And that is from research on motivation done by the Federal Reserve Bank, MIT, University of Chicago, CMU, and other mainstream groups...
People can be right about a general issue being a problem without their solution being that great. Also, a lot of scarcity in the USA is "artificial scarcity" at this point.
If you read what Marshall Brain wrote, you'll see he is not talking about a "command economy". http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm "Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
That works out to about US$16,000 a citizen per year, on top of other spending (like defense, infrastructure, etc.). Without raising taxes, a family of four could be getting US$64,000 a year as a "basic income" (without "working") to spend as they saw fit (maybe somewhat less if there was universal sick care access deducted up front). They would have to pay for their own kids' education or instead homeschool, but they would have plenty of money to do so. If people wanted more than that, then they would have to work.
If we really believe in the free market, why not give that "welfare" money every year to everyone of any age equally as a basic income to spend as they want in the market, whether on goods, services, education, housing, or whatever? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Even if some small percent blow their monthly income on liquor or gambling the first day of every month, all their friends and family would have a basic income too, so they would have somewhere to crash.:-) And note that there might be a lot less addictive behavior if people were less stressed about money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
But instead of that vision of "welfare" which is labelled "socialism" or whatever bad word someone wants to call it, we waste much of that money creating a huge bureaucracy to assess "need" (even as it is more and more obvious our economy does not "need" as many people to "work" and so many people are permanently unemployed). Why the economy may continue to implode, btw: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Or we spend the money as a society to have "public schools" that, according to a NYS teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, dumb kids down to fit into a hierarchical productive system with little room for smart or creative people: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, ent
Thanks for the reply, and it is great that these things are being discussed. What did your discussions have to say about using some combination of a basic income (expanding social security and medicare for all), a gift economy (expanding Debian GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, Apache, and blogging), localism (expanding 3D printing, local currencies, and local gardening), and democratic resource-based planning (using subsidies, taxes, and investments to deal with externalities and build infrastructure), to realize a post-scarcity economy?
From a few hundred years ago: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty "When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching."
Also from a little later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch "At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth.... The potlatch was a cultural practice much studied by ethnographers. Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige.... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1885[8] and the United States in the late nineteenth century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values.[9]"
If it takes laws and the force of arms to suppress gift giving in the USA in the past, what does that suggest about "human nature"? Also, consider how much force of arms and courts and fines and other penalties (including imprisonment) it is taking recently to suppress sharing of music and information on the internet (whether RIAA lawsuits or the firing or imprisonment of people contributing to Wikileaks). Human nature is a complex thing. Also, if you look at a count
In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons — some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad “make work” alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.
Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).
So, that’s the broader picture as I see it right now.
People are not making the obvious connections, because they still believe in an essentially a “religious dogma” of an economic ideology of endless growth that will produce endless paid employment for endless people (on a finite planet — even if a space program could help with that). This fundamentally ignores that the value of most new services is that they reduce the need for labor in industry or at home (once we are satiated for basic needs and even fairly high wants). So, we get, say, the recent push for government grants to push along more robotics in the USA as a White House priority without much though presumably given to the socio-economic implications of more automation.
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
But, beyond the economics side, it is the military side of all this that is really problematical and ironic. People have long been using all these advanced technologies of abundance (robotics, biotech, advanced materials, advanced energy sources) from a scarcity perspective of creating weapons to fight over the very scarcity that, ironically, these technologies could alleviate if created and used differently. So, we ironically get, say, military robots (drones) whose primary role is essentially to enforce a social order based on people working and acting like robots, rather that engineers just building robots to do the robot-like work and let people be people. The same is true for the misuse of nuclear energy, nanotech, rockets, and biotech all from a scarcity paradigm to
A key point being that keeping information from the public is not the same as modding up (or revising interactively) information like on slashdot. What would slashdot be like if every comment needed "peer review" before it was posted? Instead, slashdot uses after the fact moderation. (Nothing is perfect, of course.)
And from a previously posted link (from 1994 from the Vice Provost of Caltech, and it has probably gotten worse since): http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all...."
Anyway, this New Yorker article once again underscores the folly of going to extremes against common sense or long standing cultural traditions, based on some new scientific report or another, without looking at the broad big picture on overall weight of all the evidence we have from a variety of perspectives.
But even when there is a wide variety of good science, often policy ignores it. Problems with the recent timid vitamin D recommendation: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation Dr. Joel Fuhrman on how much money the USA spends on sick care for very poor outcomes: http://vimeo.com/16682935
The above links are on how others may be able to help prevent such cancers to some extent, especially us indoor techy types who may not be that into good nutrition or sunshine.
Just before Star Wars came out, I had developed my own R2-D2 shaped robot, inspired in part by a commercial cylindrical vacuum with a dome top my family had. My family had given that vacuum my oldest sister when they got a new one, and I had to ask her for it (and she was nice enough to give it to me) and I took out the motor and extended it with a big can (from tar for basement tiles IIRC) in the middle between the base and the dome top. My father (who worked around a machine shop) machined a gripping claw for it and helped with some of the other mechanical aspects like brackets for the two drive motors on either side of it. I did the electronics and some of the mechanical stuff plus the overall design. It won first prize in the Long Island Junior Science Congress (around 1977). I called it a "radioactive material transporter", as I had seen robots at Brookhaven National Labs that did that. I have some pictures of that version somewhere (and it was in local papers). One version had an arm in the front with a gripper and an arm in the back with an electromagnet (I kept changing it around a bit). I used strings with motors and pulleys to pull the arms up and down. The strings would jam now and then.
After Star Wars came out, I had to keep telling people, no, it wasn't inspired by Star Wars. I wondered for a time if Grant McCune might have seen a picture of my robot, but essentially they were both being built at the same time (me for a seventh grade science class starting in 1976, him in California for the movies). There is a picture of a later version on my site, but that one was from after Star Wars had come out (and it only has one arm in the front). See: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
That one was influenced a bit by Star Wars, as I had put in a modified Radio Shack circuit that was a light-sensitive theramin-like device that let it make squealing noises in various pitches. I think the wheel mechanism there were the same ones I used on the original, as were other parts (stuff was so hard to come by, I cannibalized one project to make the next). They had a rubber band around the big wheels and a drive motor with a pully -- the stretch in the rubber band seemed essential to making it work -- O rings would not work. The wheels came from inline skates my father had made based on "road skates" in Holland. This was before inline skates became a big thing in the USA -- so maybe I cost my Dad a fortune? I remember him deciding I could have the wheels from his prototype with an odd sort of look (a tough choice I see now, as a parent myself, in hindsight that he had to make -- help his son's dream or push forward on his own dream?) The salad bowl on the top in that later version was a gift by that same sister to my parents, and I had kind of taken it over (I wish now we'd all eaten more veggies -- see Dr. Joel Fuhrman -- that sister since died for heart disease and other issues perhaps related to vitamin D deficiency and diet too). The frame for that one was a rolling bar bought by my father at my request for it (although we did use it for a short time as a rolling bar for a party my mother gave before it became de
Languages are often tied to sets of stories and world views and cultures. So, there is more to learning a language in a broad way than knowing how to say basic things in it like "Can you direct me to the American Embassy?".:-) A diversity of cultures might be an important thing. A diversity of languages and their subcultures might make communications less efficienct in some ways, but it might make things more efficient and more interesting in others (the benefits of variety). For an extreme example of that cultural link to stories, see the Star Trek: TNG epoisode "Darmok". Or search on "One rice thousand gold".:-)
On Qualia, I can hope you are right.:-) But that all gets into metaphysics and untestable/religious areas pretty fast.
On your thoughts about what the model might be used for, I'm very much hoping you are wrong (but, I can see that, indeed, pessimistically, it may go as you say, for the sorts of social reasons you outline). A tangential item by me:
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en "One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.:-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. Or, 10 * 10 = 100."
In the mid 1980s, my psychology undergraduate senior thesis paper was on, among other things, the limits to "intelligence" from an evolutionary psychology perspective. A related post: http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/c80c16ac005f8a5b?hl=en "The Hydra's superior adaptedness to its environment is for many reasons. It is a good size to allow it to replicate quickly when food is available and then disperse by floating. It can function well over a variety of sizes; it can also shrink if no food is available. Hydra may well be immortal; they may not be programmed to die like humans or many other more complex organisms. Its neural network is complex enough to allow it to feed, yet doesn't require much energy to maintain (unlike a brain). It has what it needs to survive and replicate, with perhaps a little extra useful for evolving. In terms of efficiency, they might be considered far superior to humans. There is more to survival and adaptation than intelligence. For the hydra, a big brain and increased intelligence might even be a handicap by making it more difficult to reproduce."
One may find the same things about computer models. There may be simple and useful ones, but as they get more complex, they may get harder to justify (even if sometimes more accurate in certain situations where all the assumptions hold).
Around 1987, I made one of the world's first simulations (maybe the first) of self-replicating robots that duplicated themselves from a sea of spare parts on a 2D plane (on Symbolics in ZetaLisp+Flavors). John von Neumann had talked of this, but I don't think anyone had done it (maybe someone I was not aware of)? The very first thing a robot did when it had constructed child was cannibalize it. The algorithm just had the robot get available spare parts to follow a plan, and the closest spare parts were in the child. So, I accidentally invented robotic cannibals (and worse, robotic infanticide). I had to kludge in a sense of "smell" and marking all the parts with some identifier to prevent this. I'm glad those were only simple simulations. So, sometimes seeing the emergent consequences of our assumptions in a relatively safe way can be a good thing.:-)
I've spent much of my life since sort of thinking on-and-off about the implications of all that sort of stuff. Needless to say, generally no one is interested in supporting anyone to do that, at least not in a quirky way like I do it.:-) The disciplined "mainstream" rebels get all the funding::-) http://inetecon
I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.
Still, simulations can be used to: * predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects); * understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions); * to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack?:-); * assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes) * to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code); * educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from); * educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator); * educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games); * entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus); * to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts); * as a form of self-justifying artwork; * as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different; * probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?
I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s: http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame). http://www.papert.org/ Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL): http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)... http://www.simulation-argument.com/ http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Yes, sadly, that is all true, it is usually easier to destroy rather than create.
But, it does not change the main point about the moral and practical choices we make every day as human beings and how they can be ironic and counterproductive if we use the technologies of abundance from an assumption of scarcity.
Also, I might argue that for some people, destruction being easier than creation makes it less of a challenge and so less fun.:-)
Or to put it another way, it is in a sense "easier" as far as total time involved for people to kill themselves than to spend a lifetime involved in life -- but generally most people decide that making the effort to be engaged in life is worth it because they have things about life they value (family, friends, hobbies, children, spirituality, sensuality, community, humor, honor, singing, dancing, eating, reading, writing, whatever). In fact, for most people, there is not even a choice -- our body just keeps going and keeps us engaged (barring depression, which can often be treated in various ways ranging from vitamin D, to omega-3s, to eating more healthy food and less junk food, to a positive spiral of social-talk and self-talk, and so on). http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1692444&cid=32644166
Our society needs to decide whether it wants to continue of the current (statistically likely) suicidal path of self-destruction or if it wants to reform. Why use the nukes, warbots, plagues and nanotech and whatever else to fight over what? Oil and slaves and racism and stuff, when we could just use the tech to make what we wanted? It remains ironic, even if it is indeed "easier" to just let the society destroy itself. Nobody ever said life was going to be easy. It is a choice. http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
Still, a deeper philosophical issue is that we apparently can't create without destroying something else (even just a different future possibility). So, reality is always throwing us curves in simple analyses. But, be that as it may, it seems stupid for everyone to kill each other off for a "racket". http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Also, on a practical basis, it is not normal for humans to kill each other without some specific heated emotional interpersonal quarrel. Soldiers in earlier wars like WWI rarely fired their weapons, and when they did, aimed to miss -- only a few soldiers way back when did most of the killing. It is only in the last 50 years or so that the US military and other militaries have refined their indoctrination techniques to be able to turn most human beings into killers of people they have no personal quarrel with. Though the military may not have given much thought about what to do with the killers after the wars are over (if the wars ever are over -- how many wars is the USA fighting now and when will they ever be over?) Now push-button drones make that even easier as soldiers in air-conditioned offices near where they live with their families are not apparently killing people -- they are just pressing a few buttons that affect fuzzy blips on a video game screen. Is that "progress"?
As Godfrey H. Hardy said in disgust: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Quotations/Hardy.html "A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."
The fundamental issue considered in this essay is how an emerging post-scarcity society affects the mythology by which Princeton University defines its "brand", both as an educational institution and as an alumni community....
Consider a prospective Princeton student evaluating whether an elite education at Princeton is a good investment of four years of her or his youth -- as well as a the direct expenses and indirect opportunity cost of lost wages. How should such a person evaluate the Princeton University "brand" these days, given, say, Donald Rumsfeld '54 as a PU poster boy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child
"Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html And also, how should a bright student interested in a future of independent intellectual effort see a PU investment in relation to perhaps a future PhD and professorship if they stay on the academic track all the way? Is it worth it? Should they really sacrifice, say, creating their own personalized "brand" on their own in the internet age from day one, as opposed to trying to build a life under the Princeton "brand" and so perhaps follow in Donald Rumsfeld's footsteps?
Here is an analogous example of someone choosing to pass up working at Apple to continue developing their own personal brand:
"Why I passed up the chance to work at Apple" http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000809.html A visitor comment from that web site:
Apple has nothing on Cameron Moll. Sure, Apple is a wonderful brand. But where Apple is in the business of design, Cameron strikes me as one in the business of the art of design, and that may appear to be a subtle difference at first glance. But it isn't.... You have built a brand for and of yourself, and I personally admire your accomplishment. I believe you describe an important self-discovery: you value the Cameron Moll brand more than you value the mighty Apple brand.
By coincidence (if such really exist?:-), such a prospective student need look no further that the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Cover story: "The new rules of financial aid"): http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/table_of_contents.html to understand how the "Princeton University" brand may need to be rethought in a collaborative GNU/Linux & Wikipedia internet age. Is it still advisable to align oneself with the historic Princeton University brand in an emerging post-scarcity society? Or, to be fair, to align one's personal brand with how that historic PU brand is now seen by the public, acknowledging there is always a lot going on at Princeton in different directions? I'd also suggest there are more alumni than just me who have stopped buying PU-related automobile window stickers (see below for more on that).
That choice of self-branding versus main-stream branding in the internet age is related to the idea of "post-scarcity". I will define that better later, but for now, let's just imagine a future where beer everywhere in t
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Compartmentalization can lead to lots of secrecy ("need to know"). Secrecy helps some things, but it also makes it easier for snakes to hide inside something, or for people to be unable to "connect the dots". I heard about one sociology professor who said, studying movies, that the "good guys" always win because they have better communications than the "bad guys". There are endless books about how organizations can improve their internal communications for greater effectiveness. Also, consider that analysis is about putting things into compartments, but synthesis is about putting things together, and both are important for creative problem solving, and the needs of our society seem to be shifting towards creative synthesis:
"RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
What good is a "secure" organization if it can't perform its primary function (whatever that is) very well?
There are always tradeoffs of security vs. effectiveness/useability. See: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/security_vs_usa.html Which links to this: http://jnd.org/dn.mss/when_security_gets_in_the_way.html "The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security. Hence the prevalence of doors propped open by bricks and wastebaskets, of passwords pasted on the fronts of monitors or hidden under the keyboard or in the drawer, of home keys hidden under the mat or above the doorframe or under fake rocks that can be purchased for this purpose. We are being sent a mixed message: on the one hand, we are continually forced to use arbitrary security procedures. On the other hand, even the professionals ignore many of them. How is the ordinary person to know which ones matter and which don't?"
One might expect people at the NSA to be quite a bit more disciplined and trained than average, but certainly this point holds for other organizations.
And about another three letter agency (quoting from Wikipedia) apparently struggling with compartmentalization: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "All of this has the effect of making it hard for DI analysts to interact even with the classified outside world. The CIA view is that there are risks to connecting CIA systems even to classified systems elsewhere. Mitigating those risks sends implicit messages to analysts: that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA’s own network are secondary to the intelligence mission."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Thank you for your willingness to risk everything for your nation.
Still, would it not be better if our nation adopted a defense posture that focused on intrinic and mutual security? Maybe then we would not need to have so many "secrets". Is security by obscurity really such a good thing, whether in cryptography or on the ground soldiering?
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430 and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altruistic people around; they just unfortunately are often misled for reasons of profit and power that Major General Butler outlined very clearly in "War is a Racket" decades ago. We need to build a better world where our trusting young people (and the people who give them orders) have more options for helping build a world that works for everyone than "war play". We need to build a better world where some of our most hopeful and trusting citizens are not coming home with PTSD as shattered people (or worse, coming home in body bags) because they were asked to kill and die for an unrecognized irony of using the tools of abundance to create artificial scarcity.
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...."
=====
Great poem.
Is a racket why the people "on the other side" "need killing"?
Jurors before becoming jurors could have read that article in Wikipedia and had their opinions affected. They could also have read lots of other information previously. Why should a line be draw after they become jurors? I can maybe understand the issue about press about the case, but even there, should not a jury be instructed on how to come to a fair decision? It's supposed to be juror of peers, and now peers have access to the internet...
Jurors on cases about questionable laws like non-violent drug offenses and copyright violation need to known that a whole reason juries exists is so that "peers" can decide the law is unjust and refuse to convict under it. This can and has been abused to not convict for racist crimes, but none-the-less, a main point for the right of a jury trial is so juries can nullify laws. Otherwise, why not let the experienced judge decide?
If a bunch of "peers" don't think a "crime" like smoking marijuana or sharing music online was substantially wrong, then the whole point of a jury is so peers can say that by refusing to convict. But judges will supposedly elimiate any juror who knows about this concept of jury nullification.
Should a judge *not* informing juries of "jurry nullification" be a real reason for mistrial in our society with endless conflicting and often selectively enforced laws? Defendents in cases involving unfair or unwise laws are being deprived of their constitutional rights in that sense.
And you get juries who say essentially, "We had no choice but to convict and send someone to jail for life for a third strike of being caught smoking dope, even though no one on the jury thought that was just or fair -- because the judge told us we had no choice."
Fom Wikipedia: "Recent court rulings have contributed to the prevention of jury nullification. A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[35] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[36] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[37] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[38] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification. Further, as officers of the court, attorneys have sworn an oath to uphold the law, and are considered by bar associations to be ethically prohibited from directly advocating for jury nullification.[39]"
This book on "cognitive dissonance" and "progressive desensitization" has a section on how some police offers go bad step-by-step to the point where they are regularly planting evidence on people they are "sure" are guilty (which becomes more and more everybody). It also has stuff on why police interrogations are often used to produce false confessions, where everything someone says or does is taken as confirming evidence of guilt, since no one would be arrested unless they were guilty, right? They point to a whole standard manual for interpretign interrogations that way. http://books.google.com/books?id=vZkGNIpAsTEC&q=interrogation#v=snippet&q=interrogation&f=false
It mentions an unholy alliance from Reagan administration media deregulation leading to boys being saturated with violent content 24X7 between media, food, toys, and apparel.
Good luck. At least these two books will help you understand what you are up agsainst when you dismiss the need for much help. Of course, what kind of help is really useful is a different question...
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
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?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all....
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430 and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
You make a good point about trust, but maybe China (and the USA, too, considering the attack on Wikileaks) would not be that way if they thought in terms of abundance and mutual/intrinsic security? Also, China never invaded the USA and force US citizens to buy drugs, but the USA did invade China and force its people to do drugs (see the Opium war). So, history does not begin today, and maybe the USA should be making apologies?
Slashdot Mirror
The current theory of motivation is changing:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
And that is from research on motivation done by the Federal Reserve Bank, MIT, University of Chicago, CMU, and other mainstream groups...
People can be right about a general issue being a problem without their solution being that great. Also, a lot of scarcity in the USA is "artificial scarcity" at this point.
If you read what Marshall Brain wrote, you'll see he is not talking about a "command economy".
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."
Let's think about the USA right now in that sense. One third of the US GDP is currently spent on social "welfare" between public and private amounts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_welfare_state
That works out to about US$16,000 a citizen per year, on top of other spending (like defense, infrastructure, etc.). Without raising taxes, a family of four could be getting US$64,000 a year as a "basic income" (without "working") to spend as they saw fit (maybe somewhat less if there was universal sick care access deducted up front). They would have to pay for their own kids' education or instead homeschool, but they would have plenty of money to do so. If people wanted more than that, then they would have to work.
If we really believe in the free market, why not give that "welfare" money every year to everyone of any age equally as a basic income to spend as they want in the market, whether on goods, services, education, housing, or whatever?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Even if some small percent blow their monthly income on liquor or gambling the first day of every month, all their friends and family would have a basic income too, so they would have somewhere to crash. :-) And note that there might be a lot less addictive behavior if people were less stressed about money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
But instead of that vision of "welfare" which is labelled "socialism" or whatever bad word someone wants to call it, we waste much of that money creating a huge bureaucracy to assess "need" (even as it is more and more obvious our economy does not "need" as many people to "work" and so many people are permanently unemployed). Why the economy may continue to implode, btw:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Or we spend the money as a society to have "public schools" that, according to a NYS teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, dumb kids down to fit into a hierarchical productive system with little room for smart or creative people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, ent
Thanks for the reply, and it is great that these things are being discussed. What did your discussions have to say about using some combination of a basic income (expanding social security and medicare for all), a gift economy (expanding Debian GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, Apache, and blogging), localism (expanding 3D printing, local currencies, and local gardening), and democratic resource-based planning (using subsidies, taxes, and investments to deal with externalities and build infrastructure), to realize a post-scarcity economy?
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localism_(politics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentrally_planned_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Synthetic (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
From a few hundred years ago:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching."
Also from a little later: ... The potlatch was a cultural practice much studied by ethnographers. Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. In return, they earned prestige. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1885[8] and the United States in the late nineteenth century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values.[9]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth.
If it takes laws and the force of arms to suppress gift giving in the USA in the past, what does that suggest about "human nature"? Also, consider how much force of arms and courts and fines and other penalties (including imprisonment) it is taking recently to suppress sharing of music and information on the internet (whether RIAA lawsuits or the firing or imprisonment of people contributing to Wikileaks). Human nature is a complex thing. Also, if you look at a count
Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Alternatives by me:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402
From there:
In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons — some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad “make work” alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.
Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).
So, that’s the broader picture as I see it right now.
People are not making the obvious connections, because they still believe in an essentially a “religious dogma” of an economic ideology of endless growth that will produce endless paid employment for endless people (on a finite planet — even if a space program could help with that). This fundamentally ignores that the value of most new services is that they reduce the need for labor in industry or at home (once we are satiated for basic needs and even fairly high wants). So, we get, say, the recent push for government grants to push along more robotics in the USA as a White House priority without much though presumably given to the socio-economic implications of more automation.
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
But, beyond the economics side, it is the military side of all this that is really problematical and ironic. People have long been using all these advanced technologies of abundance (robotics, biotech, advanced materials, advanced energy sources) from a scarcity perspective of creating weapons to fight over the very scarcity that, ironically, these technologies could alleviate if created and used differently. So, we ironically get, say, military robots (drones) whose primary role is essentially to enforce a social order based on people working and acting like robots, rather that engineers just building robots to do the robot-like work and let people be people. The same is true for the misuse of nuclear energy, nanotech, rockets, and biotech all from a scarcity paradigm to
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? "
Also: http://www.google.com/#q=peer+review+as+censorship
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur02262010.html
http://www.suppressedscience.net/censorship-medicine.html
A key point being that keeping information from the public is not the same as modding up (or revising interactively) information like on slashdot. What would slashdot be like if every comment needed "peer review" before it was posted? Instead, slashdot uses after the fact moderation. (Nothing is perfect, of course.)
In general:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=37
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
And from a previously posted link (from 1994 from the Vice Provost of Caltech, and it has probably gotten worse since): ..."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all.
http://www.naturalnews.com/z030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096/rankin-on-thursday-where-communism-succeeded.htm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-26/glaxo-said-to-settle-u-s-drug-manufacturing-lawsuit-for-750-million.html
Wired on the orginal article:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/the-truth-wears-off/
Anyway, this New Yorker article once again underscores the folly of going to extremes against common sense or long standing cultural traditions, based on some new scientific report or another, without looking at the broad big picture on overall weight of all the evidence we have from a variety of perspectives.
But even when there is a wide variety of good science, often policy ignores it.
Problems with the recent timid vitamin D recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Dr. Joel Fuhrman on how much money the USA spends on sick care for very poor outcomes:
http://vimeo.com/16682935
http://www.righthealth.com/topic/vitamin_d_may_reduce_risk_of_pancreatic_cancer/overview/healthology20
http://www.vitamindwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Iodine+-+how+much+is+needed+July+2010
http://www.lmreview.com/articles/view/iodine-the-next-vitamin-d-part-I/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
The above links are on how others may be able to help prevent such cancers to some extent, especially us indoor techy types who may not be that into good nutrition or sunshine.
Just before Star Wars came out, I had developed my own R2-D2 shaped robot, inspired in part by a commercial cylindrical vacuum with a dome top my family had. My family had given that vacuum my oldest sister when they got a new one, and I had to ask her for it (and she was nice enough to give it to me) and I took out the motor and extended it with a big can (from tar for basement tiles IIRC) in the middle between the base and the dome top. My father (who worked around a machine shop) machined a gripping claw for it and helped with some of the other mechanical aspects like brackets for the two drive motors on either side of it. I did the electronics and some of the mechanical stuff plus the overall design. It won first prize in the Long Island Junior Science Congress (around 1977). I called it a "radioactive material transporter", as I had seen robots at Brookhaven National Labs that did that. I have some pictures of that version somewhere (and it was in local papers). One version had an arm in the front with a gripper and an arm in the back with an electromagnet (I kept changing it around a bit). I used strings with motors and pulleys to pull the arms up and down. The strings would jam now and then.
After Star Wars came out, I had to keep telling people, no, it wasn't inspired by Star Wars. I wondered for a time if Grant McCune might have seen a picture of my robot, but essentially they were both being built at the same time (me for a seventh grade science class starting in 1976, him in California for the movies). There is a picture of a later version on my site, but that one was from after Star Wars had come out (and it only has one arm in the front). See:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
That one was influenced a bit by Star Wars, as I had put in a modified Radio Shack circuit that was a light-sensitive theramin-like device that let it make squealing noises in various pitches. I think the wheel mechanism there were the same ones I used on the original, as were other parts (stuff was so hard to come by, I cannibalized one project to make the next). They had a rubber band around the big wheels and a drive motor with a pully -- the stretch in the rubber band seemed essential to making it work -- O rings would not work. The wheels came from inline skates my father had made based on "road skates" in Holland. This was before inline skates became a big thing in the USA -- so maybe I cost my Dad a fortune? I remember him deciding I could have the wheels from his prototype with an odd sort of look (a tough choice I see now, as a parent myself, in hindsight that he had to make -- help his son's dream or push forward on his own dream?) The salad bowl on the top in that later version was a gift by that same sister to my parents, and I had kind of taken it over (I wish now we'd all eaten more veggies -- see Dr. Joel Fuhrman -- that sister since died for heart disease and other issues perhaps related to vitamin D deficiency and diet too). The frame for that one was a rolling bar bought by my father at my request for it (although we did use it for a short time as a rolling bar for a party my mother gave before it became de
Languages are often tied to sets of stories and world views and cultures. So, there is more to learning a language in a broad way than knowing how to say basic things in it like "Can you direct me to the American Embassy?". :-) A diversity of cultures might be an important thing. A diversity of languages and their subcultures might make communications less efficienct in some ways, but it might make things more efficient and more interesting in others (the benefits of variety). For an extreme example of that cultural link to stories, see the Star Trek: TNG epoisode "Darmok". Or search on "One rice thousand gold". :-)
On Qualia, I can hope you are right. :-) But that all gets into metaphysics and untestable/religious areas pretty fast.
On your thoughts about what the model might be used for, I'm very much hoping you are wrong (but, I can see that, indeed, pessimistically, it may go as you say, for the sorts of social reasons you outline). A tangential item by me: :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. Or, 10 * 10 = 100."
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.
In the mid 1980s, my psychology undergraduate senior thesis paper was on, among other things, the limits to "intelligence" from an evolutionary psychology perspective. A related post:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/c80c16ac005f8a5b?hl=en
"The Hydra's superior adaptedness to its environment is for many reasons. It is a good size to allow it to replicate quickly when food is available and then disperse by floating. It can function well over a variety of sizes; it can also shrink if no food is available. Hydra may well be immortal; they may not be programmed to die like humans or many other more complex organisms. Its neural network is complex enough to allow it to feed, yet doesn't require much energy to maintain (unlike a brain). It has what it needs to survive and replicate, with perhaps a little extra useful for evolving. In terms of efficiency, they might be considered far superior to humans. There is more to survival and adaptation than intelligence. For the hydra, a big brain and increased intelligence might even be a handicap by making it more difficult to reproduce."
One may find the same things about computer models. There may be simple and useful ones, but as they get more complex, they may get harder to justify (even if sometimes more accurate in certain situations where all the assumptions hold).
Around 1987, I made one of the world's first simulations (maybe the first) of self-replicating robots that duplicated themselves from a sea of spare parts on a 2D plane (on Symbolics in ZetaLisp+Flavors). John von Neumann had talked of this, but I don't think anyone had done it (maybe someone I was not aware of)? The very first thing a robot did when it had constructed child was cannibalize it. The algorithm just had the robot get available spare parts to follow a plan, and the closest spare parts were in the child. So, I accidentally invented robotic cannibals (and worse, robotic infanticide). I had to kludge in a sense of "smell" and marking all the parts with some identifier to prevent this. I'm glad those were only simple simulations. So, sometimes seeing the emergent consequences of our assumptions in a relatively safe way can be a good thing. :-)
I wonder sometimes if Marshall Brain saw a presentation I made of it. But in any case, he's thought about the consequences quite a bit, like here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
I've spent much of my life since sort of thinking on-and-off about the implications of all that sort of stuff. Needless to say, generally no one is interested in supporting anyone to do that, at least not in a quirky way like I do it. :-) The disciplined "mainstream" rebels get all the funding: :-)
http://inetecon
I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.
Still, simulations can be used to: :-);
* predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects);
* understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions);
* to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack?
* assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes)
* to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code);
* educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from);
* educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator);
* educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games);
* entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus);
* to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts);
* as a form of self-justifying artwork;
* as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different;
* probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?
I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html
As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame).
http://www.papert.org/
Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA
Yes, sadly, that is all true, it is usually easier to destroy rather than create.
But, it does not change the main point about the moral and practical choices we make every day as human beings and how they can be ironic and counterproductive if we use the technologies of abundance from an assumption of scarcity.
Also, I might argue that for some people, destruction being easier than creation makes it less of a challenge and so less fun. :-)
Or to put it another way, it is in a sense "easier" as far as total time involved for people to kill themselves than to spend a lifetime involved in life -- but generally most people decide that making the effort to be engaged in life is worth it because they have things about life they value (family, friends, hobbies, children, spirituality, sensuality, community, humor, honor, singing, dancing, eating, reading, writing, whatever). In fact, for most people, there is not even a choice -- our body just keeps going and keeps us engaged (barring depression, which can often be treated in various ways ranging from vitamin D, to omega-3s, to eating more healthy food and less junk food, to a positive spiral of social-talk and self-talk, and so on).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1692444&cid=32644166
Our society needs to decide whether it wants to continue of the current (statistically likely) suicidal path of self-destruction or if it wants to reform. Why use the nukes, warbots, plagues and nanotech and whatever else to fight over what? Oil and slaves and racism and stuff, when we could just use the tech to make what we wanted? It remains ironic, even if it is indeed "easier" to just let the society destroy itself. Nobody ever said life was going to be easy. It is a choice.
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
Still, a deeper philosophical issue is that we apparently can't create without destroying something else (even just a different future possibility). So, reality is always throwing us curves in simple analyses. But, be that as it may, it seems stupid for everyone to kill each other off for a "racket".
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Also, on a practical basis, it is not normal for humans to kill each other without some specific heated emotional interpersonal quarrel. Soldiers in earlier wars like WWI rarely fired their weapons, and when they did, aimed to miss -- only a few soldiers way back when did most of the killing. It is only in the last 50 years or so that the US military and other militaries have refined their indoctrination techniques to be able to turn most human beings into killers of people they have no personal quarrel with. Though the military may not have given much thought about what to do with the killers after the wars are over (if the wars ever are over -- how many wars is the USA fighting now and when will they ever be over?) Now push-button drones make that even easier as soldiers in air-conditioned offices near where they live with their families are not apparently killing people -- they are just pressing a few buttons that affect fuzzy blips on a video game screen. Is that "progress"?
As Godfrey H. Hardy said in disgust:
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Quotations/Hardy.html
"A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."
Freeman Dyson talks about that here:
http://books.googl
A book I wrote: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
From there:
The fundamental issue considered in this essay is how an emerging post-scarcity society affects the mythology by which Princeton University defines its "brand", both as an educational institution and as an alumni community. ...
Consider a prospective Princeton student evaluating whether an elite education at Princeton is a good investment of four years of her or his youth -- as well as a the direct expenses and indirect opportunity cost of lost wages. How should such a person evaluate the Princeton University "brand" these days, given, say, Donald Rumsfeld '54 as a PU poster boy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child
"Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html
And also, how should a bright student interested in a future of independent intellectual effort see a PU investment in relation to perhaps a future PhD and professorship if they stay on the academic track all the way? Is it worth it? Should they really sacrifice, say, creating their own personalized "brand" on their own in the internet age from day one, as opposed to trying to build a life under the Princeton "brand" and so perhaps follow in Donald Rumsfeld's footsteps?
Here is an analogous example of someone choosing to pass up working at Apple to continue developing their own personal brand:
"Why I passed up the chance to work at Apple"
http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000809.html
A visitor comment from that web site:
Apple has nothing on Cameron Moll. Sure, Apple is a wonderful brand. But where Apple is in the business of design, Cameron strikes me as one in the business of the art of design, and that may appear to be a subtle difference at first glance. But it isn't. ... You have built a brand for and of yourself, and I personally admire your accomplishment. I believe you describe an important self-discovery: you value the Cameron Moll brand more than you value the mighty Apple brand.
By coincidence (if such really exist? :-), such a prospective student need look no further that the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Cover story: "The new rules of financial aid"):
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/table_of_contents.html
to understand how the "Princeton University" brand may need to be rethought in a collaborative GNU/Linux & Wikipedia internet age. Is it still advisable to align oneself with the historic Princeton University brand in an emerging post-scarcity society? Or, to be fair, to align one's personal brand with how that historic PU brand is now seen by the public, acknowledging there is always a lot going on at Princeton in different directions? I'd also suggest there are more alumni than just me who have stopped buying PU-related automobile window stickers (see below for more on that).
That choice of self-branding versus main-stream branding in the internet age is related to the idea of "post-scarcity". I will define that better later, but for now, let's just imagine a future where beer everywhere in t
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Compartmentalization can lead to lots of secrecy ("need to know"). Secrecy helps some things, but it also makes it easier for snakes to hide inside something, or for people to be unable to "connect the dots". I heard about one sociology professor who said, studying movies, that the "good guys" always win because they have better communications than the "bad guys". There are endless books about how organizations can improve their internal communications for greater effectiveness. Also, consider that analysis is about putting things into compartments, but synthesis is about putting things together, and both are important for creative problem solving, and the needs of our society seem to be shifting towards creative synthesis:
"RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
What good is a "secure" organization if it can't perform its primary function (whatever that is) very well?
There are always tradeoffs of security vs. effectiveness/useability. See:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/security_vs_usa.html
Which links to this:
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/when_security_gets_in_the_way.html
"The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security. Hence the prevalence of doors propped open by bricks and wastebaskets, of passwords pasted on the fronts of monitors or hidden under the keyboard or in the drawer, of home keys hidden under the mat or above the doorframe or under fake rocks that can be purchased for this purpose. We are being sent a mixed message: on the one hand, we are continually forced to use arbitrary security procedures. On the other hand, even the professionals ignore many of them. How is the ordinary person to know which ones matter and which don't?"
One might expect people at the NSA to be quite a bit more disciplined and trained than average, but certainly this point holds for other organizations.
And about another three letter agency (quoting from Wikipedia) apparently struggling with compartmentalization:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"All of this has the effect of making it hard for DI analysts to interact even with the classified outside world. The CIA view is that there are risks to connecting CIA systems even to classified systems elsewhere. Mitigating those risks sends implicit messages to analysts: that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA’s own network are secondary to the intelligence mission."
And links on open alternatives for most of any nation's intelligence needs:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
http://www.phibetaiota.net/abou
... for intrinsic/mutual security: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Thank you for your willingness to risk everything for your nation.
Still, would it not be better if our nation adopted a defense posture that focused on intrinic and mutual security? Maybe then we would not need to have so many "secrets". Is security by obscurity really such a good thing, whether in cryptography or on the ground soldiering?
From what I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
===
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
There are lots of alternatives I helped organize here for helping transcend an economy based around militarism and artificial scarcity:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altruistic people around; they just unfortunately are often misled for reasons of profit and power that Major General Butler outlined very clearly in "War is a Racket" decades ago. We need to build a better world where our trusting young people (and the people who give them orders) have more options for helping build a world that works for everyone than "war play". We need to build a better world where some of our most hopeful and trusting citizens are not coming home with PTSD as shattered people (or worse, coming home in body bags) because they were asked to kill and die for an unrecognized irony of using the tools of abundance to create artificial scarcity.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
CHAPTER ONE: WAR IS A RACKET
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. ..."
=====
Great poem.
Is a racket why the people "on the other side" "need killing"?
Part of how things got this bad:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
See also, on the irony of it all:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Jurors before becoming jurors could have read that article in Wikipedia and had their opinions affected. They could also have read lots of other information previously. Why should a line be draw after they become jurors? I can maybe understand the issue about press about the case, but even there, should not a jury be instructed on how to come to a fair decision? It's supposed to be juror of peers, and now peers have access to the internet...
Here is what most judges really don't want jurors to know about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
http://fija.org/
Jurors on cases about questionable laws like non-violent drug offenses and copyright violation need to known that a whole reason juries exists is so that "peers" can decide the law is unjust and refuse to convict under it. This can and has been abused to not convict for racist crimes, but none-the-less, a main point for the right of a jury trial is so juries can nullify laws. Otherwise, why not let the experienced judge decide?
If a bunch of "peers" don't think a "crime" like smoking marijuana or sharing music online was substantially wrong, then the whole point of a jury is so peers can say that by refusing to convict. But judges will supposedly elimiate any juror who knows about this concept of jury nullification.
Should a judge *not* informing juries of "jurry nullification" be a real reason for mistrial in our society with endless conflicting and often selectively enforced laws? Defendents in cases involving unfair or unwise laws are being deprived of their constitutional rights in that sense.
And you get juries who say essentially, "We had no choice but to convict and send someone to jail for life for a third strike of being caught smoking dope, even though no one on the jury thought that was just or fair -- because the judge told us we had no choice."
Fom Wikipedia: "Recent court rulings have contributed to the prevention of jury nullification. A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[35] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[36] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[37] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[38] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification. Further, as officers of the court, attorneys have sworn an oath to uphold the law, and are considered by bar associations to be ethically prohibited from directly advocating for jury nullification.[39]"
The above could be read as a systematic denial of justice... Which may help explain part of why the USA has so many more people in prison per capita than any other industrialzed country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
See: http://www.mistakesweremadebutnotbyme.com/
http://books.google.com/books?id=vZkGNIpAsTEC
This book on "cognitive dissonance" and "progressive desensitization" has a section on how some police offers go bad step-by-step to the point where they are regularly planting evidence on people they are "sure" are guilty (which becomes more and more everybody). It also has stuff on why police interrogations are often used to produce false confessions, where everything someone says or does is taken as confirming evidence of guilt, since no one would be arrested unless they were guilty, right? They point to a whole standard manual for interpretign interrogations that way.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vZkGNIpAsTEC&q=interrogation#v=snippet&q=interrogation&f=false
"The war play dilemma: what every parent and teacher needs to know"
http://books.google.com/books?id=-loYzCV11JcC
It mentions an unholy alliance from Reagan administration media deregulation leading to boys being saturated with violent content 24X7 between media, food, toys, and apparel.
The version for girls:
"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids"
http://books.google.com/books?id=O7NrhdwTeCkC
Good luck. At least these two books will help you understand what you are up agsainst when you dismiss the need for much help. Of course, what kind of help is really useful is a different question...
Other background reading:
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQlg3rQquUoC
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health and Happiness"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Nh6qAAAACAAJ
"Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right"
http://books.google.com/books?id=-W_LYnBFIY8C
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D" (since kids are indoors so much at media)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"In defense of childhood: protecting kids' inner wildness"
http://books.google.com/books?id=MAB3CciL40UC
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
Marshall Brain on widespread unemployment from robots etc. over the next two decades:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs
Solutions: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
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?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
You make a good point about trust, but maybe China (and the USA, too, considering the attack on Wikileaks) would not be that way if they thought in terms of abundance and mutual/intrinsic security? Also, China never invaded the USA and force US citizens to buy drugs, but the USA did invade China and force its people to do drugs (see the Opium war). So, history does not begin today, and maybe the USA should be making apologies?