"There were also less than 0.1% of the current population of the area, and they had little use for wood beyond using it as a basic structural material and occasional fuel for heat."
Exactly. The amount of resources was very abundant relative to the need, and so people did not have to work very hard to get wood. Now apply that idea to cheap energy from LENR, and cheap 3D printing, and cheap nanotech material recycling, and cheap service robotics, and so on.
With about seven billion people on the planet, many connected to the internet, we have more collective imagination than ever. So as a species, we are in that sense wealthier than ever...
"Again: China is developing a middle class. As China exits the cheap-labor market, many more countries are willing and able to pick up the slack"
China was the biggest single cheap labor pool around. Most of the remaining places for cheap labor have very little infrastructure. So, how long is that trend going to last?
Also, at some point, it does not matter how cheap the labor is if the quality standards can not be met for some reason. Related article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true "Tony explains that Maddie has a job [in the USA] for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe -- for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense. "
So, even in the USA, many jobs could be completely automated if we wanted to. Ask yourself, it is really better that this single parent is away from her young children to save a $100,000 capital investment by someone? Would not the USA be a better place if the robot was doing that work and this person could spend more time with her children, friends, and neighbors? How many jobs are like that, or worse are just counter-productive like Bob Black wrote about in 1985 and others in the 1960s?
"There is no vast conspiracy to defeat your idealistic vision..."
Did I say there was? Although it is true there are forces against it... As well as forces for it.
"... there are only the economic realities of efficiency and cost. The automation you envision will only happen when it becomes effective and inexpensive and not a moment before."
Well, total economic realities involve all externalities which should include things like pollution costs, health costs, social benefits costs for displaced
"It doesn't really go to my point. It's not that some people can't find something to work for on their own, it's that most people can't."
Maybe then you might like this refutation better?:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error "In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior -- where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias. As a simple example, if Alice saw Bob trip over a rock and fall, Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless (dispositional). If Alice tripped over the same rock herself, she would be more likely to blame the placement of the rock (situational)."
So, according to the fundamental attribution error, it is only natural to feel that you (and rich folk) work hard because you are virtuous. Other people whose will has been broken by the schooling system or by boring jobs don't work because they are lazy and uncreative as an innate personality defect.
Again, being a good parent can take about as much time as anyone can put into it, especially in today's problematical society that is very anti-child, anti-health, and anti-community. Ask a few people who are actively raising young children if they need more make-work activities added to their day?:-)
"Most people will need to be given some artificial challange. And the success of MMOs shows that artificial challanges fill the void, at least for a time, but I'm not sure where that leads us."
Still, see for more support that mindless schooling and mindless work reduce people in their potentials to set their own directions: "Human Resources 3/9" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
I feel that most people don't need to be "given" challenges when they are healthy and raised in a healthy community; I feel they will in that case be able to find or invent their own meaningful activities. (I'm not saying the USA approaches that though in many places...) It would be a good question how to prove that to your skeptical satisfaction (which is not an unreasonable demand).
To my mind, the fact that we generally only see fairly good people as very successful doesn't really tell us what we can conclude about the rest of humanity's aspirations and proclivities in a different setting that is less "winner takes all". Generally, the biggest material success is also not the very best in a field, who may languish as mavericks, but people of some substantial talent who were lucky enough to have substantial financial backing and good social networks and who were willing to make the right compromises for material success. Bill Gates is an example of that -- someone of substantial talent (but not the very best say compared to Dan Ingalls), born to wealth, and in the right place at the righ
This was a very interesting reply, thanks. It points out a few important issues.
As when people leave conventional schooling for "unschooling" or "homeschooling", it may take some time to decompress. A rule of thumb there is somewhere between one month to one year of decompression for every year of compulsory schooling.
Also, humans naturally are lazy to conserve energy. It's a good thing to be lazy because it prevents wasting resources on things that don't help survival. That is weighed in the mind against the fact that it is also a good thing to do certain things (things that contribute towards survival). The mind is in tension between those two things. Or, in other words, necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness is the father.:-)
Also, people in industrialized societies have become so vitamin D deficient (from lack of sunlight), so phytonutrient deficient (from lack of vegetables), so omega 3 deficient (from lack of vegetables and fish), and so on from modern processed food, that their brains are affected in a bad way, which makes it harder to be self-directing.
Please get your vitamin D level checked if you are indoors so much... Vitamin D is an occupational hazard of indoors workers like most electrical engineers.
Anyway, put those all together, and yes, it can be really hard for a mainstream person to suddenly become self-directing and healthy and connected to a health community. It can be a big challenge. Good luck with it. Part of that is to get into the right environment that stimulates us in healthy ways. See for example: http://www.bluezones.com/
As our technology improves (like with better agricultural robotics, 3D printing, mining robotics, LENR cheap energy, etc.), it will only take the 1% who enjoy stuff like that to provide enough of the basics for everyone (whether lurker or shirker), same as with GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, blogging, slashdot, etc. provide lots of information for us all through the efforts of a relatively few percent of the population. So, that is how there can be cell phones and such even if few people work to make them. Already we see a continuing drop in manufacturing employment while still producing just as much, just like agriculture before that. We'll probably increasingly see that in services, too. Here is an example for sharing free 3D designs for stuff you can print in 3D printers: http://www.thingiverse.com/
Also, Bob Black, in The Abolition of Work (the first article I think you're referring to), talks about making work into play. You are playing "games" at home. What if making stuff or providing services felt pretty much just as much fun, with a sense of flow? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Maybe you could even invent yourself a job as a "job designer"?:-)
Anyway, there are no easy answers for individuals, even if collectively the USA could with a stro
"The great unsolved problem is: people need to work for their keep (in some fashion) to feel spiritually fulfilled. In a post-basic-need-scarcity world, how does that happen? Because we've seen, over and over again, that society basically disintegrates if people don't feel like they've worked for the things they have."
Humans naturally come up with their own things to do. It is actually social institutions like compulsory schooling that beats that out of them. See John Taylor Gatto's writings, for example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates..."
Just trying to be a good parent to young children can pretty much take as much time as people can put into it.
If what you said was true, then why do not all the rich people in the world disintegrate (given most have inherited a good share of their wealth and power)? Why would they give money to their children? Why does Bill Gates still do things when he has so much material wealth? Why did Richard Stallman keep doing stuff after he got a MacArthur Genius award and could have just sat on his backside?
What does it mean to work for something? Is it really a big problem that people generally get their air for free?
I'm not saying there is not truth to your point, because it is true that people need meaning in their lives. I'm just suggesting the issue of gaining meaning solely by overcoming material scarcity does not generalize as broadly as you suggest. See also, for some middle ground: http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
Those are reasons why we may choose not to automate stuff even when we can...
"These conditions exist because we are riding on the fruits of someone else's labors..."
See, for contrast the ideas of C.H. Douglas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.""
If what you said was entirely true (I'm not saying there is not some truth in it), then how would Wikipedia work? How would GNU/Linux work? How would volunteer non-profits work? How would Slashdot work? Yet they all do to some extent. As we get more advanced technology, it becomes easier (and more fun) for a few who want to produce useful stuff to do so for everyone who wants it. At some point, then a high-tech gift economy becomes easy to sustain. See also James P. Hogan's novels like "Voyage From Yesteryear" for some ideas on how that might look socially.
As I mentioned, there are also ideas like a "basic income", democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence using advanced technologies. All of these can work together, as I outlined here: "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Your loss. The Skills of Xanadu is an amazing story, especially for having been written in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext, which we are essentially using to communicate right now.
As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them. So, you can have "permaculture" without too much work. See also: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article? http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338 "In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."
What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings? Robots can build new factories too (as if we did not have more than enough already). Don't confuse the fact that for historical reasons some few humans claim entitlement to "rent" on accessing resources they control socially with the issue that robots can increasingly supply substantially all the labor needed to use resources to make stuff. See Marshall Brain's Manna for one idea on how that might work economically: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff, especially when we are deciding for ourselves what to do or make. Look at how much people like Minecraft. So, it's not clear we need the robots in a big way. The alternative is to rethink the work so it is fun. How many trillions of one meter cubes have been mined over the last two years in Minecraft? People even pay for the privilege of doing so.
AC, probably you feel you have the moral high ground here and so that justifies incivility and so on, but you are mainly just regurgitating outdated conventional wisdom, sorry. Saying only genes cause cancer is just deep ignorance, sorry. Genes may give people weak links, but whether those weak links are ever pulled on to the point where they break is in most cases determined by what you eat and how you live (a point Dr. Fuhrman makes in "Eat to Live"). You're just advocating a certain kind of genetic fatalism.
If you bothered to look up those references you would see links to scientific research calling into question the US RDA for vitamin D (which is involved in regulating thousands of genes),
The same is true for iodine. Iodine is used both in apoptosis and also to build a protective layer against infections, again showing you don't really know what you are talking about with that. People in Japan get about ten times as much iodine as people in the USA and live longer. Also, they probably don't eat as much bread made now with bromine in the USA (bromine is an iodine antagonist).
You called someone a "Ghoul" (anonymously even) when they point out stuff that may reduce a person's friends nausea or that may help them prevent a recurrence of cancer if treatment is successful (as I mentioned). Was in appropriate to mention that to someone right now? Always a judgment call when the alternative is that they may never hear such things, true. But, would you rather that person's friend had way more nausea than the friend has to have? That sounds more ghoulish to me, sorry. Maybe it is also far more "ghoulish" to just make anonymous personal attacks on people trying to help move beyond a broken medical paradigm that tends to exploit people in all kinds of ways? Granted, 20% of modern medicine is miraculous, and some cancer treatments do indeed help, because as I said, once you have cancer, the results are iffy. I was actually in a PhD program in Biology (ecology and evolution) twenty years ago for what it is worth. I am trying to help people learn some very hard won knowledge, stuff I wish I had know years before loved ones died from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Call that ghoulish if you will. Also, a lot of people read slashdot that may benefit from knowing more about cancer, both prevention and treatment, especially considering how vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of indoor working (like most slashdotters probably engage in). That's why people read and post here.
See also stuff like a book written by a former oncologist: http://cancercaremalaysia.com/2011/09/02/book-review-money-driven-medicine-%E2%80%93-chemotherapy-for-non-responsive-cancers-%E2%80%93-denying-reality/ "Medical oncologists are paid almost nothing for talking with patients and their families. Their income depends entirely on the number of chemotherapy treatments that they order and how much they charge for each treatment. Unlike other specialists, the government allows them to also profit by selling chemotherapy drugs to their patients.... Because of the so-called "blood brain barrier," most drugs do not penetrate well from the blood stream into the brain tissue. With the exception of childhood neuroblastoma, brain cancers respond poorly to chemotherapy...." (Yet Vitamin D, iodine, fasting, and phytonutrients may indeed all benefit the brain...)
Also from that link: "Let me stress again, the above 44 statements are words written by Dr. David Cundiff, a medical oncologist turned hospice doctor. Dr. Cundiff left oncology perhaps because he couldn't "stomach" what he saw and practised. He has now joined the list of those brave souls who have enough conscience and guts to speak up."
Who does that imply are the ghouls here?
As for fasting in general, it activates biochemical pathways in the h
"Money is not the enemy, it is a tool for managing a large group of people. The legal structure that surrounds money, its distribution and its use are how that tool is used, and determine whether money will free people and empower or if it is will trap people and enslave them. The far-right has worked hard in America to turn money into a tool for controlling people, trapping them in their position in society and enforcing a rigid social structure; that is what needs to be attacked."
Lawrence Lessing writes in "Code 2.0" that there are at least four ways to control people's behavior: rules, norms, prices, and architecture. One of the big problems in the USA today is that it is so market driven, but there are many externalities (like pollution from coal burning) that are not priced into the cost of things up-front. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
I might add that the left has some of its own version of using money to control as well though through government programs. The right often celebrates self-reliance while accusing the left that they cultivate dependency.
Also, it's possible that sometimes artifacts (including the idea of money) have implicit politics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner "In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power. To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics...."
Mainly because it is increasing obsolete as a vague way to understand demand. Things like emails and twitters are a more nuanced way to express complex demands.
But, it is true, with a "basic income", money is not as bad a thing. For example, see Marshall Brain's Manna: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm ""It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."...
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
"Let me show you." said Cynthia. She opened her catalog to a page, and pointed to one of the pictures. It was clothing. "This is what I am wearing." she said. "See - it is 6 credits. In a typical week I only spend about 70 or so credits on clothes. That's why I like to wear something new every day."
"The robots did manufacture Cynthia's outfit for free. They took recycled resources, added energy and robotic labor and created what she is wearing. It cost nothing to make it. She paid credits simply to keep track of how many resources she is using." "
More and more the link between a right to consume and a need to get humans to do labor is breaking. People could see that beginning even in 1964: http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird peopleâ(TM)s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures --unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal i
"Cajun Hell described the world as it is currently functioning today,"
Only some parts of it. Are most parents paid? How much of our economy is based on volunteerism of some sort? What about slashdot itself -- do people have to be paid to write all this great content? Were you paid to write your post? Do you ever cook your own meals without being paid? Do you and friends ever talk together or contribute to some potluck party without billing each other? Alternatives are possible; see for example this book: "The dictionary of alternatives: utopianism and organization" http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
On that general issue, see also an essay I sent Andrea Rossi (supposed inventor of a LENR device): http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation "The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore."
What might we get soon with "Wikispeed" ideas applied to alternative energy? http://www.wikispeed.com/the-process "Team WIKISPEED uses methods developed by the fastest-moving software companies. In fact, in many ways we have more in common with Google or Twitter than with GM or Toyota. Manufacturing and old-thought software teams gather requirements, design the solution, build the solution, test the solution, then deliver the solution. In existing automotive companies, the design portion of that process alone takes three to twelve years, and then the vehicle design is built for five to fourteen years. This means it is possible to buy a brand new car from a dealer and that car represents the engineering team's understanding of what the customer might have wanted twenty-four years ago! Team WIKISPEED follows the model of Agile software teams, compressing the entire development cycle into one-week "sprints." We iterate the entire car every seven days, meaning that every seven days we reevaluate each part of the car and reinvent the highest-priority aspects, instead of waiting ten to twenty-four years to upgrade. This process enables a completely different pace of development."
Also, how much "labor" does a tree do to grow? It is possible then in theory to use just water, CO2, and a little bit of soil to make amazing things that are mostly carbon.
In general, one could make the same argument about software or content. People are never going to spend lots of time making free software or content to give away, and yet they do through GNU/Linux and Wikipedia.
"Money is used in exchange for labor. Labor takes up a person's time. A person's time is finite. One has only to look through the local obituary to realize that the scarcity is quite genuine."
When robotics are really cheap, what is the difference between writing free software to run material gathering robots and gathering materials for "free"?
"The 21st-century computer you composed this on is only possible because of people supplying raw materials and manufacturing in 19th-century conditions."
I might have agreed if you had not used the word "only".:-) How far we have fallen in our aspirations: http://www.fact-index.com/n/ne/next.html "By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory for their first product, the NeXTcube."
It's true that essentially slave human labor is still cheaper than robots in some applications (though fewer and fewer applications as even essentially dirt-cheap slaves kept in dormitories can't keep up with the quality robots can produce and they also take more management.)
But as is suggested here: "Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo we had a gift economy (and generally communal property ownership of hunting and gathering grounds) long before people started doing exchange-based economics. So, that is a missing part of most discussions about the emergence of money.
With that said, I do tend to agree that war can happen for a lot of non-material reasons (issue of pride, honor, internal politics, cultural clashes, and so on). Still, in general, "War is a Racket" driven by greed according to Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
There may be always reasons why people are in conflict. But turning that conflict into large bureaucracies spending vast amounts or resources on the conflict generally means money is involved somehow someway. History is full of examples where people with different belief systems got along -- Ancient China, the North American natives, and even the past 200 years of life in New York City.:-)
This is not to disagree totally with your point on conflict. If you want to take that analysis up a notch, you could look into "memetics" and the evolutionary forces on "memes". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
"There's still a minimum level of money you have to pay someone so that they are willing to be creative for you. Although after a certain point, most people are not motivated by money anymore, so throwing more of it at them leads to diminishing returns."
Good points, thank. So often there is a confusion between the notion of money (or other resources) as *enabling* creativity as opposed to money as *rewarding* creativity. And as you say there, the issue with money becomes getting people to be creative for *you* (where it is true, the concept of money can help), as opposed to maximally creative for themselves or the world, where it turns out money tends to hurt (beyond, of course, the fact that people who are deprived often find their creativity directed at best only to survival).
Example: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/06/how-to-build-a-career-as-an-artist/ "The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can't really make art. Because your sense of self-preservation insists that your brain focus on the possibility that you will be out on the street. Your brain cannot stop solving that problem long enough to solve the problem of what is truth and beauty. Here are some things I did while I was becoming a writer: I ate only bagels because I didn't have enough money for anything else and then I got anemic and had to go to the doctor but I didn't have health insurance so I had to lie and say I did in order to get the iron pills I needed so that I didn't pass out from exhaustion the moment I woke up in the morning. Believe me, I was not making great art during this period."
So, yes, as far as creativity is concerned, a money based society (where all food is under "lock and key" like Daniel Quinn call it) can use money to say what people will mostly be creative about, accepting that they will in general be much less creative overall if controlled that way. Even self-employed artists often fall into a rut where they keep making more of the same stuff that paid well last time, rather than trying to reach towards new ideas like they might have done before they were financially successful.
And in general, creativity may not be very important to our current system: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a h
I could believe that last one!:-) http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/ "Hearst and Anslinger were then supported by Dupont chemical company and various pharmaceutical companies in the effort to outlaw cannabis. Dupont had patented nylon, and wanted hemp removed as competition. The pharmaceutical companies could neither identify nor standardize cannabis dosages, and besides, with cannabis, folks could grow their own medicine and not have to purchase it from large companies."
So, if true, once again, artificial scarcity, backed up by legal means...
Yes, "The Dead Past" is probably the one I was thinking of, thanks. I just looked at it again in Asimov's "Earth is Room Enough" just now.
I can still wonder if there is still one more old story about a single inventor of such a cheap device (one where the inventor uses false labels on envelopes that fall off due to weak glue when they send out the plans to everyone). But I may be getting some stories mixed up with another sci-fi one where there was universal surveillance. And I don't remember all the details from "The Light of Other Days" so I may be mixing in some plot points from there?
That Wikipedia link on "The Dead Past" also points to two other stories, "E for Effort" and "Paycheck", but I'm pretty sure I have not read either one of those.
The Widom-Larsen idea is that strange things happen at the surface of metals, where protons and electrons can become slow neutrons which then are absorbed which leads to conventional radioactive decay.
In theory, to have space habitats, all we really need to do is launch one robotic seed factory to the moon, and then have it make all the space craft and habitats there. No need for CO2. And rising CO2 is really the least of our problems as a species -- it may already have forestalled another ice age we are due for. Much of it may have come from topsoil depletion by bad farming practices, too. That is solveable with relatively small amounts of energy and materials like so by grinding up rock: http://remineralize.org/
A little idea sketch I made about three years ago of what it would take to evacuate all humans from the Earth into space habitats: http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004037.html "Current launch costs are about US$10,000 a pound. People on starvation diets might weigh about 100 pounds. So, that's about US$1 million per person for launch costs using today's technology in small production runs. I feel it reasonable to assume that if we were going to launch billions of people into space, launch costs would come down by at least a factor of ten to US$100K per person, considering how people are already talking about such lower costs, and the actual energy to lift someone into space if you can do it really efficiently (space elevator) is maybe US$200 worth of electricity... So, seven billion people soon, minus a few doomsters, times US$100K per person, is US$700 trillion. The world GDP is about US$60 trillion, so, in round numbers, this is about ten years of world economic output to put everyone into space. We can assume that with these self-replicating space habitat seeds that an entire space infrastructure is being prepared for free from sunlight and lunar ore and asteroidal ore (though it might take some time to produce it on an exponential growth curve). So, we only need to get people into low Earth orbit and shuttles can ferry people without luggage beyond low Earth orbit to a life of abundance produced with resources from space. Also, since we're evacuating the entire planet to leave it as a nature park, we don't need to do any upkeep on infrastructure as it is all abandoned. So, we can devote close to 100% of the industrial base to producing rockets. Also, people in space can still provide services to Earth like telemedicine or teleoperating mining equipment and launch control, so essential services can be kept going the whole time even as the last person goes on the last rocket (except the doomsters who want to stay:-)."
Of course, we could ask, how many times has this been done before over the last few billion years?:-)
Thanks for your other comment too (which this kind of addresses in part as well). Good luck with your robotics work. Robots could be a boon instead of a bane as long as we adjust our economy to a post-scarcity model. One example I put together: "The Riches
"The main thing is the solutions are there, the problem can be solved."
Yes, that is my key point. Solutions exist even if we may choose collectively not to pursue them. Thanks for the summary and insights into issues of power. A related item: "The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Whether we decide to solve these problem is getting to be more a social issue than a technological one. A related essay I wrote: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en "One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.:-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. or, 10 * 10 = 100."
One big problem is that every day it gets easier and easier for fewer and fewer people to wipe out all of humanity. For example, the genetic code was like a lock that prevented designer plagues (or attempts at them). Now that that code has been "broken", we are all at extreme risk of plagues created for whatever reasons. And it is not as easy to change your DNA as it is to change your ssh key.
As Bucky Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...
So, I don't know what will happen. I only can see from everything I've read on slashdot and elsewhere what could possibly happen in terms of solutions.
Likely we may get a range of outcomes in different places. India actually seems to me a place that may get it together best -- a culture of villages, a culture of sharing, a common knowledge of English, a youthful population, and so on... http://p2pfoundation.net/Creative_Commons_-_Critiques#The_perverse_effects_of_CC_in_the_developing_world "There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill "One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space.[50][51] Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites. "
And from around 1927: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/ "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus."
"Likewise, unless the powers that be use fascist tactics to control reproduction, procreation will put a further strain on resources."
There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations... http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html
"What do any of those last 3 links have to do with what you quoted? Have you just been looking for a place to post those? Or do I just not see the connection?"
They are all about currency and motivation, and how money in practice really came to be and how trying to motivate creating through money is counter-productive.
"you're not going to get a stranger to do your domestic chores as a gift."
Too true, because what current military planners (civilian especially) have lost sight of is that any medium-size country can probably make a deadly global plague either now or very soon. And the scale needed for such an effort continues to decrease (it's probably more like any second-tier university could do it). That fact totally changes the dynamics of war and the nature of security, but it has not been widely understood, otherwise people would not be so focused on whether Iran gets "nukes" when it and many other countries may already have plagues. Look at another slashdot article today on scientists making a version of herpes that evades the human immune system (supposedly for therapeutic goals, fine, but what else might it be used for?) Reseachers also did other stuff with increasing the transmission of viruses with a related controversy about publication. We need to focus on intrinsic security and mutual security and abundance for all if *any* of us are to survive in any recognizable way.
"I don't think that's necessarily so. Some things have real scarcity, such as bushels of wheat or energy. There really is only so much, and its limits are quite natural."
True, but that is real scarcity, not artificial scarcity. And there are no laws about sharing bushels of wheat or counterfeiting electricity, are there?
As for your other points, you invent a system for organizing society, say it has problems, and then expect me to solve them for you?:-) Why not just have a gift economy empowered by robotics and advanced materials and LENR and dirt-cheap solar panels? It is no longer hard to make most everyday things, given most peolpe's biggest problem in the USA is having too much stuff. Maybe it was once hard to make stuff, but it is not anymore. 1% of the population can produce enough food via farming for everyone (especially if we stop raising livestock, which takes 75% of agriculture and overall is not helping our health). Manufacturing is going that way too, with a declining trend on how many people are needed to make stuff, and robotics and 3D printing are just more steps along that path. We don't need to "motivate" people extrinsically to make content (as shown by bloggers and Wikipedia and YouTube). Most services can be provided by friends and neighbors empowered by learning through the internet.
So, why do we need these "chits" you're talking about and worried about people "cheating" with?:-)
Although I don't see why anyone would even bother, when they could just ask their neighbor to print them a new 3D printer and some solar panels and a matter extractor device if theirs broke for some reason.:-) Maybe we are not there now, but we may be in 20 years or so?
However, that is not to completely disagree with your point. It is true that abundances of one thing can sometimes create a complementary scarcity of something else (too much information chasing too little attention). But *material* scarcity is over if we want it -- just like war: http://imaginepeace.com/warisover/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbKsgaXQy2k
"Fiat currencies emerged because, as economies grew, you simply couldn't find enough notes to do business"
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money
A related sci-fi book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days "The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke, which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum.... The novel examines the philosophical issues that arise from the world's population (increasingly suffering from ecological and political disturbances) being aware that they could be under constant observation by anyone, or that they could observe anyone without their knowledge...."
There are a couple other similar sci-fi stories as well, including one about "Slow Glass" by Bob Shaw with the same name as that novel. http://strick.net/blog/041103.html
And one about a similar time viewer (I forget the name).
Unfortunately, instead of scientists studying what is proven to work (nutrition, fasting, and lifestyle) and then people lobbying to make good support for healthy choices readily available to all, scientists seem to be creating what could become the basis of a weaponized plague that evades the human immune system.:-(
Well, maybe I could say that says all I need to know about where *you* are coming from regarding "science"?:-) Oh yea of so little faith in science and inquiry and so much faith in unquestionable dogmas?:-) Did you bother to do even the slightest bit of research before your reaction? See for example: "Variety in Fruit and Vegetable Consumption and the Risk of Lung Cancer in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition" http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/729525 "The results show that the risk for lung cancer decreased with increasing variety in fruit and vegetable consumption. The hazard ratio for the quartile of participants with the greatest DDS was 0.77 (95% confidence interval, 0.64-0.94) compared with the quartile that had the lowest dietary diversity (P =.02). Intermediate DDS results were associated with intermediate reductions in lung cancers. The inverse association between dietary diversity and incidence of lung cancers was limited to current smokers, and there was a lower risk for squamous cell carcinomas but not other lung cancers. Data on known potential confounding factors, particularly consumption of meat and alcohol, as well as physical activity and education levels, were available but did not affect the outcome."
And that result is not even by focusing on a possible synergetic effect of bringing together really superior nutrition like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talk about with lots of fruits, vegetables, and beans (plus some nuts, seeds, whole grains, and omega 3s), good vitamin D levels like Dr. John Cannell talks about, and Iodine like others talk about, and wellness strategies like Dr. Andrew Weil talks about. Together, these things may well have a much bigger benefit to someone than quitting smoking, and then, when a person doing these other things is healthier overall physically and mentally, quitting smoking may be much easier. That was Dr. Mercola's point if you watched the video, and he tells the story in relation to his success in getting his own sister to quit smoking but all the health problems she had because he did not focus first on helping her eat better. Sometimes when you want to get a pool ball into a pocket you need to do a bank shot.:-)
Science is a process, not just a storehouse of stale factoids (many of which may even have been imparted due to someone's profit motive and may not be very true, or may be out of context or incomplete). And what facts science as a social enterprise chooses to collect and organize also has a lot to do with politics. See also, by an editor of Physics Today: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
Do I (or Dr. Mercola in that video) recommend smoking? Of course not. It's a dirty habit, and an expensive one too, and it is harmful to your health and that of those around you. But it is quite likely that smoking is far less dangerous to your health than the Standard American Diet when you consider a SAD diet puts you at increased risk for all sorts of other cancers, plus heart disease, plus diabetes, plus dementia, and so on. Put the two together (SAD and smoking) and that is, of course, really bad news for many people in the USA. As Dr. Mercola points out in the video, most MDs have been trained to prioritize addressing the less important one first (smoking), a prioritization that may indeed be shortening the lives of their patients compared to doing things the other way around of focusing on nutrition first, like Dr. Mercola suggests. Once people are eating better, and reducing stress in other parts of their lives (see Andrew Weil's work or "Blue Zones"), then maybe they eventually will be able to move beyond the "pleasure trap" of smoking. http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Anyway, about all I have time for. Perhaps you just can't hear what I'm saying right now b
Slashdot Mirror
"There were also less than 0.1% of the current population of the area, and they had little use for wood beyond using it as a basic structural material and occasional fuel for heat."
Exactly. The amount of resources was very abundant relative to the need, and so people did not have to work very hard to get wood. Now apply that idea to cheap energy from LENR, and cheap 3D printing, and cheap nanotech material recycling, and cheap service robotics, and so on.
The human imagination is indeed the "ultimate resource" as economist Julian Simon said:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
With about seven billion people on the planet, many connected to the internet, we have more collective imagination than ever. So as a species, we are in that sense wealthier than ever...
"Again: China is developing a middle class. As China exits the cheap-labor market, many more countries are willing and able to pick up the slack"
China was the biggest single cheap labor pool around. Most of the remaining places for cheap labor have very little infrastructure. So, how long is that trend going to last?
Also, at some point, it does not matter how cheap the labor is if the quality standards can not be met for some reason. Related article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true
"Tony explains that Maddie has a job [in the USA] for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe -- for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense. "
So, even in the USA, many jobs could be completely automated if we wanted to. Ask yourself, it is really better that this single parent is away from her young children to save a $100,000 capital investment by someone? Would not the USA be a better place if the robot was doing that work and this person could spend more time with her children, friends, and neighbors? How many jobs are like that, or worse are just counter-productive like Bob Black wrote about in 1985 and others in the 1960s?
The cost of advanced robotics is also dropping very rapidly. Even toys are more and more pressed into service in real productive applications:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/13/1426252/lego-mindstorms-used-to-make-artificial-bones
"There is no vast conspiracy to defeat your idealistic vision..."
Did I say there was? Although it is true there are forces against it... As well as forces for it.
"... there are only the economic realities of efficiency and cost. The automation you envision will only happen when it becomes effective and inexpensive and not a moment before."
Well, total economic realities involve all externalities which should include things like pollution costs, health costs, social benefits costs for displaced
"It doesn't really go to my point. It's not that some people can't find something to work for on their own, it's that most people can't."
Maybe then you might like this refutation better? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
"In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior -- where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias. As a simple example, if Alice saw Bob trip over a rock and fall, Alice might consider Bob to be clumsy or careless (dispositional). If Alice tripped over the same rock herself, she would be more likely to blame the placement of the rock (situational)."
So, according to the fundamental attribution error, it is only natural to feel that you (and rich folk) work hard because you are virtuous. Other people whose will has been broken by the schooling system or by boring jobs don't work because they are lazy and uncreative as an innate personality defect.
Again, being a good parent can take about as much time as anyone can put into it, especially in today's problematical society that is very anti-child, anti-health, and anti-community. Ask a few people who are actively raising young children if they need more make-work activities added to their day? :-)
"Most people will need to be given some artificial challange. And the success of MMOs shows that artificial challanges fill the void, at least for a time, but I'm not sure where that leads us."
I'd certainly agree that some people are good at making worlds others want to spend time exploring. It's a good question how we should feel about this. What aspects of that come from creating pleasure traps unhealthily full of supernormal stimuli irresistible to abnormally distressed people?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Still, see for more support that mindless schooling and mindless work reduce people in their potentials to set their own directions:
"Human Resources 3/9"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
I feel that most people don't need to be "given" challenges when they are healthy and raised in a healthy community; I feel they will in that case be able to find or invent their own meaningful activities. (I'm not saying the USA approaches that though in many places...) It would be a good question how to prove that to your skeptical satisfaction (which is not an unreasonable demand).
To my mind, the fact that we generally only see fairly good people as very successful doesn't really tell us what we can conclude about the rest of humanity's aspirations and proclivities in a different setting that is less "winner takes all". Generally, the biggest material success is also not the very best in a field, who may languish as mavericks, but people of some substantial talent who were lucky enough to have substantial financial backing and good social networks and who were willing to make the right compromises for material success. Bill Gates is an example of that -- someone of substantial talent (but not the very best say compared to Dan Ingalls), born to wealth, and in the right place at the righ
This was a very interesting reply, thanks. It points out a few important issues.
As when people leave conventional schooling for "unschooling" or "homeschooling", it may take some time to decompress. A rule of thumb there is somewhere between one month to one year of decompression for every year of compulsory schooling.
Also, humans naturally are lazy to conserve energy. It's a good thing to be lazy because it prevents wasting resources on things that don't help survival. That is weighed in the mind against the fact that it is also a good thing to do certain things (things that contribute towards survival). The mind is in tension between those two things. Or, in other words, necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness is the father. :-)
Also, in our society, with "supernormal stimuli", it is indeed easy to get caught in "pleasure traps" whether you have to work 9-5 or not:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Also, people in industrialized societies have become so vitamin D deficient (from lack of sunlight), so phytonutrient deficient (from lack of vegetables), so omega 3 deficient (from lack of vegetables and fish), and so on from modern processed food, that their brains are affected in a bad way, which makes it harder to be self-directing.
Please get your vitamin D level checked if you are indoors so much... Vitamin D is an occupational hazard of indoors workers like most electrical engineers.
More health tips here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Anyway, put those all together, and yes, it can be really hard for a mainstream person to suddenly become self-directing and healthy and connected to a health community. It can be a big challenge. Good luck with it. Part of that is to get into the right environment that stimulates us in healthy ways. See for example:
http://www.bluezones.com/
BTW, and to address some of the other points you made too, have you thought about a career in agricultural robotics? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
As our technology improves (like with better agricultural robotics, 3D printing, mining robotics, LENR cheap energy, etc.), it will only take the 1% who enjoy stuff like that to provide enough of the basics for everyone (whether lurker or shirker), same as with GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, blogging, slashdot, etc. provide lots of information for us all through the efforts of a relatively few percent of the population. So, that is how there can be cell phones and such even if few people work to make them. Already we see a continuing drop in manufacturing employment while still producing just as much, just like agriculture before that. We'll probably increasingly see that in services, too. Here is an example for sharing free 3D designs for stuff you can print in 3D printers:
http://www.thingiverse.com/
Also, Bob Black, in The Abolition of Work (the first article I think you're referring to), talks about making work into play. You are playing "games" at home. What if making stuff or providing services felt pretty much just as much fun, with a sense of flow?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Maybe you could even invent yourself a job as a "job designer"? :-)
Anyway, there are no easy answers for individuals, even if collectively the USA could with a stro
"The great unsolved problem is: people need to work for their keep (in some fashion) to feel spiritually fulfilled. In a post-basic-need-scarcity world, how does that happen? Because we've seen, over and over again, that society basically disintegrates if people don't feel like they've worked for the things they have."
Humans naturally come up with their own things to do. It is actually social institutions like compulsory schooling that beats that out of them. See John Taylor Gatto's writings, for example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm ..."
"When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates
Just trying to be a good parent to young children can pretty much take as much time as people can put into it.
Look at how people used to live for some other ideas:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
If what you said was true, then why do not all the rich people in the world disintegrate (given most have inherited a good share of their wealth and power)? Why would they give money to their children? Why does Bill Gates still do things when he has so much material wealth? Why did Richard Stallman keep doing stuff after he got a MacArthur Genius award and could have just sat on his backside?
What does it mean to work for something? Is it really a big problem that people generally get their air for free?
I'm not saying there is not truth to your point, because it is true that people need meaning in their lives. I'm just suggesting the issue of gaining meaning solely by overcoming material scarcity does not generalize as broadly as you suggest. See also, for some middle ground:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
Those are reasons why we may choose not to automate stuff even when we can...
"These conditions exist because we are riding on the fruits of someone else's labors..."
See, for contrast the ideas of C.H. Douglas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.""
There is such a thing as "hard fun":
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
If what you said was entirely true (I'm not saying there is not some truth in it), then how would Wikipedia work? How would GNU/Linux work? How would volunteer non-profits work? How would Slashdot work? Yet they all do to some extent. As we get more advanced technology, it becomes easier (and more fun) for a few who want to produce useful stuff to do so for everyone who wants it. At some point, then a high-tech gift economy becomes easy to sustain. See also James P. Hogan's novels like "Voyage From Yesteryear" for some ideas on how that might look socially.
As I mentioned, there are also ideas like a "basic income", democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence using advanced technologies. All of these can work together, as I outlined here:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"tl;dr"
Your loss. The Skills of Xanadu is an amazing story, especially for having been written in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext, which we are essentially using to communicate right now.
As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them. So, you can have "permaculture" without too much work. See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."
What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005926.html
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
People for decades wanted to make agricultural robotics but were stymied by the economics of our society and its acceptance of cheap (slave wages) illegal labor. Give it a decade to adjust and we'll see robots in the Georgia and Alabama fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2009/04/autonomous-grape-vine-pruner.html
Then you will see how software can be eaten. :-)
What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings? Robots can build new factories too (as if we did not have more than enough already). Don't confuse the fact that for historical reasons some few humans claim entitlement to "rent" on accessing resources they control socially with the issue that robots can increasingly supply substantially all the labor needed to use resources to make stuff. See Marshall Brain's Manna for one idea on how that might work economically:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
And to see how robotic mining is emerging:
"Rio on edge of new world of robotic mining"
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6cc3482-6756-11df-a932-00144feab49a.html
That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff, especially when we are deciding for ourselves what to do or make. Look at how much people like Minecraft. So, it's not clear we need the robots in a big way. The alternative is to rethink the work so it is fun. How many trillions of one meter cubes have been mined over the last two years in Minecraft? People even pay for the privilege of doing so.
AC, probably you feel you have the moral high ground here and so that justifies incivility and so on, but you are mainly just regurgitating outdated conventional wisdom, sorry. Saying only genes cause cancer is just deep ignorance, sorry. Genes may give people weak links, but whether those weak links are ever pulled on to the point where they break is in most cases determined by what you eat and how you live (a point Dr. Fuhrman makes in "Eat to Live"). You're just advocating a certain kind of genetic fatalism.
If you bothered to look up those references you would see links to scientific research calling into question the US RDA for vitamin D (which is involved in regulating thousands of genes),
The same is true for iodine. Iodine is used both in apoptosis and also to build a protective layer against infections, again showing you don't really know what you are talking about with that. People in Japan get about ten times as much iodine as people in the USA and live longer. Also, they probably don't eat as much bread made now with bromine in the USA (bromine is an iodine antagonist).
You called someone a "Ghoul" (anonymously even) when they point out stuff that may reduce a person's friends nausea or that may help them prevent a recurrence of cancer if treatment is successful (as I mentioned). Was in appropriate to mention that to someone right now? Always a judgment call when the alternative is that they may never hear such things, true. But, would you rather that person's friend had way more nausea than the friend has to have? That sounds more ghoulish to me, sorry. Maybe it is also far more "ghoulish" to just make anonymous personal attacks on people trying to help move beyond a broken medical paradigm that tends to exploit people in all kinds of ways? Granted, 20% of modern medicine is miraculous, and some cancer treatments do indeed help, because as I said, once you have cancer, the results are iffy. I was actually in a PhD program in Biology (ecology and evolution) twenty years ago for what it is worth. I am trying to help people learn some very hard won knowledge, stuff I wish I had know years before loved ones died from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Call that ghoulish if you will. Also, a lot of people read slashdot that may benefit from knowing more about cancer, both prevention and treatment, especially considering how vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of indoor working (like most slashdotters probably engage in). That's why people read and post here.
See also stuff like a book written by a former oncologist: ... Because of the so-called "blood brain barrier," most drugs do not penetrate well from the blood stream into the brain tissue. With the exception of childhood neuroblastoma, brain cancers respond poorly to chemotherapy. ..." (Yet Vitamin D, iodine, fasting, and phytonutrients may indeed all benefit the brain...)
http://cancercaremalaysia.com/2011/09/02/book-review-money-driven-medicine-%E2%80%93-chemotherapy-for-non-responsive-cancers-%E2%80%93-denying-reality/
"Medical oncologists are paid almost nothing for talking with patients and their families. Their income depends entirely on the number of chemotherapy treatments that they order and how much they charge for each treatment. Unlike other specialists, the government allows them to also profit by selling chemotherapy drugs to their patients.
Also from that link: "Let me stress again, the above 44 statements are words written by Dr. David Cundiff, a medical oncologist turned hospice doctor. Dr. Cundiff left oncology perhaps because he couldn't "stomach" what he saw and practised. He has now joined the list of those brave souls who have enough conscience and guts to speak up."
Who does that imply are the ghouls here?
As for fasting in general, it activates biochemical pathways in the h
"Money is not the enemy, it is a tool for managing a large group of people. The legal structure that surrounds money, its distribution and its use are how that tool is used, and determine whether money will free people and empower or if it is will trap people and enslave them. The far-right has worked hard in America to turn money into a tool for controlling people, trapping them in their position in society and enforcing a rigid social structure; that is what needs to be attacked."
I just wanted to add that this is a very insightful point, thanks. It reminds me a bit of this:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Lawrence Lessing writes in "Code 2.0" that there are at least four ways to control people's behavior: rules, norms, prices, and architecture. One of the big problems in the USA today is that it is so market driven, but there are many externalities (like pollution from coal burning) that are not priced into the cost of things up-front.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
I might add that the left has some of its own version of using money to control as well though through government programs. The right often celebrates self-reliance while accusing the left that they cultivate dependency.
Also, it's possible that sometimes artifacts (including the idea of money) have implicit politics: ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
"In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power. To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics.
"Why should we get rid of money?"
Mainly because it is increasing obsolete as a vague way to understand demand. Things like emails and twitters are a more nuanced way to express complex demands.
But, it is true, with a "basic income", money is not as bad a thing. For example, see Marshall Brain's Manna: ...
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
""It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
"Let me show you." said Cynthia. She opened her catalog to a page, and pointed to one of the pictures. It was clothing. "This is what I am wearing." she said. "See - it is 6 credits. In a typical week I only spend about 70 or so credits on clothes. That's why I like to wear something new every day."
"The robots did manufacture Cynthia's outfit for free. They took recycled resources, added energy and robotic labor and created what she is wearing. It cost nothing to make it. She paid credits simply to keep track of how many resources she is using." "
More and more the link between a right to consume and a need to get humans to do labor is breaking. People could see that beginning even in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird peopleâ(TM)s rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures --unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal i
"Cajun Hell described the world as it is currently functioning today,"
Only some parts of it. Are most parents paid? How much of our economy is based on volunteerism of some sort? What about slashdot itself -- do people have to be paid to write all this great content? Were you paid to write your post? Do you ever cook your own meals without being paid? Do you and friends ever talk together or contribute to some potluck party without billing each other? Alternatives are possible; see for example this book:
"The dictionary of alternatives: utopianism and organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
Maybe we can't yet torrent uranium (interesting metaphorical idea) outside of Minecraft worlds, but we can share ideas about how to create alternative energy, which might be even better:
"On the Hunt For The Catalyst: Open Catalyst Crowd Project Forms to Advance Cold Fusion"
http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/12/on-the-hunt-for-the-catalyst-open-catalyst-crowd-project-forms-to-advance-cold-fusion/
On that general issue, see also an essay I sent Andrea Rossi (supposed inventor of a LENR device):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore."
In any case, by decades of dedicated work (most not well paid), we will soon have fairly cheap solar panels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
What might we get soon with "Wikispeed" ideas applied to alternative energy?
http://www.wikispeed.com/the-process
"Team WIKISPEED uses methods developed by the fastest-moving software companies. In fact, in many ways we have more in common with Google or Twitter than with GM or Toyota. Manufacturing and old-thought software teams gather requirements, design the solution, build the solution, test the solution, then deliver the solution. In existing automotive companies, the design portion of that process alone takes three to twelve years, and then the vehicle design is built for five to fourteen years. This means it is possible to buy a brand new car from a dealer and that car represents the engineering team's understanding of what the customer might have wanted twenty-four years ago! Team WIKISPEED follows the model of Agile software teams, compressing the entire development cycle into one-week "sprints." We iterate the entire car every seven days, meaning that every seven days we reevaluate each part of the car and reinvent the highest-priority aspects, instead of waiting ten to twenty-four years to upgrade. This process enables a completely different pace of development."
"All require raw materials, none of which are "inherently fun" to obtain, especially not when it comes to obtaining useful quantities."
Check out Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" for a sci-fi exploration of the idea of making the gathering of materials "fun":
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false
Also, how much "labor" does a tree do to grow? It is possible then in theory to use just water, CO2, and a little bit of soil to make amazing things that are mostly carbon.
In general, one could make the same argument about software or content. People are never going to spend lots of time making free software or content to give away, and yet they do through GNU/Linux and Wikipedia.
"Money is used in exchange for labor. Labor takes up a person's time. A person's time is finite. One has only to look through the local obituary to realize that the scarcity is quite genuine."
When robotics are really cheap, what is the difference between writing free software to run material gathering robots and gathering materials for "free"?
"The 21st-century computer you composed this on is only possible because of people supplying raw materials and manufacturing in 19th-century conditions."
I might have agreed if you had not used the word "only". :-) How far we have fallen in our aspirations:
http://www.fact-index.com/n/ne/next.html
"By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory for their first product, the NeXTcube."
It's true that essentially slave human labor is still cheaper than robots in some applications (though fewer and fewer applications as even essentially dirt-cheap slaves kept in dormitories can't keep up with the quality robots can produce and they also take more management.)
But in any case, things are changing:
"Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801
But as is suggested here:
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
we had a gift economy (and generally communal property ownership of hunting and gathering grounds) long before people started doing exchange-based economics. So, that is a missing part of most discussions about the emergence of money.
With that said, I do tend to agree that war can happen for a lot of non-material reasons (issue of pride, honor, internal politics, cultural clashes, and so on). Still, in general, "War is a Racket" driven by greed according to Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
There may be always reasons why people are in conflict. But turning that conflict into large bureaucracies spending vast amounts or resources on the conflict generally means money is involved somehow someway. History is full of examples where people with different belief systems got along -- Ancient China, the North American natives, and even the past 200 years of life in New York City. :-)
This is not to disagree totally with your point on conflict. If you want to take that analysis up a notch, you could look into "memetics" and the evolutionary forces on "memes".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Along with the possible co-evolution of religious behavior with humanity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
"There's still a minimum level of money you have to pay someone so that they are willing to be creative for you. Although after a certain point, most people are not motivated by money anymore, so throwing more of it at them leads to diminishing returns."
Good points, thank. So often there is a confusion between the notion of money (or other resources) as *enabling* creativity as opposed to money as *rewarding* creativity. And as you say there, the issue with money becomes getting people to be creative for *you* (where it is true, the concept of money can help), as opposed to maximally creative for themselves or the world, where it turns out money tends to hurt (beyond, of course, the fact that people who are deprived often find their creativity directed at best only to survival).
Example:
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/06/how-to-build-a-career-as-an-artist/
"The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can't really make art. Because your sense of self-preservation insists that your brain focus on the possibility that you will be out on the street. Your brain cannot stop solving that problem long enough to solve the problem of what is truth and beauty. Here are some things I did while I was becoming a writer: I ate only bagels because I didn't have enough money for anything else and then I got anemic and had to go to the doctor but I didn't have health insurance so I had to lie and say I did in order to get the iron pills I needed so that I didn't pass out from exhaustion the moment I woke up in the morning. Believe me, I was not making great art during this period."
Yet:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
So, yes, as far as creativity is concerned, a money based society (where all food is under "lock and key" like Daniel Quinn call it) can use money to say what people will mostly be creative about, accepting that they will in general be much less creative overall if controlled that way. Even self-employed artists often fall into a rut where they keep making more of the same stuff that paid well last time, rather than trying to reach towards new ideas like they might have done before they were financially successful.
And in general, creativity may not be very important to our current system:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a h
Thanks, Thing 1!
Related posts by you as replies by stuff I wrote, just looking at them again, most relating to post-scarcity and abundance and singularity topics:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34977060
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34979994
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34990484
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=35001526
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=35001540
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2719093&cid=39319235
I could believe that last one! :-)
http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/
"Hearst and Anslinger were then supported by Dupont chemical company and various pharmaceutical companies in the effort to outlaw cannabis. Dupont had patented nylon, and wanted hemp removed as competition. The pharmaceutical companies could neither identify nor standardize cannabis dosages, and besides, with cannabis, folks could grow their own medicine and not have to purchase it from large companies."
So, if true, once again, artificial scarcity, backed up by legal means...
See also (although different drugs work by different methods):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
And yet, the perennial problem of the "pleasure trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Yes, "The Dead Past" is probably the one I was thinking of, thanks. I just looked at it again in Asimov's "Earth is Room Enough" just now.
I can still wonder if there is still one more old story about a single inventor of such a cheap device (one where the inventor uses false labels on envelopes that fall off due to weak glue when they send out the plans to everyone). But I may be getting some stories mixed up with another sci-fi one where there was universal surveillance. And I don't remember all the details from "The Light of Other Days" so I may be mixing in some plot points from there?
That Wikipedia link on "The Dead Past" also points to two other stories, "E for Effort" and "Paycheck", but I'm pretty sure I have not read either one of those.
"Practical cold fusion, or anything that delivers on the promises of cold fusion, would nail it."
On cold fusion, see:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/03/dr-george-miley-to-present-on-lenr-at-march-23-conference-will-awareness-of-new-energy-source-spread/
http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=522
The Widom-Larsen idea is that strange things happen at the surface of metals, where protons and electrons can become slow neutrons which then are absorbed which leads to conventional radioactive decay.
Or on solar panels, a commend by the director of GE's research lab:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
In theory, to have space habitats, all we really need to do is launch one robotic seed factory to the moon, and then have it make all the space craft and habitats there. No need for CO2. And rising CO2 is really the least of our problems as a species -- it may already have forestalled another ice age we are due for. Much of it may have come from topsoil depletion by bad farming practices, too. That is solveable with relatively small amounts of energy and materials like so by grinding up rock: http://remineralize.org/
A little idea sketch I made about three years ago of what it would take to evacuate all humans from the Earth into space habitats: ... So, seven billion people soon, minus a few doomsters, times US$100K per person, is US$700 trillion. The world GDP is about US$60 trillion, so, in round numbers, this is about ten years of world economic output to put everyone into space. We can assume that with these self-replicating space habitat seeds that an entire space infrastructure is being prepared for free from sunlight and lunar ore and asteroidal ore (though it might take some time to produce it on an exponential growth curve). So, we only need to get people into low Earth orbit and shuttles can ferry people without luggage beyond low Earth orbit to a life of abundance produced with resources from space. Also, since we're evacuating the entire planet to leave it as a nature park, we don't need to do any upkeep on infrastructure as it is all abandoned. So, we can devote close to 100% of the industrial base to producing rockets. Also, people in space can still provide services to Earth like telemedicine or teleoperating mining equipment and launch control, so essential services can be kept going the whole time even as the last person goes on the last rocket (except the doomsters who want to stay :-)."
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004037.html
"Current launch costs are about US$10,000 a pound. People on starvation diets might weigh about 100 pounds. So, that's about US$1 million per person for launch costs using today's technology in small production runs. I feel it reasonable to assume that if we were going to launch billions of people into space, launch costs would come down by at least a factor of ten to US$100K per person, considering how people are already talking about such lower costs, and the actual energy to lift someone into space if you can do it really efficiently (space elevator) is maybe US$200 worth of electricity
Of course, we could ask, how many times has this been done before over the last few billion years? :-)
Thanks for your other comment too (which this kind of addresses in part as well). Good luck with your robotics work. Robots could be a boon instead of a bane as long as we adjust our economy to a post-scarcity model. One example I put together:
"The Riches
"The main thing is the solutions are there, the problem can be solved."
Yes, that is my key point. Solutions exist even if we may choose collectively not to pursue them. Thanks for the summary and insights into issues of power. A related item:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Whether we decide to solve these problem is getting to be more a social issue than a technological one. A related essay I wrote: :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100."
One big problem is that every day it gets easier and easier for fewer and fewer people to wipe out all of humanity. For example, the genetic code was like a lock that prevented designer plagues (or attempts at them). Now that that code has been "broken", we are all at extreme risk of plagues created for whatever reasons. And it is not as easy to change your DNA as it is to change your ssh key.
As Bucky Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...
I find this 1950s story called "The Skills of Xanadu" inspirational about the possible power of the internet for social change, but even then, the internet could be used for a crackdown too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false
So, I don't know what will happen. I only can see from everything I've read on slashdot and elsewhere what could possibly happen in terms of solutions.
Likely we may get a range of outcomes in different places. India actually seems to me a place that may get it together best -- a culture of villages, a culture of sharing, a common knowledge of English, a youthful population, and so on...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Creative_Commons_-_Critiques#The_perverse_effects_of_CC_in_the_developing_world
"There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?"
Maybe we'll see more good things from Skikshantar?
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/udaipur.html
"Who is supposed to pay for the construction of such a space habitat?"
"Zeitgeist Star Trek"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6cN-1dLoPY
"Captain Picard promotes a Resource Based Economy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6g23ygov8
"Where will the materials come from?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
"One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space.[50][51] Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites. "
And from around 1927:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus."
"What about mission support?"
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
"Even on such a station, there will be a class system and scarcity, whether anyone likes it or not."
Yes, some people may always choose to be poor and enslaved...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
Read James P. Hogan's novels like "Voyage From Yesteryear" for an alternative vision:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"Someone will have to fly the damn thing."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 :-)
"Likewise, unless the powers that be use fascist tactics to control reproduction, procreation will put a further strain on resources."
There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html
"What do any of those last 3 links have to do with what you quoted? Have you just been looking for a place to post those? Or do I just not see the connection?"
They are all about currency and motivation, and how money in practice really came to be and how trying to motivate creating through money is counter-productive.
"you're not going to get a stranger to do your domestic chores as a gift."
A "free" OS for a personal service robot, from strangers, as a "gift": :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROS_(Robot_Operating_System)
Not exactly what you asked for, but pretty close.
"war is just chaging its shape"
Too true, because what current military planners (civilian especially) have lost sight of is that any medium-size country can probably make a deadly global plague either now or very soon. And the scale needed for such an effort continues to decrease (it's probably more like any second-tier university could do it). That fact totally changes the dynamics of war and the nature of security, but it has not been widely understood, otherwise people would not be so focused on whether Iran gets "nukes" when it and many other countries may already have plagues. Look at another slashdot article today on scientists making a version of herpes that evades the human immune system (supposedly for therapeutic goals, fine, but what else might it be used for?) Reseachers also did other stuff with increasing the transmission of viruses with a related controversy about publication. We need to focus on intrinsic security and mutual security and abundance for all if *any* of us are to survive in any recognizable way.
"I don't think that's necessarily so. Some things have real scarcity, such as bushels of wheat or energy. There really is only so much, and its limits are quite natural."
True, but that is real scarcity, not artificial scarcity. And there are no laws about sharing bushels of wheat or counterfeiting electricity, are there?
As for your other points, you invent a system for organizing society, say it has problems, and then expect me to solve them for you? :-) Why not just have a gift economy empowered by robotics and advanced materials and LENR and dirt-cheap solar panels? It is no longer hard to make most everyday things, given most peolpe's biggest problem in the USA is having too much stuff. Maybe it was once hard to make stuff, but it is not anymore. 1% of the population can produce enough food via farming for everyone (especially if we stop raising livestock, which takes 75% of agriculture and overall is not helping our health). Manufacturing is going that way too, with a declining trend on how many people are needed to make stuff, and robotics and 3D printing are just more steps along that path. We don't need to "motivate" people extrinsically to make content (as shown by bloggers and Wikipedia and YouTube). Most services can be provided by friends and neighbors empowered by learning through the internet.
So, why do we need these "chits" you're talking about and worried about people "cheating" with? :-)
Although I don't see why anyone would even bother, when they could just ask their neighbor to print them a new 3D printer and some solar panels and a matter extractor device if theirs broke for some reason. :-) Maybe we are not there now, but we may be in 20 years or so?
"The economy will never be "post-scacity", as there's only so much shoreline property. "
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat
However, that is not to completely disagree with your point. It is true that abundances of one thing can sometimes create a complementary scarcity of something else (too much information chasing too little attention). But *material* scarcity is over if we want it -- just like war:
http://imaginepeace.com/warisover/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbKsgaXQy2k
"Fiat currencies emerged because, as economies grew, you simply couldn't find enough notes to do business"
See:
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
"Money as Debt"
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
:-) We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity (including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback), and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it, as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about "counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money
A related sci-fi book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days "The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke, which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum. ... The novel examines the philosophical issues that arise from the world's population (increasingly suffering from ecological and political disturbances) being aware that they could be under constant observation by anyone, or that they could observe anyone without their knowledge. ..."
There are a couple other similar sci-fi stories as well, including one about "Slow Glass" by Bob Shaw with the same name as that novel.
http://strick.net/blog/041103.html
And one about a similar time viewer (I forget the name).
A good thing to keep in mind is, just because we can do something, does not mean we should.
http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2009/02/11/solid-development-principles-in-motivational-pictures/
http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/files/2011/03/SingleResponsibilityPrinciple2_71060858.jpg
What kind of word do we want to live in, and what kind of world do we want for our children, and children's children, and so on, for seven or more generations?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainability
It may be too late, but you could tell your friend about vitamin D, iodine, and vegetables, fruits, and beans, as well as fasting, in preventing and sometimes curing cancer. I've posted many links on that stuff here in the past. Just google on those term and cancer, and look up Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work and Dr. John Cannell's work. Unfortunately, the best way to deal with cancer is to prevent it by helping the human immune system deal with individual cancer cells before they proliferate. Once you have cancer, things are pretty iffy. Fasting can also help in reducing nausea from chemotherapy. Good luck to your friend. Assuming the surgery is a success, exploring these things may help prevent a recurrence. Some links to start:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
http://iodine4health.com/disease/cancer/cancer.htm
http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080331/fasting_may_improve_cancer_chemotherapy
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fasting-cancer/
Unfortunately, instead of scientists studying what is proven to work (nutrition, fasting, and lifestyle) and then people lobbying to make good support for healthy choices readily available to all, scientists seem to be creating what could become the basis of a weaponized plague that evades the human immune system. :-(
Well, maybe I could say that says all I need to know about where *you* are coming from regarding "science"? :-) Oh yea of so little faith in science and inquiry and so much faith in unquestionable dogmas? :-) Did you bother to do even the slightest bit of research before your reaction? See for example: .02). Intermediate DDS results were associated with intermediate reductions in lung cancers. The inverse association between dietary diversity and incidence of lung cancers was limited to current smokers, and there was a lower risk for squamous cell carcinomas but not other lung cancers. Data on known potential confounding factors, particularly consumption of meat and alcohol, as well as physical activity and education levels, were available but did not affect the outcome."
"Variety in Fruit and Vegetable Consumption and the Risk of Lung Cancer in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition"
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/729525
"The results show that the risk for lung cancer decreased with increasing variety in fruit and vegetable consumption. The hazard ratio for the quartile of participants with the greatest DDS was 0.77 (95% confidence interval, 0.64-0.94) compared with the quartile that had the lowest dietary diversity (P =
And that result is not even by focusing on a possible synergetic effect of bringing together really superior nutrition like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talk about with lots of fruits, vegetables, and beans (plus some nuts, seeds, whole grains, and omega 3s), good vitamin D levels like Dr. John Cannell talks about, and Iodine like others talk about, and wellness strategies like Dr. Andrew Weil talks about. Together, these things may well have a much bigger benefit to someone than quitting smoking, and then, when a person doing these other things is healthier overall physically and mentally, quitting smoking may be much easier. That was Dr. Mercola's point if you watched the video, and he tells the story in relation to his success in getting his own sister to quit smoking but all the health problems she had because he did not focus first on helping her eat better. Sometimes when you want to get a pool ball into a pocket you need to do a bank shot. :-)
Science is a process, not just a storehouse of stale factoids (many of which may even have been imparted due to someone's profit motive and may not be very true, or may be out of context or incomplete). And what facts science as a social enterprise chooses to collect and organize also has a lot to do with politics. See also, by an editor of Physics Today: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
Do I (or Dr. Mercola in that video) recommend smoking? Of course not. It's a dirty habit, and an expensive one too, and it is harmful to your health and that of those around you. But it is quite likely that smoking is far less dangerous to your health than the Standard American Diet when you consider a SAD diet puts you at increased risk for all sorts of other cancers, plus heart disease, plus diabetes, plus dementia, and so on. Put the two together (SAD and smoking) and that is, of course, really bad news for many people in the USA. As Dr. Mercola points out in the video, most MDs have been trained to prioritize addressing the less important one first (smoking), a prioritization that may indeed be shortening the lives of their patients compared to doing things the other way around of focusing on nutrition first, like Dr. Mercola suggests. Once people are eating better, and reducing stress in other parts of their lives (see Andrew Weil's work or "Blue Zones"), then maybe they eventually will be able to move beyond the "pleasure trap" of smoking.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Anyway, about all I have time for. Perhaps you just can't hear what I'm saying right now b