlett's anaysis is miguided because he ignores that while problems can grow exponentially, so can solutions, especially when you have a lot of people to think them up and implement them. Julian Simon's take on things in "[The human imagination as] The Ultimate Resource" was much better in that regard. That's one reason aluminum used to cost more than gold, but now it is so cheap we throw it away. Soon we will have dirt-cheap solar panels and maybe even hot and cold fusion power, all thanks to all those "too many" people using too much stuff that people like Bartlett or William Catton might just as soon be rid of because they use resources and make places crowded, ignoring that people also produce resources and make places worth being in. Same for robotics, 3D printing, and someday self-replicating space habitats. The solar system may have limits to growth, but we are nowhere near them. Carrying capacity is a function of both lifestyle and technology, both of which are affected by imagination.
The main problem humanity faces right now is more the other direction -- highly educated and affluent people tend to stop breeding; you can see that in the demographics. Having so many modern distractions just makes the Peak Population crisis problem worse due to "The Pleasure Trap" of "Supernormal Stimuli". Contributing to that is also a scarcity mythology, made very dangerous because people will then ironically fight over perceived scarcity with the technologies of abundance like nuclear power, rocket ships, robotics, and nanotechnology...
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
"A video instructional series for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 26 half-hour video programs and coordinated books"
I've watched it twice, once in my twenties, and once with my kid. It is hosted by a Nobel prize winning chemist (Roald Hoffman) with demos by Don Showalter. Holds up pretty well for something from 1990 as far as the basics, except maybe for touting the wonders of Bisphenol A in the last episode or so.
Great post. Something by me on a related theme:
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
http://www.google.com/search?q=galactic+superwave+theory
One example:
http://www.etheric.com/LaViolette/Predict.html
"Subsequent concurrence (1998): In 1988, when presented with Dr. LaViolette's Galactic explosion hypothesis, astronomer Mark Morris dismissed the idea as having no merit. However, in 1998 after ten years of observation, Morris was quoted as saying that the center of our Galaxy explodes about every 10,000 years with these events each lasting 100 years or so."
Imagine if you were to go outside one night and the sky suddenly lit up as bright as day and stayed that way for 100 years!
Maybe matter falls towards the galactic core, but interacts with the core to produce shock waves that push it away again, to form some sort of resonant process that happens every 10,000 years?
See my comments here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/looking-back-on-noemail-at-6-weeks/comment-page-1/#comment-441324
And here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613
And here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
And here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f
And a related back-burner open source project by me (being passed by): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ ..."
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers.
... across the USA (my modest proposal): http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
"Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all."
...because the same technologies of computing could be used to create material abundance for all so there would be little reason to fight (like by sharing knowledge or collaborating online to build open robotics and advanced manufacturing systems). http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A lot of life circumstances (especially lack of good sleep) can put us on a downward spiral where we let things slide and things get worse, especially as we turn to junky comfort foods. Here is some health advice I put together to help with an upward spiral, but it is true that it is easier to follow with more social support and community (and less worries over money): http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Watch out especially for vitamin D deficiency and how using the computer indoors to deal with aches and pains may just make that worse as a downward spiral. Many adults need 5000 IU D3 daily as a supplement, as the US RDA is too low and dermatologists have gotten us to fear the sun. Taking vitamin D supplements is at least an easy first step back to wellness.
Also, eating a lot more vegetables and taking omega 3 supplements may help, too.
People may become obese eating "empty calorie" junk food because the body keeps searching for nutrients and filling fiber that is not in junk food, so their "appestat" (your thermostat for appetite) is never satisfied. In the same way, people may turn to more and more computer use when what they really want is something else (more human contact, more time in nature, more hands on projects, more satisfying work, etc.) -- searching for something they can't find much of online.
Good luck in moving onto an upward spiral again.
Sorry, that should read: "Another source from before Bush's *re-*election:"
"The problem is that there are hostile, sometimes crazy, nations that have nuclear weapons"
Like the USA? :-) If not today, maybe after the next election? What about a country that has institutionalized torture, that has about a quarter of its population food insecure, that is becoming completely dependent on other countries for consumer goods, and that is blowing up people around the world with killer robots, is sane?
You may be unable to see the forest of my point for the trees of your strategic reply, perhaps because you are caught up in short-term thinking about the rationality of military planning (each point making sense by itself) while missing the overall increasing systematic risk? That is the kind of thinking that lead to the recent global economic crisis --- every local economic decision making sense locally, but then the whole house of cards collapsing as the system collectively passes some phase change boundary (like heated water starting to turn into steam). Like pollution, increasing systemic risk is an externality often unaccounted for in local decision making (whether economically or militarily).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is based on rationality at all levels of the system (except that the whole approach is crazy for reasons I mention below). You just said there are crazy people out there. So MAD will not work. It can not keep working indefinitely for exactly the reasons you mention ("hostile, sometimes crazy"). Seriously, why should a crazy leader of either North Korea or the USA not just start nuking other countries because they think they are on some mission from god or something and everyone else is to terrified to stop them? Example:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
"George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month."
Another source from before Bush's election:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
"''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.'' "
You're also ignoring the bigger issue is that WMDs is no longer purely a national problem. Like has happened so many times before, the technologies like nuclear weapons, designer plagues, nanotech, cyberwarfare, or killer robots, that once were only in the control of big countries are going to eventually filter down to the average small country or even small group or individual. Our entire military doctrine is out-of-sync with emerging 21st century realities.
Or, as George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
An essay I wrote on that general issue:
"Problems of the MAD doctrine, their consequences, and positive alternatives"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/browse_thread/thread/6b18338b6b947931
"The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) wi
http://www.facebook.com/drfuhrman
"Joel Fuhrman M.D. is a board-certified family physician, best-selling author and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods."
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vitamin-D-Council/332321220632
"The Vitamin D Council is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to end the worldwide epidemic of vitamin D deficiency."
Just saying... Even though I normally cite their direct websites... Both eating better and getting enough vitamin D have been show to prevent, and in some cases reverse, a variety of diseases including cancer.
"If someone has a viable strategy for real global nuclear disarmament, I'm all ears."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Take rockets and advanced materials and social collaboration by engineers that could make the solar system rich through billions of self-replicating space habitats supporting trillions of human lives, and instead waste it all fighting over oil fields and on posturing about whose socioeconomic system is a little less broken given twenty-first century facts like advanced automation making most of the paid jobs go away...
"High-Speed Robot Hand " http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation?page=1
Or: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/automation-links/
And from there: http://singularityhub.com/2012/05/04/better-faster-and-cheaper-these-robots-are-invading-car-manufacturing-plants/
See especially from the last: http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/23/look-out-humans-this-frida-robot-from-abb-will-take-your-factory-job/
The income-through-jobs link that grants the right to consume (for those 99% without significant capital) is about to be severely stretched... Which was predicted decades ago (like in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964).
If we can have semi-autonomous drones to watch people who might steal things, why not just use the same robotic technology to make lots more stuff for everybody so less people feel a need to steal?
James P. Hogan on Global Warming: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan2.html
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=1171
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/category.php?id=21
"But even if the recent warming trends were shown to be largely of our own doing, there's more reason for celebration than the panic that we're witnessing. Warm worlds are cheerier, healthier, more secure, and better able to support a richer and more abundant biosphere than cold ones. On land and in the oceans, life thrives in the green equatorial and temperate zones, not the icy higher latitudes. A warmer world would transform the vast wastes of Siberia and northern Canada into forests, gardens, granaries, and habitats, opening up huge areas to accommodate the growing population that some view as a blight, and bring water back to such regions as the Sahara and Middle East, that were once verdant. So, if human activity is capable of making a measurable difference, one would think that a good policy to adopt would be to help things along by using the abundance of energy that the world offers, to increase wealth and living standards generally, and enjoy the environmental benefits."
The deeper issue is the unfairness that some people benefit from this (Canadians, Russians) while others lose out (islanders, those with beachfront property, those in places where the weather worsens, etc.). Our form of geographical sovereignty and related economics of real estate are not designed to deal with the consequences of global changes from "externalities".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality.
http://civicrm.org/casestudy/node/1390 ... With the backing of CiviCRM's community of developers, Bluebird's increased functional capabilities, streamlined workflows and refined user interface promises to move the State of New York forward and help improve the communication of representative governmentâs ultimately making the Senate more responsive to constituent needs. ... Several open source CRM solutions were evaluated as platforms to help improve the New York State Senate's communication and responsiveness to constituent needs through streamlined workflows, increased functional capabilities and a user interface built on principles of simplicity and efficiency. CiviCRM stood out from the other available platforms due to it's robust feature set, open source license, eager and thriving community of developers and cooperative core team."
"New York State Senate's Bluebird: Managing millions of constituents for 62 New York State Senate offices
The code is here:
https://github.com/nysenate
If CiviCRM/Bluebird can't do what the questioner asks, the feature could be added. It is a web-based PHP/Drupal application. The NYS Senate's technology group (a great group of people, who also run "Capitol Camp" http://blog.capitolcamp.org/ ) sometimes has openings for more open source developers, so for any expert PHP/Drupal developers out there who want to work in public service on open source, you might want to get your resume on file with them.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/179504
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
"[Toynbee] argues that in this environment, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, as a Prophet)."
That just about sums up so much slashdot discussion? :-)
More on that theme by me: http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/e34f9013282af9d7?hl=en
Your comment reminds me of: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars --- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism."
Anyway, the new battery sounds like an impressive innovation if it proves out in production. There are many innovative peopel at IBM Almaden; it is truly an amazing accomplishment. With that, and hydrigen storage in metal hydrides, both useful for storing intermittent renewable energy, and maybe hot or cold (LENR) fusion, our society is well on its way to ensuring an abundance of energy for all for basic needs.
Or, if you assume people are reading your emails, then you can write your email in such as way as might enlighten the human (or AI) readers so they could become part of a post-scarcity society that is emerging from the very technologies being used for eavesdropping, storing, indexing, and sensemaking... That's one reason my standard email sig says: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity. "
Or as I wrote here: :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.
Or, also from there: "As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card technology] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
So, we must continue to make the most of our advantages of a lack of credibility, a lack of resources, and our being under constant surveillance to help achieve the goal of a happier, healthier, abundant, and intrinsically&mutually secure society for all. :-) When you look at it that way, keeping the world from blowing itself up, or plaguing itself down, or roboticizing or bureaucratizing itself to death is not entirely impossible with the resources at hand. :-)
Or at least, maybe we can at least keep things going until the asteroid mining starts to pay off and we get self-replicating space habitats going? :-)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403362,00.asp
This article is about an example of an organization that can collect, index, and try to make sense of 20 trillion transactions from around the globe, but they not the only one (Google is another example). At some point, quantitative differences become qualitative differences. As our society deals in all sorts of abundances, we are moving into mostly uncharted waters (even as some people like James P. Hogan in "Voyage from Yesteryear" tried to paint us a possible picture of the difference between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking). We need to think about what that "societal phase change" means (to use JP Hogan's phrasing). But very few people are doing that, and the discussion to this article is just one more example of missing the forest for the trees. Whether or not encryption makes sense in any context is completely tangential to this much deeper and broader issue of abundance vs. scarcity thinking.
See also my essays on this: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... 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
Or:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
Or:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sens
Taken from what I wrote 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?
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 example, a
From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. (from David Goostein, Vice Provost, Caltech, who testified to Congress back then about this)"
One solution would be a graduate-student level stipend of a "basic income" for *everyone* in the country, so those who were inclined to research could do that, or those who wanted to write free software could do that, or those who wanted to volunteer with local Emergency Medical Services could do that, and others could raise children, and so on. A gift economy could accomplish that too, as could advanced 3D printing, or also better government planning to create free or cheap life-support services related to housing and food. We'll probably see a mix of all that going forward, and there already are aspects of all of those already.
We also need to move beyond this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."