"As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity's survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions."
As my sig suggests, there may be something more deeply important psychologically underlying that challenge: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
"I'll also point out that when Java was released, the only serious rival as a ubiquitous platform-independent language at the time (Python) was maintained by one person and that scared a lot of people."
Look up cross-platform VisualWorks Smalltalk. Sun tried to license it instead of making Java, but ParcPlace wanted too much in run-time fees per copy for set-top boxes. So Sun's Green/Oak progressed to Java, IBM got behind it instead of their own Smalltalk, and the rest is history.
As Gatto points out, schooling is segmented, with 1% or so of students receiving an education intended for them to be part of a top elite, and then about 10% or so more receiving a somewhat different education to be part of a managerial/professional class (doctors, lawyers), and then the rest intended for worker class status.
Whatever the level of "interactivity", there is still the issue of who sets the agenda, who tells whom what to learn and when, and so on. Is the situation learner-directed (like a public library) or is it state-directed (or employer-directed) like in a public school or private workplace?
If you think about what most businesses want, whatever they say, it is not "curiosity" but "assignable curiosity", which is a big difference. It is not critical thinking, but it is thinking critically about business problems within business assumptions while not rocking the boat where it matters. See also Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds" book which goes into that: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
The primary function of top 50 schools is not really "education" so much as "filtering". See Goodstein or Chomsky: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm "People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on."
It can take a long time to accept all this, especially after one has been through decades of schooling where the number one thing taught is how much you need schooling... It took me a long time to accept that... It can be especially hard for those who get the best grades in school...
When I was in high school (1970s) and we had just gotten Commodore PETs, I was thinking how this mean everyone could get cheap-to-copy tapes with content and programmed instruction so they could learn all sorts of stuff. I saw the big issue as being the cost of textbooks. I did not see then that such a thing would have violated the basic idea of schooling, that you are learning what the school system wants you to learn when it wants you to learn it, and what it already had was sufficient to that task. Schools were not interested in having their routines disrupted by people learning what they wanted when they wanted in as much depth as they wanted and without much oversight and tracking.
That is why educational computing has gone pretty much nowhere within most schools, except when it has been very narrowly crafted to essentially be just like a text-book (maybe just a bit better) and when it has been linked into a pervasive system of monitoring and evaluation and fine-grained control. Some of that is changing, but it is changing despite what schools are, not because of what schools are. Any change is from some few dedicated educators who often are risking everything to try something that would actually help kids a lot (like Gatto).
The big issue is the difference between "education" and "schooling" which John Taylor Gatto goes into. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Iâ(TM)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?"
Great points. See also my: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
I've loved reading these posts. I started as a teenager with a KIM-1 my Dad and I bought and built the power supply for by hand. Then I sold that to buy a Commodore PET through a local school teacher, Jack Woelfel, who sold them and I did some work for. I wrote software in BASIC for that for education called PetTeach (really, Peteach, but hard to understand that), and a Purchase Order organizer for our school district, and Conways' game of life, part of that in assembler. I also wrote some AI stuff with triples that became my Pointrel system eventually on other platforms -- so still working on it:-). Then I bought a VIC-20 (I wrote a video game for that called Intruder Scramble in Assembler which earned a bunch of money for a summer's work on my own). And then I bought a C64 (I missed my chance to be rich porting that video game to the C64 but I had started at a college and was distracted).
Great times. I still have a VIC and a C64 somewhere packed away and hope they still run to show my kid sometime. (I think old capacitors can go bad...)
I agree the great thing about them was they were understandable all the way down.
I especially liked the HESForth cartridges that let you have a (for the time) high-level language right on the system that was still really fast, and you could easily restart the system and still keep what you had in memory. That was a great way to learn more about programming interactively. I just with I had been able to deliver code back then in Forth (but you needed the cartridge for that system).
People like Eric von Hippel at MIT have written about how about 80% or so of innovation comes from customers, anyway...
What we really need is a "basic income" so anyone who wants to focus on innovating and giving away the results without enforcing "artificial scarcity" can afford to do so. http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
Sadly, I have to agree that the issue you raise is a big potential problem (especially that those with power and wealth often use that first and foremost to preserve their relative privilege), and it is very much what the USA is already struggling through. For example, real wages have been essentially flat in the USA for the past thirty to forty years, while productivity has doubled or tripled and the money has gone to the workers not as wages but as loans: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Things may well get much worse before they get better, before people (OWS etc.) eventually confront "the mythology of wealth": http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 "In fact, the cheap-labor conservatives have counter-attacked with their own “rational” theory to justify their hierarchical world-view. Some call it “Social Darwinism”, though more politically savvy cheap-labor conservatives avoid that term. The purpose of this “rational theory” is to establish that the existing social order is the “natural order”. Elites enjoy wealth, privilege and status because of their inherent superiority. The place where this natural hierarchy is established, is that mythical place known as the “market”."
Marshall Brain talks about that general issue here: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With the rank and file employees gone, all of the money in the corporation flows upward to the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will accelerate dramatically because robots allow real automation in the service sector for the first time in history. The amount of money paid to executives and shareholders will be remarkable. Meanwhile, the one million displaced employees will flow into a job market that is flooded by robotically-displaced workers. Since all major corporations with large numbers of employees will be doing the same thing, it is difficult to imagine the economy suddenly creating enough jobs to absorb all of the displaced workers. If the economy does not create new jobs for them, they will be living in government welfare dormitories. "
This is starting to happen even in China. See, for example:
"Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years" http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/30/c_131018764.htm "Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions."
Or from a couple years ago: 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. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity. The rash of strikes at Honda and Toyota parts factories and assembly plants in southern China this year -- with demands for substantially higher wages at the Japanese-owned companies
That video by Albert Bartlett is misleading because it ignores how more people leads to more innovation -- like developing solar panels or fusion energy to replace fossil fuels, or developing space habitats to make more land for humans.
As I outline on my site ( http://www.pdfernhout.net/ ), mainstream economics assumes infinite demand (or at least, that demand will grow as fast or faster than productivity). But that assumption is becoming invalid, and so all of mainstream economics is suffering through a divide-by-zero error which most economists won't admit.
With modern production methods, as well as trends like environmentalism, here is a need for less and less jobs overall as productivity goes up and demand grows more slowly than productivity.
While thing were different in hunter-gatherer times, the rise of agriculture and industrialism led to a lot of work (because there was less land to support each person and expectations also rose). But then productivity continues to improve exponentially.
Here are some examples. Five year old kids used to have to work in mines 200 years ago. Now they are sent to "school" often until their mid twenties or even longer. Work weeks used to be 80+ hours per week. Now work weeks are 35-40 hours plus paid vacations. People used to work until they died. Now in Europe many retire in their mid-fifties and live and eat and play for another three decades. People in their mid-twenties used to be the backbone of the economy. Now many educated 20-somethings in Europe have no jobs (and are rioting over that regularly like in Greece).
Agriculture has gone from 90% of the workforce to 2% or so over the last two hundred years in the USA. US manufacturing went from around 35% to 16% over the past fifty years, while still making the same or more amount of stuff and at higher quality. That number continues downward.
With computers and robotics (especially vision systems), more and more service jobs will come user the same pressures. We need to rethink our economics to account for this. For ideas on that, see writings by Marshall Brain, Martin Ford, or stuff on my website (essentially, a basic income of social security and medicare for all, an improved gift economy like Wikipeida and the blogosphere and GNU/Linux and Freecycle, improved subsistence like with 3D printers and agricultural robots, and better democratic resource-based planning).
Computers have imporved a lot since the old USSR. How does your computer with billions of transistors know how to move information around inside itself to meet your needs without using money inside it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
How does Debian know what software to make and maintain? Can emails and chat messages act as currency?
Soon we will have print-on-demand with 3D printers. Does that not also change things? We may also have recycle-on-demand with nanotech devices.
Even if capitalism coudl be made to work sustainably (including if externalities are accounted for through government regulation, taxes, and subsidies), then we still need a basic income to make sure the market hears the needs of everyone. See, from 1964: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
I got one from "Sandy Claws" that I'm going to keep unopened as a collector's item, if we all survive the next twenty years of this level of unrecognized irony.
The past couple decades have involved China trading a lot of cheap labor in exchange for Western technical know-how. China knows most of what there is to know by now about making gadgets. Eventually China could just create money for its own economy (by credit or printing it) and it could sell to internal markets and raise its material standard of living a lot. Export driven economies only have big value if you need imports. Although it is true that China does import stuff, so it will need to replace some of that with internal import replacing approaches, like Jane Jacobs wrote about (like solar energy instead of oil, or composites instead of metals) -- but aside from US food products, much raw materials come from other than the USA (like Australia or soon Africa). Although there remains a strategic military advantage for China in having Chinese products everywhere in the USA, so they may still do some of that. For example, most ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) in the USA comes from China. How much of it is really inspected? When is the last time you had something with extra vitamin C? That makes the USA's health very dependent on Chinese good will, as just one of many, many examples. Eastern minds typically grow up playing "Go", which teaches a very different way of "winning" (by encirclement) than Western Chess. Granted, the cost of this is that the average Chinese citizen has suffered a lower material standard of living for this sort of foreign policy (a cost that does not show up as "military" spending).
But as Langdon Winner points out, technological systems do have assumptions and implications...
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner "In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power.[2] To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way "transcends the simple categories of 'intended' and 'unintended' altogether, representing "instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others" (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are other questions entirely.)
The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999). He distinguishes between two types of inherently political artifacts: those that require a particular sociological system and those that are strongly compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner, p. 29, 1999). A further distinction is made between conditions internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it (Winner, p. 33, 1999). This second way in which artifacts can have politics can be visualized as a 2-by-2 matrix, consisting of four 'types' of artifacts: those requiring a particular internal sociological system, those compatible with a particular internal sociological system, those requiring a particular external sociological system, and those compatible with a particular external sociological system.
As are all typologies, this matrix is a simplification-by-boundary-work -- in this case, the two boundaries are drawn between requiring and compatible, and between internal and external. It is this boundary-work that makes the typology useful for avoiding extreme technological determinism, social constructivism, and noetic flatness in conceptualizing an artifact's political qualities, and for thinking about how these qualities change through time.
Applied to Wikipedia itself, Winner's first way in which artifacts can have politics asks about the process of a Wikipedia's development and whether it was/is somehow biased. The second way asks whether Wikipedia requires or is compatible with particular internal or external sociological systems."
"I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that."
I agree, and here are some ideas I put together on that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
And: http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm "Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
Lots more links on my site. See also this site on "A Newer Way Of Thinking": http://anwot.org/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
How can a system be ethical however it is programmed if it mostly ignores that issue? Granted, we may well need smart security robots. But they might be designed and used differently if we understood that fundamental issues.
Banking problems are another aspect of why we are creating military robots, given the Muslims have repudiated the US banking system, and this is part of the whole conflict. Here is an insightful essay by Richard C. Cook ( http://www.richardccook.com/ ) about a "national dividend" (or a "basic income") from April 2007 (!) called: "An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States" http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5494
It's not exactly robotics, but for about $20, my kid is learning a lot about electronics Minecraft through building redstone circuits: http://www.minecraft.net/ http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Redstone_Circuits "Redstone circuitry is a feature introduced in Alpha which allows for intricate Redstone wire based mechanisms to be created by players. Redstone circuitry is similar to digital electronics (based on boolean algebra) in real life. t's also possible to use pistons in redstone circuits. "
You can even build stuff like elevators and music players.
based on asteroidal ore (1920s): 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. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant...."
I know I sound like a broken record on this... But we really need a new intrinsic/mutual definition of security arising from "A Newer Way Of Thinking" like Albert Einstein called for if we are to survive all the technological power we are creating in the 21st century: http://anwot.org/
To go with the newer way of thinking, then we need different sorts of machines... Thinks like 3D printers of everyone, or solar panels for all, or advanced "AutoDoc" medical systems, or organic gardening robots, or plenty of other similar things where we use our technological knowledge to make abundance for all -- instead of using advanced technologies of abundance like robotics to fight over scarcity, or worse, create artificial scarcity. Still, DARPA has made contributions to some of these, so that's a good thing.
That's a sensible point, and I won't disagree with the general truth of it, but the 21st century problem is that our weapons of mass destruction (nukes, plagues, bureaucracy/holocaust, and soon robotics and nanotech) have become so powerful that we need "A Newer Way Of Thinking" to deal with the consequences of all that power. http://anwot.org/ Otherwise, just a few malcontents empowered by such WMDs could doom us all, as could just an accidental use of them. So, for our own protection, we need to work towards a global society that has a greater proportion of fairly happy people, and a very low proportion of people who think they have gotten a terribly raw deal. That means rethinking security in terms of mutual security and intrinisic security, and thinking deeply about rich/poor divide issues.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust "IBM and the Holocaust is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book, Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide against the Jewish people through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data."
"I sometimes wonder why skin cancers are almost unheard of there."
Because the immune system needs vitamin D (from UVB from sunlight) to fight cancer cells. Some people (like Dr. John Cannell) suggest dermatologists have caused ten or more cancers for every melanoma they have prevented. Why is the melanoma rate higher for indoor office workers than outdoor workers? Dr. John Cannell suggests essentially that most dermatologists are guilty of malpractice because they have caused so much cancer and other health issues by scaring people about the sun without at the same time telling them how to be sure to get enough vitamin D. The problem is made worse by the US RDA for vitamin D being much lower than what most adults need (by a factor of 5 to 10). http://blog.vitamindcouncil.org/tag/uv-light/
What you could also wonder about is how many cases of autism dermatologists have created as well, with links being shown between autism and keeping pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children out of the sun...
Slashdot Mirror
How would the companies that make processor chips and computers and network hardware compare?
Please read this: http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx
"As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity's survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions."
As my sig suggests, there may be something more deeply important psychologically underlying that challenge: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
"I'll also point out that when Java was released, the only serious rival as a ubiquitous platform-independent language at the time (Python) was maintained by one person and that scared a lot of people."
Look up cross-platform VisualWorks Smalltalk. Sun tried to license it instead of making Java, but ParcPlace wanted too much in run-time fees per copy for set-top boxes. So Sun's Green/Oak progressed to Java, IBM got behind it instead of their own Smalltalk, and the rest is history.
As Gatto points out, schooling is segmented, with 1% or so of students receiving an education intended for them to be part of a top elite, and then about 10% or so more receiving a somewhat different education to be part of a managerial/professional class (doctors, lawyers), and then the rest intended for worker class status.
Whatever the level of "interactivity", there is still the issue of who sets the agenda, who tells whom what to learn and when, and so on. Is the situation learner-directed (like a public library) or is it state-directed (or employer-directed) like in a public school or private workplace?
If you think about what most businesses want, whatever they say, it is not "curiosity" but "assignable curiosity", which is a big difference. It is not critical thinking, but it is thinking critically about business problems within business assumptions while not rocking the boat where it matters. See also Jeff Schmidt's "Disciplined Minds" book which goes into that:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
The primary function of top 50 schools is not really "education" so much as "filtering". See Goodstein or Chomsky:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on."
It can take a long time to accept all this, especially after one has been through decades of schooling where the number one thing taught is how much you need schooling... It took me a long time to accept that... It can be especially hard for those who get the best grades in school...
When I was in high school (1970s) and we had just gotten Commodore PETs, I was thinking how this mean everyone could get cheap-to-copy tapes with content and programmed instruction so they could learn all sorts of stuff. I saw the big issue as being the cost of textbooks. I did not see then that such a thing would have violated the basic idea of schooling, that you are learning what the school system wants you to learn when it wants you to learn it, and what it already had was sufficient to that task. Schools were not interested in having their routines disrupted by people learning what they wanted when they wanted in as much depth as they wanted and without much oversight and tracking.
That is why educational computing has gone pretty much nowhere within most schools, except when it has been very narrowly crafted to essentially be just like a text-book (maybe just a bit better) and when it has been linked into a pervasive system of monitoring and evaluation and fine-grained control. Some of that is changing, but it is changing despite what schools are, not because of what schools are. Any change is from some few dedicated educators who often are risking everything to try something that would actually help kids a lot (like Gatto).
Th
The big issue is the difference between "education" and "schooling" which John Taylor Gatto goes into.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Iâ(TM)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?"
Or John Holt.
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
It relates to, but goes beyond, this article:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/01/03/2040253/when-getting-rid-of-college-lectures-makes-sense
Great points. See also my: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
See also these collections of links i put together:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005584.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006005.html
I've loved reading these posts. I started as a teenager with a KIM-1 my Dad and I bought and built the power supply for by hand. Then I sold that to buy a Commodore PET through a local school teacher, Jack Woelfel, who sold them and I did some work for. I wrote software in BASIC for that for education called PetTeach (really, Peteach, but hard to understand that), and a Purchase Order organizer for our school district, and Conways' game of life, part of that in assembler. I also wrote some AI stuff with triples that became my Pointrel system eventually on other platforms -- so still working on it :-). Then I bought a VIC-20 (I wrote a video game for that called Intruder Scramble in Assembler which earned a bunch of money for a summer's work on my own). And then I bought a C64 (I missed my chance to be rich porting that video game to the C64 but I had started at a college and was distracted).
Great times. I still have a VIC and a C64 somewhere packed away and hope they still run to show my kid sometime. (I think old capacitors can go bad...)
I agree the great thing about them was they were understandable all the way down.
I especially liked the HESForth cartridges that let you have a (for the time) high-level language right on the system that was still really fast, and you could easily restart the system and still keep what you had in memory. That was a great way to learn more about programming interactively. I just with I had been able to deliver code back then in Forth (but you needed the cartridge for that system).
"Explain to me how that fosters innovation. "
Because it causes deflation -- everything is cheaper, which makes it easier to live on less and have more free time for innovation.
After hundreds of years of innovation, we've now reached the point where most human labor is spent on "guarding", not "production".
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" by Dan Pink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
And on how Bill Gates learned to program in part from dumpster diving to read other people's code:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
People like Eric von Hippel at MIT have written about how about 80% or so of innovation comes from customers, anyway...
What we really need is a "basic income" so anyone who wants to focus on innovating and giving away the results without enforcing "artificial scarcity" can afford to do so.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
Sadly, I have to agree that the issue you raise is a big potential problem (especially that those with power and wealth often use that first and foremost to preserve their relative privilege), and it is very much what the USA is already struggling through. For example, real wages have been essentially flat in the USA for the past thirty to forty years, while productivity has doubled or tripled and the money has gone to the workers not as wages but as loans:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Things may well get much worse before they get better, before people (OWS etc.) eventually confront "the mythology of wealth":
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"In fact, the cheap-labor conservatives have counter-attacked with their own “rational” theory to justify their hierarchical world-view. Some call it “Social Darwinism”, though more politically savvy cheap-labor conservatives avoid that term. The purpose of this “rational theory” is to establish that the existing social order is the “natural order”. Elites enjoy wealth, privilege and status because of their inherent superiority. The place where this natural hierarchy is established, is that mythical place known as the “market”."
And:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
Marshall Brain talks about that general issue here:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
"With the rank and file employees gone, all of the money in the corporation flows upward to the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will accelerate dramatically because robots allow real automation in the service sector for the first time in history. The amount of money paid to executives and shareholders will be remarkable. Meanwhile, the one million displaced employees will flow into a job market that is flooded by robotically-displaced workers. Since all major corporations with large numbers of employees will be doing the same thing, it is difficult to imagine the economy suddenly creating enough jobs to absorb all of the displaced workers. If the economy does not create new jobs for them, they will be living in government welfare dormitories. "
And also in his story "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
This is starting to happen even in China. See, for example:
"Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years"
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/30/c_131018764.htm
"Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants, which some blamed on tough working conditions."
Or from a couple years ago:
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. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity. The rash of strikes at Honda and Toyota parts factories and assembly plants in southern China this year -- with demands for substantially higher wages at the Japanese-owned companies
That video by Albert Bartlett is misleading because it ignores how more people leads to more innovation -- like developing solar panels or fusion energy to replace fossil fuels, or developing space habitats to make more land for humans.
But I agree with you about the economic issues as far as our current financial system. Both the housing bubble and the college bubble helped push back a problem related to rising productivity but flat real wages related to wealth concentration.
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5494
As I outline on my site ( http://www.pdfernhout.net/ ), mainstream economics assumes infinite demand (or at least, that demand will grow as fast or faster than productivity). But that assumption is becoming invalid, and so all of mainstream economics is suffering through a divide-by-zero error which most economists won't admit.
See also:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
A fairly straight-forward solution is a "basic income", but there are other approaches and we will likely see a mix of them.
With modern production methods, as well as trends like environmentalism, here is a need for less and less jobs overall as productivity goes up and demand grows more slowly than productivity.
While thing were different in hunter-gatherer times, the rise of agriculture and industrialism led to a lot of work (because there was less land to support each person and expectations also rose). But then productivity continues to improve exponentially.
Here are some examples. Five year old kids used to have to work in mines 200 years ago. Now they are sent to "school" often until their mid twenties or even longer. Work weeks used to be 80+ hours per week. Now work weeks are 35-40 hours plus paid vacations. People used to work until they died. Now in Europe many retire in their mid-fifties and live and eat and play for another three decades. People in their mid-twenties used to be the backbone of the economy. Now many educated 20-somethings in Europe have no jobs (and are rioting over that regularly like in Greece).
Agriculture has gone from 90% of the workforce to 2% or so over the last two hundred years in the USA. US manufacturing went from around 35% to 16% over the past fifty years, while still making the same or more amount of stuff and at higher quality. That number continues downward.
With computers and robotics (especially vision systems), more and more service jobs will come user the same pressures. We need to rethink our economics to account for this. For ideas on that, see writings by Marshall Brain, Martin Ford, or stuff on my website (essentially, a basic income of social security and medicare for all, an improved gift economy like Wikipeida and the blogosphere and GNU/Linux and Freecycle, improved subsistence like with 3D printers and agricultural robots, and better democratic resource-based planning).
Computers have imporved a lot since the old USSR. How does your computer with billions of transistors know how to move information around inside itself to meet your needs without using money inside it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
How does Debian know what software to make and maintain? Can emails and chat messages act as currency?
Soon we will have print-on-demand with 3D printers. Does that not also change things? We may also have recycle-on-demand with nanotech devices.
An alternative idea for designing sustainable and flourishing economies:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Even if capitalism coudl be made to work sustainably (including if externalities are accounted for through government regulation, taxes, and subsidies), then we still need a basic income to make sure the market hears the needs of everyone. See, from 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
Or more recently, from the "free" encyclopedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
Ironically, it is EU regulations that forced a lot of this cleanup (as another poster commented on).
...defending the abundance of whales.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
You know an idea has percolated through a society when there are toys about it:
"SB94 DRONE * UNITED ALLIANCE * Die-Cast MATCHBOX Sky Busters Missions Series"
http://www.amazon.com/ALLIANCE-Die-Cast-MATCHBOX-Busters-Missions/dp/B005314CEG
I got one from "Sandy Claws" that I'm going to keep unopened as a collector's item, if we all survive the next twenty years of this level of unrecognized irony.
The past couple decades have involved China trading a lot of cheap labor in exchange for Western technical know-how. China knows most of what there is to know by now about making gadgets. Eventually China could just create money for its own economy (by credit or printing it) and it could sell to internal markets and raise its material standard of living a lot. Export driven economies only have big value if you need imports. Although it is true that China does import stuff, so it will need to replace some of that with internal import replacing approaches, like Jane Jacobs wrote about (like solar energy instead of oil, or composites instead of metals) -- but aside from US food products, much raw materials come from other than the USA (like Australia or soon Africa). Although there remains a strategic military advantage for China in having Chinese products everywhere in the USA, so they may still do some of that. For example, most ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) in the USA comes from China. How much of it is really inspected? When is the last time you had something with extra vitamin C? That makes the USA's health very dependent on Chinese good will, as just one of many, many examples. Eastern minds typically grow up playing "Go", which teaches a very different way of "winning" (by encirclement) than Western Chess. Granted, the cost of this is that the average Chinese citizen has suffered a lower material standard of living for this sort of foreign policy (a cost that does not show up as "military" spending).
"Yes, technology itself isn't bad."
But as Langdon Winner points out, technological systems do have assumptions and implications...
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
"In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power.[2] To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way "transcends the simple categories of 'intended' and 'unintended' altogether, representing "instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others" (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are other questions entirely.)
The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999). He distinguishes between two types of inherently political artifacts: those that require a particular sociological system and those that are strongly compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner, p. 29, 1999). A further distinction is made between conditions internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it (Winner, p. 33, 1999). This second way in which artifacts can have politics can be visualized as a 2-by-2 matrix, consisting of four 'types' of artifacts: those requiring a particular internal sociological system, those compatible with a particular internal sociological system, those requiring a particular external sociological system, and those compatible with a particular external sociological system.
As are all typologies, this matrix is a simplification-by-boundary-work -- in this case, the two boundaries are drawn between requiring and compatible, and between internal and external. It is this boundary-work that makes the typology useful for avoiding extreme technological determinism, social constructivism, and noetic flatness in conceptualizing an artifact's political qualities, and for thinking about how these qualities change through time.
Applied to Wikipedia itself, Winner's first way in which artifacts can have politics asks about the process of a Wikipedia's development and whether it was/is somehow biased. The second way asks whether Wikipedia requires or is compatible with particular internal or external sociological systems."
That said, I applaud the judge's ruling.
"I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that."
I agree, and here are some ideas I put together on that: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
And:
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
Lots more links on my site. See also this site on "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://anwot.org/
Sadly, this was also in the news yesterday about budget cuts to health programs:
"Report Claims Cuts Weaken U.S. Bioterrorism Response"
http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/Surveillance/30333
A great related article:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
How can a system be ethical however it is programmed if it mostly ignores that issue? Granted, we may well need smart security robots. But they might be designed and used differently if we understood that fundamental issues.
Banking problems are another aspect of why we are creating military robots, given the Muslims have repudiated the US banking system, and this is part of the whole conflict. Here is an insightful essay by Richard C. Cook ( http://www.richardccook.com/ ) about a "national dividend" (or a "basic income") from April 2007 (!) called:
"An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5494
A related six-part video series:
"Credit As A Public Utility"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
It's not exactly robotics, but for about $20, my kid is learning a lot about electronics Minecraft through building redstone circuits:
http://www.minecraft.net/
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Redstone_Circuits
"Redstone circuitry is a feature introduced in Alpha which allows for intricate Redstone wire based mechanisms to be created by players. Redstone circuitry is similar to digital electronics (based on boolean algebra) in real life. t's also possible to use pistons in redstone circuits. "
You can even build stuff like elevators and music players.
Warning: Minecraft can be pretty addictive-seeming. Be sure to get your vitamin D, maybe get a treadmill workstation, and take regular breaks...
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
based on asteroidal ore (1920s): 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. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?"
I know I sound like a broken record on this... But we really need a new intrinsic/mutual definition of security arising from "A Newer Way Of Thinking" like Albert Einstein called for if we are to survive all the technological power we are creating in the 21st century:
http://anwot.org/
To go with the newer way of thinking, then we need different sorts of machines... Thinks like 3D printers of everyone, or solar panels for all, or advanced "AutoDoc" medical systems, or organic gardening robots, or plenty of other similar things where we use our technological knowledge to make abundance for all -- instead of using advanced technologies of abundance like robotics to fight over scarcity, or worse, create artificial scarcity. Still, DARPA has made contributions to some of these, so that's a good thing.
That's a sensible point, and I won't disagree with the general truth of it, but the 21st century problem is that our weapons of mass destruction (nukes, plagues, bureaucracy/holocaust, and soon robotics and nanotech) have become so powerful that we need "A Newer Way Of Thinking" to deal with the consequences of all that power.
http://anwot.org/
Otherwise, just a few malcontents empowered by such WMDs could doom us all, as could just an accidental use of them. So, for our own protection, we need to work towards a global society that has a greater proportion of fairly happy people, and a very low proportion of people who think they have gotten a terribly raw deal. That means rethinking security in terms of mutual security and intrinisic security, and thinking deeply about rich/poor divide issues.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
"IBM and the Holocaust is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book, Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide against the Jewish people through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data."
Please see my other reply on how vitamin D3 from UV-B from sunlight or supplements is essential for the body to fight cancer.
"I sometimes wonder why skin cancers are almost unheard of there."
Because the immune system needs vitamin D (from UVB from sunlight) to fight cancer cells. Some people (like Dr. John Cannell) suggest dermatologists have caused ten or more cancers for every melanoma they have prevented. Why is the melanoma rate higher for indoor office workers than outdoor workers? Dr. John Cannell suggests essentially that most dermatologists are guilty of malpractice because they have caused so much cancer and other health issues by scaring people about the sun without at the same time telling them how to be sure to get enough vitamin D. The problem is made worse by the US RDA for vitamin D being much lower than what most adults need (by a factor of 5 to 10).
http://blog.vitamindcouncil.org/tag/uv-light/
What you could also wonder about is how many cases of autism dermatologists have created as well, with links being shown between autism and keeping pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children out of the sun...