The problem is not the bombs so much as how you look at them.:-)
Just like the thesis of the book in your sig, that perspective matters a lot::-)
""Irreducible mind: toward a psychology for the 21st century" http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC "Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience."
Here is something I send to Freeman Dyson on this issue of perspective and nuclear weapons (he wrote a book called Weapons and Hope, and hopes that someday we can eliminate all nuclear weapons from the world):
====
Quick thought exercise: imagine the Vogons told us they were removing the sun to make room for a hyperspace bypass, but they would be able to spare the Earth, which they intended to use as a dumping ground for quadrillions of dial-a-yield nuclear bombs (one kiloton to one gigaton yield) left over from their Poetry Wars. And thanks to all the messages from Al Gore, they were going to help us out by removing all our coal, oil, and natural gas, being a friendly, helpful, likable sort. Using the ideas from Project Orion, could you build a system that would allow us to power our society from all these quadrillions of nuclear bombs?
I'm sure you could -- maybe in some geothermal way or whatever else. You might lead a project to do that all over the place. Humanity would prosper from those quadrillions of nuclear bombs. We would go to the stars on them, like Project Orion. So, the real problem is not the bombs. It is how we look at them. When life hands you lemons or H-bombs...:-) So, our current energy crisis is caused by not having enough nuclear bombs.:-) Of course, we don't need the bombs for energy if we use regular geothermal power, or get laser fusion to work, and so on, so I'm just joking there. I'm not saying they are not dangerous. In any case, we better sort this out before plagues and black holes on demand and whatever else can be made by anyone with access to the internet.
Thanks. What's really problematical for me is that links to individual posts no longer work right. I just sent some feedback about that.
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To: feedback@slashdot.org CC: Rob Malda Subject: Problem viewing nested posts with new slashdot
With the new slashdot, using FireFox 3.6.13, a click to something like this link (a reply to something I wrote): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1964112&cid=35004816 no longer opens the message itself (just the top parent, and I have to drill down to the message). This makes using the emails slashdot sends out to look at posts difficult.
If I have fsdn.com blocked with NoScript, I can't even drill down to the message (it goes back to the top). If both slashdot.org and fsdn.com are blocked, there seems no way to navigate to a specific child post a link is intended to go to.
I had been using slashdot posts as a sort of blog, and it was important to me that I could give out URLs and assume people could click on them to get to them. Now that seems broken? This in turn has broken probably hundreds (even thousands) of references to posts I've made to slashdot on other sites. I hope this get fixed.
IHMO, the conceptual design mistake here was probably in assuming that people only use slashdot for active discussions, not to post material for future reference, or not to link to parts of previous discussions later, both of which eventually drive more traffic to the slashdot site and make slashdot more valuable as a publishing platform.
I'm not going to abandon slashdot entirely over this (I've been using it for more than a decade), but it suddenly has dropped enormously in value to me as far as my interest in participating on it. And years of previous work elsewhere is now broken.
In any case, requiring people to have JavaScript enabled to be able to view an old post just seems like a dumb idea, sorry. If this was done intentionally, well, I guess it's some sort of weird feature I do not understand, maybe to drive ad revenue or something?
Anyway, thanks for running such a great site in the past. Hopefully this is just a bug, not a feature, and it will get fixed eventually.
--Paul Fernhout http://www.pdfernhout.net/ ==== The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Oh, it was true in the 20th century too. And the 19th. And maybe also all the way back to 10,000 BC or earlier. So, you're right to be skeptical in that sense.
The irony just grows every year though, as our technological capacity increase exponentially, which makes it a very pressing issue for the 21st century, where someone like Ray Kurweil predicts an exponential growth in technological capacity equivalent to 10,000 or whatever years of increase in capacity relative to what happended in the 20th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
So the danger of the irony grows, too, since technology is an amplifier. As Albert Einstein said, with the harnessing of the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. The same applies with harnessing the power of computers, or the internet, or robotics, or nanotech, or biotech, or bureaucracy, or psychology, or cold fusion, or whatever. Whether we do get exponential growth or not, since the 1950s, the world has been under this storm cloud of nuclear war. Now it is under obvious threats of biowarfare and, increasingly, robotic warfare. So, there are emerging issues.
We could afford in the 19th century as a global society to be stupid -- as a war in one place did not effect the lives much of people living somewhere else. With nuclear bombs, desinger plagues, killer robots, and vast bureaucracies (like committed the WWII Holocaust) becoming more and more common as our industrial capacity grows, ironic stupidity is becoming a lot more dangerous to the survival of humanity.
As several responders have suggested by mentioning the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it just gets easy and easier to destroy stuff with the technologies of abundance (like lunar mass drivers). We need to at least countrbalance that with using the technologies of abunace for, well, abundance.
Still, war is only one thing that can help people find meaning in life. How about the issue of worrying about a big solar flare or a supervolcano? If you really want a challenge, why not help solve those sorts of issues? Or help design better space habitats? Or improve cold fusion reactor designs to power space craft? Or figure out how to get everyone on the planet fresh vegetables and fruits so they can afford to eat like Dr. Fuhrman suggests? Limiting the scope of your ambitions to fighting ironic wars with superweapons seems, well, not very ambitious.:-)
War is also a racket, by the way, just to be sure you know, acording to a very decorated military man: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC, Retired 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..."
So, you want to go to war to line some rich guys pockets?
Apparently, compulsory schools were mainly created to indoctrinate people to be part of the war racket, and to ensure they were trained to not see how they were being used. See either of: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm "The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1
The ideal of the perfect is sometimes the eclipser of the reality of the good?:-)
Also, consider that some Native American traditions suggest putting in at least one mistake into everything as a sign of either humility or something for others to demonstrate their prowess to be "chief" by finding.:-)
It was spending time around Han Moravec's lab, as well as in Red Whittaker's lab, that more than anything maybe got me to start thinking more deeply about the military and competitive consequences of all this research (given the military was funding much of what was going on at CMU at the time), I got to see the first ALVAN created (self-driving vehicle).
Sure, there are a lot of possibilities. But many transhumanists (including Kurzweil) are very propertarian libertarian and push patents and copyrights and expanding mainstream economics as the way to reach a singularity, without considering there are, as you say, many alternatives. Example:
"Kurzweil patents A.I. poetry" http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/15032-kurzweil-patents-ai-poetry/
If the future is so abundant, why focus on creating artificial scarcity right now?
So, I guess our AIs aren't going to be able to be poets for a long time... And there will be follow-on patents and then endless copyrights on top of that.
Yes, but see, they had to just make something up like Latinum as a plot device to try to bring some recognizable notions of 20th century economics into the 24th century, otherwise why not such civilizations exchanging gifts (why even bother with barter -- even that may be a plot device)? Besides, the question is never answered, why would anyone want Latinum? What is it useful for (besides currency)? At least gold can be used to make non-tarnishing wires. http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Latinum
For example, why can't the Starship Voyage seed some nanobots rear an uninhabited star that, using asteroid ore, in a couple months create solar arrays that produce a vast amount of antimatter fuel? So that they don't need to stay on tight "replicator rations"? That's another inconsistency.
Writers write what they know, in this case, trade and planets and war. Within that, they have shown a lot of imagination to push that envelope, and I am grateful for that, and I have been much inspired by what they have done.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net] "... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?... 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. "
Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless.:-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things.:-)
Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example: http://space.mike-combs.com/
So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.
So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite.:-)
Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?... 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. "
Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless.:-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things.:-)
Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example: http://space.mike-combs.com/
So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.
So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite.:-)
Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience applause].
And why should your hard earned tax dollars go to pay public citizens to sit on juries and render open justice when things could be done so much more quic
Some of these seem like mostly trumped-up plot devices to make stories to appeal to 20th century audiences, but I'd agree others may always be with us as possible conflicts.
* "rare natural resources" -- to the best of our knowledge, nothing is that rare in the universe that we need to support an unimaginable number of living beings in the galaxy and beyond (as in, millions of quadrillions of people and their biospheres). We have stars for power, we have lots of mass orbiting around to build space habitats, and with artifical retinas like in this story, there will be endless robotic labot to turn matter using solar energy into whatever humanity wants. Star Trek invented stuff that could not be replicated like "latinum", but in practice, who really needs it?
* "control of habitable planets (and the power they bring)" -- in the future, few in their right minds in an advanced space faring society would want to live on a planet, given so many ecological/political restrictions, so little energy flux, being so far from happening city habitats, being stuck at the bottom of a gravity well, beign so corwded, being so dirty, being so poor, being so full of strange diseases, being full of uneducated people who coudl not get into space, being so culturally backwards, and so on. See: http://space.mike-combs.com/ I'm not saying some tiny percent of the quadrillions of people (and other sentients/AIs) living in the solar system in advanced space habitats someday might not want to visit Earth on a pilgrimage, in the same way some very few people from the USA may go on a trip for a week or two to Africa to get a feel for where humanity is from and then go back home glad they don't live there, feeling sorry of the inhabitants, and sponsoring villages there. Actually, places in Africa may be way more advanced culturally than the USA in a lot of ways, so this analogy doesn't quite hold.:-) Also, the current woes of Africa have a lot to do with centuries of exploitation by Europeans and US Americans, so again, this analogy might not hold.
* "culture and politics" -- yes, I agree people will continue to have conflicts over these, which boil down to things like issues of status, impressing the opposite sex, aesthetics, and managing mental illness like a desire for "financial obesity".
* "Sometimes one race just hates another, and wants to fight over it" -- there are less reasons for hatred if there is less conflict over resources. I think some of this is just trumped up plot devices, especially given advanced social technology for mediation. One group related to conflict resolution: http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch
* "The Vulcans and Romulans are in conflict due to their historic dispute" -- yes, essentially, a war over philosophy/religion. I agree this may always be an issue, coming down to aesthetics and identity.
* "the Klingon culture is heavily militaristic and demands war as the only route to honor" -- yes, this may always be an issue, and it connects with trying to impress potential mates, too. See James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear for at least one alternative.
However, while I disputed planets having much value above, I could believe there might be broader conflicts about star systems, in the same way some Europeans committed genocide against the Native Americans to get the land they were living on and from. We could potentially see arguments over what aesthetic philosophy or genetic paradigm controlled a solar system, true, even if the planets themselves might not be of much interest (other than maybe as sources of raw materials).
So, a more believable Star Trek might have cultures fighting over control of a star's Oort cloud material a light year away from the star for use in building space habitats? But, such fights would also
Probably good advice in general. But, for good or bad, a combination of competition, greed, evolution, curiousity, promises about longevity, pleasure traps, capitalistic short-term profit motive, and other things seem to be driving us towards one or more of them.
Apparently though, according to the above link, the original useage was more "worries, cares, and sorrows killed the cat..."
My guess is that how we come out of any singularity may have something to do with the path we take going into one... Do we go into a singularity having alleviated global sorrows with a basic income, a gift economy, demosratic resource-based palnning, and local self-reliance/subsistence through shared open source advanced technology like RepRap 3D printing, organic gardens with heirloom seeds, and even solar panels/cold fusion, or do we go into a singularity with a world at military and economic war with itself using the tools of abundance as weapons to create artificial scarcity?
"Shared joy is doubled joy, shared sorrow is halved sorrow" from an old proverb.
You're welcome. Thanks for the comment. I've been refining the message. I hope the meme continues to propagate and others adapt it for local circumstances and their own unique style. James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear is one big source of that meme for me. Marcine Quenzer was influential too: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty As was Doug Lisle: http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm And others (Gerry Pournelle to an extent with his "Survival with Style" essay, lots of other writers with a bit here and there, including Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"). So I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants.:-)
The Flexner Report (by Abraham Flexner, in conjunction with the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations) is where things really started to go wrong with US medicine, as someone with success doing hands-on stuff with K-12 education tried to apply it to medicine where it was less appropriate since prevention, infrastructure, and complex psychology/spiritual issues are more important for wellness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report Ironically, now we have hands-on treatment focused medicine, and abstraction-oriented K-12, mostly just the opposite of how it should be...
More on that from one perspective: http://www.sntp.net/fda/piper_griffin.htm "In the meantime, while doctors are forced to spend hundreds of hours studying the names and actions of all kinds of man-made drugs, they are lucky if they receive even a portion of a single course on basic nutrition. Many have none at all. The result is that the average doctor's wife or secretary knows more about practical nutrition than he does."
If this cold fusion thing does work out (or even if it does not), these issues may help explain why it (as well as alternative medicine) encountered so much resistance. Still, I hope things may have improved somewhat from the days of Ignaz Semmelweis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Thanks for the reply. While some of that was old, most of it was organized or written new as a reply. I haven't read about Shrike and ergs, so thanks for the pointer.
I spent a year around Hans Moravec's lab when he was writing "Mind Children" in the mid-1980s. I think he has a lot of great ideas, especially in terms of understanding evolution (in a way I think, say, Ray Kurzweil seemingly does not), but it is indeed easy to get lost in speculation or miss some key issue (I'm guilty of that too often enough myself). Personally, I like him and he was kind to me to let me hang out in his lab for quite a while; he really is in some sense at least to me a real model of what a basic researcher should be like. I'm not saying every researcher should be like him, just that he really represents something special in his own way. As far as his vision of the future, mind children seems a lot better than the robots we have emerging from corporate competition or military competition. Do we want to create our "mind children" to be military slaves? Do we even want human children to be made that way, say through compulsory schooling? From: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm "Fichte's point was that schools could and should be used to create a compliant citizenry, one that would be used to following orders, comfortable submitting their will to a larger authority, familiar with hierarchical chains of command and instructed in the virtues of the State.
To that end Prussian educational theorists devised a model for schooling, built around centrally controlled curriculums, constant fragmentation of days into changing classes at the sound of a bell, obedience and teacher-directed classroom groupings. At the heart of the system though was the primacy of the State, and that children both belonged to and were the responsibility of the State. As Hegel put it, the State is "the higher authority in respect to which the laws and interests of the family and the civic community are subject and dependent".7
By 1819 the ideal of a national system of compulsory schooling was in place, and the Prussian economy and military was booming...."
The Pleasure Trap concept (in the book or video) talks mostly how to break out of one (a food related one, but probably genealizeable) by understanding what they are given neuroadaptation (that getting adjusted to something extra pleasurable that is bad for you in the long run really doesn't feel that more pleasureable after an initial rush, but you may have to accept feeling worse for a short time until your sensation level readjust if you go back to experiencing things that are plainer but healthier).
As life goes by, we may change from experiences (good and bad), and so our plans may change. Not saying they should, just that they might.
In Hogan's book, he does not talk about if the other universes are inhabited in VFY, but I've thought about that issue you raised, that they might be polluting another universe.:-) Would have made a nice sequel... Too bad he is no longer around to write it, or I'd suggest it to him.
I agree with you on the problems of unimaginative uncurious politicians in a high-tech rapidly changing time.
Red Dwarf gets better as the season progresses. But, in any case, for background (contains minor spoilers):
When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book "Midas World". It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called "The Midas Plague", originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: "... in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the 'poor' are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the 'rich' can live lives of simplicity." In that imaginary world, only the "rich" get to have small homes, to eat plain food, and to work a lot both to help other people and to tend their small gardens; the "poor" are condemned to living in mansions, to eating vast amounts of fancy food, to being entertained endlessly, and they are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves -- all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy.:-)
In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor's diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work"). But instead that fictional world ended up with "a snowmobile in every driveway... and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand".
The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind's social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.
I'd recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I'm not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan's hard sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.
In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as people want to do them; people may otherwise be prevented from doing those things well by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thi
One big thing I see about this demo, if is it true, given the continuing progress of solar/wind/etc and batteries and energy efficiency, is that cold fusion could power advanced vehicles like flying cars or ion-drive spacecraft. Or even mobile robots. Rocketry might be the biggest beneficiary though, and we might start seeing trips to the Moon becoming common in a decade or so and the beginning of space habitats? Once we are on the Moon again, we can mine H3 for other fusion techniques.
Mining on Earth for nickel can still be ecologically disruptive, and it is not clear how much nickel is needed in practice for each generator even if only a small part of it fuses (is the rest poisoned or can it be reformed?). I'm not sure of the relative impacts of nickel mining per watt vs. renewables though, and renewables themselves take mining of various sorts for the materials. I'd think the ecological advantage would be in favor of the cold fusion though, at least as far as using up ready supplies of nickel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour "In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/?pagination=false "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
http://www.webscription.net/p-236-kicking-the-sacred-cow.aspx "Galileo may have been forced to deny that the Earth moves around the Sun; but in the end, science triumphed. Nowadays science fearlessly pursues truth, shining the pure light of reason on the mysteries of the universe. Or does it As bestselling author James P. Hogan demonstrates in this fact-filled and thoroughly documented study, science has its own roster of hidebound pronouncements which are Not to be Questioned. Among the dogma-laden subjects he examines are Darwinism, global warming, the big bang, problems with relativity, radon and radiation, holes in the ozone layer, the cause of AIDS, and the controversy over Velikovsky. Hogan explains the basics of each controversy with his clear, informative style, in a book that will be fascinating for anyone with an interest in the frontiers of modern science."
One hopes that eventually science is self-correcting, but can that sometimes take centuries?
As I say there, after talking about positive alternatives of a a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence: "There are some bad "make-work" alternatives also that could prop up the status quo for a time and are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons. All of those just keep people busy in an addictive or destructive or mindless way to little good end and to little human happiness. Unfortunately, people turn all too quickly to those bad alternatives sometimes to deal with social problems related to abundance or uneven wealth distribution. I outline that in more depth in the knol."
So, I might consider drugs part of the "endless sickness". But maybe it deserves its own category for the reason you outline? Thanks for the suggestion. It also feeds into the prison "solution", too, as you point out. And, as you say indirectly, it connects to the notion of being a "Millionaire Wannabee" as well: http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47 "But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
This 1970s study (ignored and terminated) showed that addictive behavior may be mainly a response to environmental stress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park "To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments."
Could that go for computer addiction and workaholism and so on, too?
Its ironic how the totalitarian USSR needed to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, and we in the USA rightly said that was awful, but the USA is finding it ne
These are the ones I consider important and listed there and in a followup: * limited demand invalidates classical macroeconomics relating to employment; * the basic income guarantee and its history, as one of multiple ways to address the exponential increase in technological capacity and job loss; * the issue of post-scarcity technology wielded to create artificial scarcities; * the potential of 3D printing if it follows the growth of 2D printing and continues to improve; and * how our social values may affect the nature of any Technological Singularity, and how the Singularity is a mirror. * how the cost of computing dropping towards zero makes all prices drop towards zero.
I made a hokey short Youtube video myself, but obviously I'm not great artist/entertainer.:-)
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
I put that under CC-BY-ND because my voice is on that (and I did feel comfortable thinking about my voice remixed), but people should feel free to use the text or images or storyline under CC-BY-SA (though I'm sure any experienced artist or scriptwriter would rapidly leave almost all of that behind and make something way better).
So, yes, I'd agree, some young entertainers could make a huge difference running with these sorts of ideas and making funny videos, songs, drawings, and so on about them.
Zeitgeist, profiling the Venus Project in sequels, is another example. But the Venus Project and resource-based planning is just one option (a basic income, a gift economy, and local subsistence with 3D printing and solar panels and organic gardening are others that can all interact with it). So, we could use catch things that are broader. But Zeitgeist was a good start. We need short, funny stuff. Maybe there are even grants for that kind of stuff for the right people? http://www.casefoundation.org/topics/social-media-for-good/videos
Thanks for your insightful reply. I'll have to read "The Gripping Hand" to see if I agree; I had not known there was a sequel::-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand "A crucial plot element of the book is the idiom "on the gripping hand", a three-armed variation of the idiom "On one hand X, on the other hand Y." The saying is native to the alien Moties, who have three arms, one of which is stronger but possesses less finesse. The idiom has also gained some use among fans of the book.[1]"
Actually, as an analogy to the blockaded of the Moties, are there intellectual blockades by some aspects of an elite trying to keep regular humans from expanding intellectually or economically?:-) Related:
"Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies" http://yupnet.org/boyle/archives/162
Nanotech may have been slow to develop for other reasons (see Amara's Law or Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns), but nanotech-related science is reshaping our economy, and 3D printing of plastic and other materials (like with MakerBot or RepRap) is shaping up to be the next big thing. So, as with Amara's law, it is easy to get the pace of an exponential trend wrong from a linear perspective. Also, there may be specific issues (thermal limitations, statistical issues) on why Drexler's original nanotech stuff may never play out as he outlined (biological cells may be as good as it gets for reliable mechanisms on that nanotech level, even if nanotech structures like blended materials or diamanoid may still be useful). From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
I'd agree that conflicts may well exist in the future over what are essentially issues of identity and aesthetics (or even religious/spiritual issues). I liked your Dyson sphere example. And, to an extent, those issues are with us even now, some people might prefer there was only a billion (or less) people on the Earth, and some others even might want the solar system left the way it is (no more disfiguring footprints on the Moon, etc.). The Negative Population Growth people come to mind, for example, and that NPG meme has grown all too common in the US environmental movement IMHO: http://www.npg.org/
I'm more in the Jerry Pournelle/Julian Simon "Survival with Style" camp for now myself: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/ http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q2/view570.html "Survival with Style said that Carter and the gloomsters were wrong, we were not headed for a nearly inevitable collapse, we would not have an enormous die-off of humanity, there would not be a billion people dead of starvation, and the US didn't need to join the poor nations: the best thing the US could do for the world would be to get rich. And there were ways to do it. Despair is not only a sin, it's a blunder. Back in those days I was one of the few who went to college campuses to say things like that. I was opposed by the faculty; most of the students wanted to hear that they were not headed for lives of poverty and gloom. But I sure felt alone for a while there."
However, with that said, because I believe were are entering an age of abundance, I think we can "survive with style" while still, for the most part, being respectful of the natural environment (especially regarding habitat loss and pollution) as well as working towards things like a basic income for all of humanity. My very belief in potential abundance suggest
I was just watching some Star Trek: Enterprise episodes and when I saw all these big starships (Andorian vs. Vulcan in that case) shooting at each other, it just seemed, well, here they have warp drive, anti-matter energy, anti-gravity, and all they can think to do with it all is fight over some planets, when the whole universe is full of matter they can use to reorganize into space habitats and starships?
Anyway, I'm not saying you don't make a good point. But this is a deep issue that seems to me is being widely ignored. It relates to so many of these issue coming up as we approach one or more singularities. How do you suggest I approach that?
I wrote: "Even China is automating to cut costs: http://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." It is the fiscal logic of mainstream capitalism in its final death spiral... There was no net job growth in the USA for the entire last decade (despite rising population). That has never happened before in the USA. Yet, productivity in terms of the US GDP grew 40% (with the benefits almost entirely going to the business owners/investors). Why should that trend not continue? Mainstream economists, even liberal ones like Paul Krugman, seem pretty much oblivous to the implications. Offshoring is a huge red herring they are chasing..."
Regardless of what Samantha said, why would someone mod this offtopic? People are creating an artificial retina, and it is offtopic to talk about the consequences of automation? Who gets mod points these days?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not the bombs so much as how you look at them. :-)
Just like the thesis of the book in your sig, that perspective matters a lot: :-)
""Irreducible mind: toward a psychology for the 21st century"
http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"Practically every contemporary mainstream scientist presumes that all aspects of mind are generated by brain activity. We demonstrate the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain. We further show that an alternative picture developed by F. W. H. Myers and William James successfully accommodates these phenomena, ratifies the common sense view of ourselves as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with contemporary physics and neuroscience."
Here is something I send to Freeman Dyson on this issue of perspective and nuclear weapons (he wrote a book called Weapons and Hope, and hopes that someday we can eliminate all nuclear weapons from the world):
====
Quick thought exercise: imagine the Vogons told us they were removing the sun to make room for a hyperspace bypass, but they would be able to spare the Earth, which they intended to use as a dumping ground for quadrillions of dial-a-yield nuclear bombs (one kiloton to one gigaton yield) left over from their Poetry Wars. And thanks to all the messages from Al Gore, they were going to help us out by removing all our coal, oil, and natural gas, being a friendly, helpful, likable sort. Using the ideas from Project Orion, could you build a system that would allow us to power our society from all these quadrillions of nuclear bombs?
I'm sure you could -- maybe in some geothermal way or whatever else. You might lead a project to do that all over the place. Humanity would prosper from those quadrillions of nuclear bombs. We would go to the stars on them, like Project Orion. So, the real problem is not the bombs. It is how we look at them. When life hands you lemons or H-bombs... :-) So, our current energy crisis is caused by not having enough nuclear bombs. :-) Of course, we don't need the bombs for energy if we use regular geothermal power, or get laser fusion to work, and so on, so I'm just joking there. I'm not saying they are not dangerous. In any case, we better sort this out before plagues and black holes on demand and whatever else can be made by anyone with access to the internet.
Thanks. What's really problematical for me is that links to individual posts no longer work right. I just sent some feedback about that.
----
To: feedback@slashdot.org
CC: Rob Malda
Subject: Problem viewing nested posts with new slashdot
With the new slashdot, using FireFox 3.6.13, a click to something like
this link (a reply to something I wrote):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1964112&cid=35004816
no longer opens the message itself (just the top parent, and I have to
drill down to the message). This makes using the emails slashdot sends
out to look at posts difficult.
If I have fsdn.com blocked with NoScript, I can't even drill down to the
message (it goes back to the top). If both slashdot.org and fsdn.com are
blocked, there seems no way to navigate to a specific child post a link
is intended to go to.
I had been using slashdot posts as a sort of blog, and it was important
to me that I could give out URLs and assume people could click on them
to get to them. Now that seems broken? This in turn has broken probably
hundreds (even thousands) of references to posts I've made to slashdot
on other sites. I hope this get fixed.
IHMO, the conceptual design mistake here was probably in assuming that
people only use slashdot for active discussions, not to post material
for future reference, or not to link to parts of previous discussions
later, both of which eventually drive more traffic to the slashdot site
and make slashdot more valuable as a publishing platform.
I'm not going to abandon slashdot entirely over this (I've been using it
for more than a decade), but it suddenly has dropped enormously in value
to me as far as my interest in participating on it. And years of
previous work elsewhere is now broken.
In any case, requiring people to have JavaScript enabled to be able to
view an old post just seems like a dumb idea, sorry. If this was done
intentionally, well, I guess it's some sort of weird feature I do not
understand, maybe to drive ad revenue or something?
Anyway, thanks for running such a great site in the past. Hopefully this
is just a bug, not a feature, and it will get fixed eventually.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Oh, it was true in the 20th century too. And the 19th. And maybe also all the way back to 10,000 BC or earlier. So, you're right to be skeptical in that sense.
The irony just grows every year though, as our technological capacity increase exponentially, which makes it a very pressing issue for the 21st century, where someone like Ray Kurweil predicts an exponential growth in technological capacity equivalent to 10,000 or whatever years of increase in capacity relative to what happended in the 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
So the danger of the irony grows, too, since technology is an amplifier. As Albert Einstein said, with the harnessing of the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. The same applies with harnessing the power of computers, or the internet, or robotics, or nanotech, or biotech, or bureaucracy, or psychology, or cold fusion, or whatever. Whether we do get exponential growth or not, since the 1950s, the world has been under this storm cloud of nuclear war. Now it is under obvious threats of biowarfare and, increasingly, robotic warfare. So, there are emerging issues.
We could afford in the 19th century as a global society to be stupid -- as a war in one place did not effect the lives much of people living somewhere else. With nuclear bombs, desinger plagues, killer robots, and vast bureaucracies (like committed the WWII Holocaust) becoming more and more common as our industrial capacity grows, ironic stupidity is becoming a lot more dangerous to the survival of humanity.
As several responders have suggested by mentioning the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it just gets easy and easier to destroy stuff with the technologies of abundance (like lunar mass drivers). We need to at least countrbalance that with using the technologies of abunace for, well, abundance.
People's feelings about this change sometimes change in different points in their lives...
This is not to deny there is some truth in what you say, echoed by Chris Hedge's point in his book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Force_That_Gives_Us_Meaning
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/War_Gives_Meaning.html
Still, war is only one thing that can help people find meaning in life. How about the issue of worrying about a big solar flare or a supervolcano? If you really want a challenge, why not help solve those sorts of issues? Or help design better space habitats? Or improve cold fusion reactor designs to power space craft? Or figure out how to get everyone on the planet fresh vegetables and fruits so they can afford to eat like Dr. Fuhrman suggests? Limiting the scope of your ambitions to fighting ironic wars with superweapons seems, well, not very ambitious. :-)
War is also a racket, by the way, just to be sure you know, acording to a very decorated military man: .."
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC, Retired
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.
So, you want to go to war to line some rich guys pockets?
Apparently, compulsory schools were mainly created to indoctrinate people to be part of the war racket, and to ensure they were trained to not see how they were being used. See either of:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1
The ideal of the perfect is sometimes the eclipser of the reality of the good? :-)
Also, consider that some Native American traditions suggest putting in at least one mistake into everything as a sign of either humility or something for others to demonstrate their prowess to be "chief" by finding. :-)
It was spending time around Han Moravec's lab, as well as in Red Whittaker's lab, that more than anything maybe got me to start thinking more deeply about the military and competitive consequences of all this research (given the military was funding much of what was going on at CMU at the time), I got to see the first ALVAN created (self-driving vehicle).
Sure, there are a lot of possibilities. But many transhumanists (including Kurzweil) are very propertarian libertarian and push patents and copyrights and expanding mainstream economics as the way to reach a singularity, without considering there are, as you say, many alternatives. Example:
"Kurzweil patents A.I. poetry"
http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/15032-kurzweil-patents-ai-poetry/
If the future is so abundant, why focus on creating artificial scarcity right now?
So, I guess our AIs aren't going to be able to be poets for a long time... And there will be follow-on patents and then endless copyrights on top of that.
This is sad as poetry may be central to intelligence and knowledge management, as I suggested over a decade ago here:
"[unrev-II] Poetry and Knowledge Management (was Jack's Use Case)"
http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/1881.html
Yes, but see, they had to just make something up like Latinum as a plot device to try to bring some recognizable notions of 20th century economics into the 24th century, otherwise why not such civilizations exchanging gifts (why even bother with barter -- even that may be a plot device)? Besides, the question is never answered, why would anyone want Latinum? What is it useful for (besides currency)? At least gold can be used to make non-tarnishing wires.
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Latinum
For example, why can't the Starship Voyage seed some nanobots rear an uninhabited star that, using asteroid ore, in a couple months create solar arrays that produce a vast amount of antimatter fuel? So that they don't need to stay on tight "replicator rations"? That's another inconsistency.
Writers write what they know, in this case, trade and planets and war. Within that, they have shown a lot of imagination to push that envelope, and I am grateful for that, and I have been much inspired by what they have done.
Great point!
Can you please point to some examples of better designed discussion sites that address the issues you raise?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net] ... 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. "
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless. :-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things. :-)
Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example:
http://space.mike-combs.com/
So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.
So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite. :-)
Even without using the Moon, there is enough to go around on Earth though. Some examples:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_taste_of_Post-Scarcity
Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.
==
I also posted this comment elsewhere to this story but is not showing up well with the new Slashdot format which seems to collapse subsequent posts under low ranked parents:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1966606&cid=35008680
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. "
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless. :-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things. :-)
Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example:
http://space.mike-combs.com/
So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.
So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite. :-)
Even without using the Moon, there is enough to go around on Earth though. Some examples:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_taste_of_Post-Scarcity
Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience applause].
And why should your hard earned tax dollars go to pay public citizens to sit on juries and render open justice when things could be done so much more quic
Some of these seem like mostly trumped-up plot devices to make stories to appeal to 20th century audiences, but I'd agree others may always be with us as possible conflicts.
* "rare natural resources" -- to the best of our knowledge, nothing is that rare in the universe that we need to support an unimaginable number of living beings in the galaxy and beyond (as in, millions of quadrillions of people and their biospheres). We have stars for power, we have lots of mass orbiting around to build space habitats, and with artifical retinas like in this story, there will be endless robotic labot to turn matter using solar energy into whatever humanity wants. Star Trek invented stuff that could not be replicated like "latinum", but in practice, who really needs it?
* "control of habitable planets (and the power they bring)" -- in the future, few in their right minds in an advanced space faring society would want to live on a planet, given so many ecological/political restrictions, so little energy flux, being so far from happening city habitats, being stuck at the bottom of a gravity well, beign so corwded, being so dirty, being so poor, being so full of strange diseases, being full of uneducated people who coudl not get into space, being so culturally backwards, and so on. See: http://space.mike-combs.com/ I'm not saying some tiny percent of the quadrillions of people (and other sentients/AIs) living in the solar system in advanced space habitats someday might not want to visit Earth on a pilgrimage, in the same way some very few people from the USA may go on a trip for a week or two to Africa to get a feel for where humanity is from and then go back home glad they don't live there, feeling sorry of the inhabitants, and sponsoring villages there. Actually, places in Africa may be way more advanced culturally than the USA in a lot of ways, so this analogy doesn't quite hold. :-) Also, the current woes of Africa have a lot to do with centuries of exploitation by Europeans and US Americans, so again, this analogy might not hold.
* "culture and politics" -- yes, I agree people will continue to have conflicts over these, which boil down to things like issues of status, impressing the opposite sex, aesthetics, and managing mental illness like a desire for "financial obesity".
* "Sometimes one race just hates another, and wants to fight over it" -- there are less reasons for hatred if there is less conflict over resources. I think some of this is just trumped up plot devices, especially given advanced social technology for mediation. One group related to conflict resolution:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch
* "The Vulcans and Romulans are in conflict due to their historic dispute" -- yes, essentially, a war over philosophy/religion. I agree this may always be an issue, coming down to aesthetics and identity.
* "the Klingon culture is heavily militaristic and demands war as the only route to honor" -- yes, this may always be an issue, and it connects with trying to impress potential mates, too. See James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear for at least one alternative.
However, while I disputed planets having much value above, I could believe there might be broader conflicts about star systems, in the same way some Europeans committed genocide against the Native Americans to get the land they were living on and from. We could potentially see arguments over what aesthetic philosophy or genetic paradigm controlled a solar system, true, even if the planets themselves might not be of much interest (other than maybe as sources of raw materials).
So, a more believable Star Trek might have cultures fighting over control of a star's Oort cloud material a light year away from the star for use in building space habitats? But, such fights would also
"I suggest you don't approach singularities."
Probably good advice in general. But, for good or bad, a combination of competition, greed, evolution, curiousity, promises about longevity, pleasure traps, capitalistic short-term profit motive, and other things seem to be driving us towards one or more of them.
Which one of those allegedly "killed the cat" again? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_killed_the_cat
Apparently though, according to the above link, the original useage was more "worries, cares, and sorrows killed the cat..."
My guess is that how we come out of any singularity may have something to do with the path we take going into one... Do we go into a singularity having alleviated global sorrows with a basic income, a gift economy, demosratic resource-based palnning, and local self-reliance/subsistence through shared open source advanced technology like RepRap 3D printing, organic gardens with heirloom seeds, and even solar panels/cold fusion, or do we go into a singularity with a world at military and economic war with itself using the tools of abundance as weapons to create artificial scarcity?
"Shared joy is doubled joy, shared sorrow is halved sorrow" from an old proverb.
So, if we are falling into a singularity, at least we can give some thought to whether we should be holding each other's hands rather than holding each other's throats as we fall into it... Related:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch
You're welcome. Thanks for the comment. I've been refining the message. I hope the meme continues to propagate and others adapt it for local circumstances and their own unique style. James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear is one big source of that meme for me. Marcine Quenzer was influential too: :-)
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
As was Doug Lisle:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
And others (Gerry Pournelle to an extent with his "Survival with Style" essay, lots of other writers with a bit here and there, including Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"). So I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants.
BTW, if you like Edgar Cayce, how do you feel about Herbert Shelton, Joel Fuhrman, and Blue Zones?
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.bluezones.com/
The Flexner Report (by Abraham Flexner, in conjunction with the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations) is where things really started to go wrong with US medicine, as someone with success doing hands-on stuff with K-12 education tried to apply it to medicine where it was less appropriate since prevention, infrastructure, and complex psychology/spiritual issues are more important for wellness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
Ironically, now we have hands-on treatment focused medicine, and abstraction-oriented K-12, mostly just the opposite of how it should be...
More on that from one perspective:
http://www.sntp.net/fda/piper_griffin.htm
"In the meantime, while doctors are forced to spend hundreds of hours studying the names and actions of all kinds of man-made drugs, they are lucky if they receive even a portion of a single course on basic nutrition. Many have none at all. The result is that the average doctor's wife or secretary knows more about practical nutrition than he does."
More on how medical and other research has gone wrong in the USA (another post I made to this story):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1964112&cid=34989572
If this cold fusion thing does work out (or even if it does not), these issues may help explain why it (as well as alternative medicine) encountered so much resistance. Still, I hope things may have improved somewhat from the days of Ignaz Semmelweis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Thanks for the reply. While some of that was old, most of it was organized or written new as a reply. I haven't read about Shrike and ergs, so thanks for the pointer.
I spent a year around Hans Moravec's lab when he was writing "Mind Children" in the mid-1980s. I think he has a lot of great ideas, especially in terms of understanding evolution (in a way I think, say, Ray Kurzweil seemingly does not), but it is indeed easy to get lost in speculation or miss some key issue (I'm guilty of that too often enough myself). Personally, I like him and he was kind to me to let me hang out in his lab for quite a while; he really is in some sense at least to me a real model of what a basic researcher should be like. I'm not saying every researcher should be like him, just that he really represents something special in his own way. As far as his vision of the future, mind children seems a lot better than the robots we have emerging from corporate competition or military competition. Do we want to create our "mind children" to be military slaves? Do we even want human children to be made that way, say through compulsory schooling? From: ..."
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"Fichte's point was that schools could and should be used to create a compliant citizenry, one that would be used to following orders, comfortable submitting their will to a larger authority, familiar with hierarchical chains of command and instructed in the virtues of the State.
To that end Prussian educational theorists devised a model for schooling, built around centrally controlled curriculums, constant fragmentation of days into changing classes at the sound of a bell, obedience and teacher-directed classroom groupings. At the heart of the system though was the primacy of the State, and that children both belonged to and were the responsibility of the State. As Hegel put it, the State is "the higher authority in respect to which the laws and interests of the family and the civic community are subject and dependent".7
By 1819 the ideal of a national system of compulsory schooling was in place, and the Prussian economy and military was booming.
An alternative (that inspired Ted Nelson's Xanadu project and Hypertext):
"The Skills of Xanadu"
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
The Pleasure Trap concept (in the book or video) talks mostly how to break out of one (a food related one, but probably genealizeable) by understanding what they are given neuroadaptation (that getting adjusted to something extra pleasurable that is bad for you in the long run really doesn't feel that more pleasureable after an initial rush, but you may have to accept feeling worse for a short time until your sensation level readjust if you go back to experiencing things that are plainer but healthier).
As life goes by, we may change from experiences (good and bad), and so our plans may change. Not saying they should, just that they might.
I think you have an interesting point about nanotech risk and simulation. You've probably seen this:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
In Hogan's book, he does not talk about if the other universes are inhabited in VFY, but I've thought about that issue you raised, that they might be polluting another universe. :-) Would have made a nice sequel... Too bad he is no longer around to write it, or I'd suggest it to him.
I agree with you on the problems of unimaginative uncurious politicians in a high-tech rapidly changing time.
Red Dwarf gets better as the season progresses. But, in any case, for background (contains minor spoilers):
I posted to this to Andrea Rossi's website, and I'll post it again here in case that site ever goes down (with some added links and some typos fixed):
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
January 22nd, 2011 at 11:33 AM
Andrea-
When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book "Midas World". It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called "The Midas Plague", originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: "... in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the 'poor' are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the 'rich' can live lives of simplicity." In that imaginary world, only the "rich" get to have small homes, to eat plain food, and to work a lot both to help other people and to tend their small gardens; the "poor" are condemned to living in mansions, to eating vast amounts of fancy food, to being entertained endlessly, and they are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves -- all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy. :-)
In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor's diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work"). But instead that fictional world ended up with "a snowmobile in every driveway ... and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand".
The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind's social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.
I'd recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I'm not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan's hard sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.
In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as people want to do them; people may otherwise be prevented from doing those things well by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thi
"We remain regretfully fusion-free."
Except for cheap solar power from the fusion plant in the sky (the sun) with widespread USA grid parity from PV expected by many in the next few years. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2008/2169588.htm
One big thing I see about this demo, if is it true, given the continuing progress of solar/wind/etc and batteries and energy efficiency, is that cold fusion could power advanced vehicles like flying cars or ion-drive spacecraft. Or even mobile robots. Rocketry might be the biggest beneficiary though, and we might start seeing trips to the Moon becoming common in a decade or so and the beginning of space habitats? Once we are on the Moon again, we can mine H3 for other fusion techniques.
Mining on Earth for nickel can still be ecologically disruptive, and it is not clear how much nickel is needed in practice for each generator even if only a small part of it fuses (is the rest poisoned or can it be reformed?). I'm not sure of the relative impacts of nickel mining per watt vs. renewables though, and renewables themselves take mining of various sorts for the materials. I'd think the ecological advantage would be in favor of the cold fusion though, at least as far as using up ready supplies of nickel?
Two slashdot posts by me on general problems with research and peer review:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740048
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740098
Others stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/?pagination=false
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
http://www.webscription.net/p-236-kicking-the-sacred-cow.aspx
"Galileo may have been forced to deny that the Earth moves around the Sun; but in the end, science triumphed. Nowadays science fearlessly pursues truth, shining the pure light of reason on the mysteries of the universe. Or does it As bestselling author James P. Hogan demonstrates in this fact-filled and thoroughly documented study, science has its own roster of hidebound pronouncements which are Not to be Questioned. Among the dogma-laden subjects he examines are Darwinism, global warming, the big bang, problems with relativity, radon and radiation, holes in the ozone layer, the cause of AIDS, and the controversy over Velikovsky. Hogan explains the basics of each controversy with his clear, informative style, in a book that will be fascinating for anyone with an interest in the frontiers of modern science."
One hopes that eventually science is self-correcting, but can that sometimes take centuries?
I do talk about escapism and drug addiction in passing here:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
Summarized in a new way here:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
As I say there, after talking about positive alternatives of a a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence: "There are some bad "make-work" alternatives also that could prop up the status quo for a time and are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons. All of those just keep people busy in an addictive or destructive or mindless way to little good end and to little human happiness. Unfortunately, people turn all too quickly to those bad alternatives sometimes to deal with social problems related to abundance or uneven wealth distribution. I outline that in more depth in the knol."
So, I might consider drugs part of the "endless sickness". But maybe it deserves its own category for the reason you outline? Thanks for the suggestion. It also feeds into the prison "solution", too, as you point out. And, as you say indirectly, it connects to the notion of being a "Millionaire Wannabee" as well:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
BTW, here is a way to break out of food-related "drug" addiction, in the sense that refined sugar and cheap salt and excessive refined-oil/factory-farmed-animal fat are all drugs in a way too:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
Combined with this or something similar:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
This 1970s study (ignored and terminated) showed that addictive behavior may be mainly a response to environmental stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
"To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments."
A claymation about that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3swVNAaoDgw
Could that go for computer addiction and workaholism and so on, too?
Its ironic how the totalitarian USSR needed to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, and we in the USA rightly said that was awful, but the USA is finding it ne
You're welcome. Thanks for the comment. It's been said: "Where there is no vision, the people perish."
On that theme of consciousness raising and helping work towards a new vision for a 21st century society, here is something I wrote in 2009:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/eff0aa5033106bb5
These are the ones I consider important and listed there and in a followup:
* limited demand invalidates classical macroeconomics relating to employment;
* the basic income guarantee and its history, as one of multiple ways to address the exponential increase in technological capacity and job loss;
* the issue of post-scarcity technology wielded to create artificial scarcities;
* the potential of 3D printing if it follows the growth of 2D printing and continues to improve; and
* how our social values may affect the nature of any Technological Singularity, and how the Singularity is a mirror.
* how the cost of computing dropping towards zero makes all prices drop towards zero.
I made a hokey short Youtube video myself, but obviously I'm not great artist/entertainer. :-)
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
I put that under CC-BY-ND because my voice is on that (and I did feel comfortable thinking about my voice remixed), but people should feel free to use the text or images or storyline under CC-BY-SA (though I'm sure any experienced artist or scriptwriter would rapidly leave almost all of that behind and make something way better).
Here is another parable I wrote recently, about the USA's future:
"Burdened by Bags of Sand"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
And another item:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd
So, yes, I'd agree, some young entertainers could make a huge difference running with these sorts of ideas and making funny videos, songs, drawings, and so on about them.
Here is a one minute item that I found inspiring and relates to these themes:
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
More stuff like that that gets people thinking about a basic income and robotics might be useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Here are some videos linked there, but they are a bit dry:
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
Here is a video on a gift economy, but again, it could be more exciting:
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
Zeitgeist, profiling the Venus Project in sequels, is another example. But the Venus Project and resource-based planning is just one option (a basic income, a gift economy, and local subsistence with 3D printing and solar panels and organic gardening are others that can all interact with it). So, we could use catch things that are broader. But Zeitgeist was a good start. We need short, funny stuff. Maybe there are even grants for that kind of stuff for the right people?
http://www.casefoundation.org/topics/social-media-for-good/videos
Computer games are another line of approach.
Thanks for your insightful reply. I'll have to read "The Gripping Hand" to see if I agree; I had not known there was a sequel: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gripping_Hand
"A crucial plot element of the book is the idiom "on the gripping hand", a three-armed variation of the idiom "On one hand X, on the other hand Y." The saying is native to the alien Moties, who have three arms, one of which is stronger but possesses less finesse. The idiom has also gained some use among fans of the book.[1]"
Actually, as an analogy to the blockaded of the Moties, are there intellectual blockades by some aspects of an elite trying to keep regular humans from expanding intellectually or economically? :-) Related:
"Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies"
http://yupnet.org/boyle/archives/162
Nanotech may have been slow to develop for other reasons (see Amara's Law or Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns), but nanotech-related science is reshaping our economy, and 3D printing of plastic and other materials (like with MakerBot or RepRap) is shaping up to be the next big thing. So, as with Amara's law, it is easy to get the pace of an exponential trend wrong from a linear perspective. Also, there may be specific issues (thermal limitations, statistical issues) on why Drexler's original nanotech stuff may never play out as he outlined (biological cells may be as good as it gets for reliable mechanisms on that nanotech level, even if nanotech structures like blended materials or diamanoid may still be useful). From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
I'd agree that conflicts may well exist in the future over what are essentially issues of identity and aesthetics (or even religious/spiritual issues). I liked your Dyson sphere example. And, to an extent, those issues are with us even now, some people might prefer there was only a billion (or less) people on the Earth, and some others even might want the solar system left the way it is (no more disfiguring footprints on the Moon, etc.). The Negative Population Growth people come to mind, for example, and that NPG meme has grown all too common in the US environmental movement IMHO:
http://www.npg.org/
I'm more in the Jerry Pournelle/Julian Simon "Survival with Style" camp for now myself:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q2/view570.html
"Survival with Style said that Carter and the gloomsters were wrong, we were not headed for a nearly inevitable collapse, we would not have an enormous die-off of humanity, there would not be a billion people dead of starvation, and the US didn't need to join the poor nations: the best thing the US could do for the world would be to get rich. And there were ways to do it. Despair is not only a sin, it's a blunder. Back in those days I was one of the few who went to college campuses to say things like that. I was opposed by the faculty; most of the students wanted to hear that they were not headed for lives of poverty and gloom. But I sure felt alone for a while there."
However, with that said, because I believe were are entering an age of abundance, I think we can "survive with style" while still, for the most part, being respectful of the natural environment (especially regarding habitat loss and pollution) as well as working towards things like a basic income for all of humanity. My very belief in potential abundance suggest
:-)
I'm glad someone is paying attention. :-)
I was just watching some Star Trek: Enterprise episodes and when I saw all these big starships (Andorian vs. Vulcan in that case) shooting at each other, it just seemed, well, here they have warp drive, anti-matter energy, anti-gravity, and all they can think to do with it all is fight over some planets, when the whole universe is full of matter they can use to reorganize into space habitats and starships?
Anyway, I'm not saying you don't make a good point. But this is a deep issue that seems to me is being widely ignored. It relates to so many of these issue coming up as we approach one or more singularities. How do you suggest I approach that?
Thanks.
I wrote: "Even China is automating to cut costs: http://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." It is the fiscal logic of mainstream capitalism in its final death spiral... There was no net job growth in the USA for the entire last decade (despite rising population). That has never happened before in the USA. Yet, productivity in terms of the US GDP grew 40% (with the benefits almost entirely going to the business owners/investors). Why should that trend not continue? Mainstream economists, even liberal ones like Paul Krugman, seem pretty much oblivous to the implications. Offshoring is a huge red herring they are chasing..."
Regardless of what Samantha said, why would someone mod this offtopic? People are creating an artificial retina, and it is offtopic to talk about the consequences of automation? Who gets mod points these days? :-)