Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years - Easter Island
Yes, I agree. I believe that work originated here: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island/1 Feature article, so apparently not paywalled - I'm not a subscriber, but I can see it. Jeff On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 2:27 PM, David L Babcock ol...@rochester.rr.comwrote: On 10/9/2012 11:53 AM, Nigel Dyer wrote: I had thought that they destroyed their own environment through overharvesting and overhunting, ie the population was to large to live sustainably. This is not a particualrly religious reason. I had also gathered that the statues etc were an attempt to appease their gods in the hope that the gods would get them out of the mess that they had got themselves into. No Gods appeared to wave their magic wands. I've had a quick look at some of the summaries of Collapse and that seems to be what J Diamond says as well Nigel On 09/10/2012 14:36, Jed Rothwell wrote: fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed Just read, in Nat. Geographic, article on Easter Island. The best going theory now is apparently that the rats that the first settlers brought with them (as food stock, probably) were wildly successful. (No natural enemies). They ate all the tree seeds and the forest died out. Has the sound of truth. Ol' Bab
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years - Easter Island
After doing a bit more reading I am a little more convinced by the argument that a significant cause of the deforestation was to provide the wood to move the statues. Whether this was religious or not is unclear, although that is plausible. It may be in part this need for groups of people to outdo each other. Each Easter Island statue has to be bigger and better than the last. A bit like our Olympic Games, or the building of cathedrals. The instinctive drive for growth. Nigel On 10/10/2012 07:20, Jeff Berkowitz wrote: Yes, I agree. I believe that work originated here: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island/1 Feature article, so apparently not paywalled - I'm not a subscriber, but I can see it. Jeff On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 2:27 PM, David L Babcock ol...@rochester.rr.comwrote: On 10/9/2012 11:53 AM, Nigel Dyer wrote: I had thought that they destroyed their own environment through overharvesting and overhunting, ie the population was to large to live sustainably. This is not a particualrly religious reason. I had also gathered that the statues etc were an attempt to appease their gods in the hope that the gods would get them out of the mess that they had got themselves into. No Gods appeared to wave their magic wands. I've had a quick look at some of the summaries of Collapse and that seems to be what J Diamond says as well Nigel On 09/10/2012 14:36, Jed Rothwell wrote: fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed Just read, in Nat. Geographic, article on Easter Island. The best going theory now is apparently that the rats that the first settlers brought with them (as food stock, probably) were wildly successful. (No natural enemies). They ate all the tree seeds and the forest died out. Has the sound of truth. Ol' Bab
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Socialism is based on public ownership of means of production AND the price regulation. Regulating prices creates the problem of economic calculation, which leads to inherent inefficiencies in the market. There is a lot of information contained in prices. In mature markets, prices generally reflect the amount of labor that went into creating an object. This is not true in new markets where new innovations give one supplier an advantage, or in markets protected by patents or copyrights. But in older markets, profits drop to below 5% of price, from competition, and generally reflect the amount of labor that went into the product. Now imagine the the hundreds of components that go into, say, a car. Now imagine the thousands of parts that go into each of these components. Each of these components and each of these parts were designed and built with the price in mind. Prices tell the designer the most efficient way to get something done. For each part, the designer knows what type of problem he is trying to solve and the price tells him which path to take for his solution which incurs the lowest cost. When prices are regulated, then distortions develop in this process, and then the designer no longer knows the most efficient way to solve his problems. For example, gold is the best conductor of electricity, and silver is next. But prices tell the designer that copper will solve the problem for the cheapest cost, and hence the least amount of labor. When prices are distorted, then this information is lost. This why socialism can never be as efficient as capitalism. For each individual item for sale in a market, the price is set to create a balance between supply and demand, which leads to a reflection of the amount of labor which went into an item. Distort this process and the resulting solutions for complex products and services will no longer be efficient in that they will no longer provide the solution for the consumer that reflects the least amount of labor for that solution. Craig On 10/09/2012 11:18 PM, Jouni Valkonen wrote: Jarold, no, it is not called socialism. See my first post in this threat. Socialism is based on public ownership of means of production AND the price regulation. If income is just redistribute via basic income, it does not have an effect of the ownership of means of production and definitely it does not have an effect for price regulation. On the contrary, because increasing median purchasing power of people will increase the power of free market economy, because free market economy is based on the supply and *consumer* demand. This is polar opposite to that of socialism and free market economy does work the better the higher is the median purchasing power of the people. Therefore only thing what distinguishes socialism from ricardian capitalism, that in ricardian capitalism /Rockefeller/ owns the means of production and controls the prices, but in socialism /state/ owns the means of production and controls the prices. For individual consumer they both are the same, because democracy is lacking in both systems. And indeed without keynesian redistribution of wealth and antitrust laws, Rockefeller would indeed have the monopoly of production. The new economic system that Jed is referring is called Keynesian redistribution. That was widely practiced in 1960's, that was the golden age of keynesian redistribution. However, I would think that we need to modify keynesian redistribution in various ways. I personally would like to call the new keynesian economy as Star Trek economy, where there is no scarcity of basic needs — globally! —Jouni
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On 10/10/2012 12:39 AM, Eric Walker wrote: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com mailto:jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts, then there is enough room for humans to live comfortably in bungalows. So we turn the idea of city and country side upside down. That in the future humans will live in countryside, while food is produced in the cities and skyscrapers! This is what I would like to see -- for roads to disappear from cities and be replaced by walkways between buildings that are built downwards for the most part rather than upwards. The tallest buildings would not be taller than three stories in most urban areas. You could get the population density needed for mass transit by building several stories downwards, around open-air gardens at the bottom of a wide column. The buildings would be all but hidden by trellises and greenery. [...] It's nice that you have a vision; but other people have other visions; and unfortunately, the only way for you to achieve your vision is to threaten other people with violence. Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts... The only way to FORCE people to do what you want is through threats of violence. Socialists all have great visions of perfectly working societies. But all these visions are backed by guns and threats. Free Markets, however, are voluntarily created. Numerous solutions are offered, and consumers choose their solutions, independently, amongst an assortment with various prices guiding them to efficient solutions. There are only two fundamental ways to live and work with other people: one is through threats and violence (Socialism); the other is through voluntary cooperation (Capitalism). The answers are black and white. Craig
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Capitalism is no different from socialism in its threat of violence against those who do not agree to its terms. The best that civilization can do is adopt a system that allows assortative migration by people to territories occupied by mutually consenting adults to whatever system they strongly adhere. This is the This allows controlled experimentation in the social sciences with voluntary human subjects. The twin virtues of truth and freedom are thereby upheld to the limits allowed by civilization. That is exactly what my system allows for. On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 6:14 AM, Craig Haynie cchayniepub...@gmail.comwrote: On 10/10/2012 12:39 AM, Eric Walker wrote: On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com mailto:jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts, then there is enough room for humans to live comfortably in bungalows. So we turn the idea of city and country side upside down. That in the future humans will live in countryside, while food is produced in the cities and skyscrapers! This is what I would like to see -- for roads to disappear from cities and be replaced by walkways between buildings that are built downwards for the most part rather than upwards. The tallest buildings would not be taller than three stories in most urban areas. You could get the population density needed for mass transit by building several stories downwards, around open-air gardens at the bottom of a wide column. The buildings would be all but hidden by trellises and greenery. [...] It's nice that you have a vision; but other people have other visions; and unfortunately, the only way for you to achieve your vision is to threaten other people with violence. Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts... The only way to FORCE people to do what you want is through threats of violence. Socialists all have great visions of perfectly working societies. But all these visions are backed by guns and threats. Free Markets, however, are voluntarily created. Numerous solutions are offered, and consumers choose their solutions, independently, amongst an assortment with various prices guiding them to efficient solutions. There are only two fundamental ways to live and work with other people: one is through threats and violence (Socialism); the other is through voluntary cooperation (Capitalism). The answers are black and white. Craig
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Sent from my iPhone On Oct 10, 2012, at 4:14, Craig Haynie cchayniepub...@gmail.com wrote: It's nice that you have a vision; but other people have other visions; and unfortunately, the only way for you to achieve your vision is to threaten other people with violence. Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts... The only way to FORCE people to do what you want is through threats of violence. My description may not have made it clear, but I am actually quite sympathetic to this view. I am not attempting to describe a master plan to be followed and enforced by a utopian state. I'm attempting the impossible task of forecasting where things would go if day-to-day subsistence were not an issue for the majority of people. I'm suggesting that there will be a general refinement in tastes as people are able to have more say in how they live their lives. There are obviously the nouveau riches. But eventually the tastes of their children and their grandchildren will gradually be refined. I am not at all a cultural relativist in this regard -- I think that it is possible for there to be consensus across cultures concerning what constitutes excellence in a product. People know where good chocolate can be found; they know where good cheese is produced. The spread of this kind of knowledge will generate a lot of economic activity and start new cottage industries. All of this will be uncoerced. You don't need state socialism and a five year plan to bring it about; just general prosperity for a few generations. We should also avoid binary logic. Switzerland is not a communist country, but they've been able to avoid for the most part the cacaphony of architectural styles that afflict much of the world, and particularly the US. There were no doubt some Swiss along the way who wanted to raise some monstrous structures, and they were overruled. This is not socialism, it's governance. Eric
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years - Easter Island
The problem of ecological dominance is inherent in the eusocial nature of civilized man. Eusociality results in ecological dominance. For a discussion of this read E. O. Wilson's laterst book The Social Conquest of Earth. There is only one solution to this: Civilization must leave the biosphere. To the extent that man remains in the biosphere, man must resolve disputes in natural duel, as do other sexual species. This is the only way to ensure man does not form a civilization in the biosphere again. The only way to ensure natural duel is the ultimate dispute processing mode is to execute any man that refuses to meet a challenger in a natural setting for a duel using only nature itself as the weaponry. On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 2:55 AM, Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: After doing a bit more reading I am a little more convinced by the argument that a significant cause of the deforestation was to provide the wood to move the statues. Whether this was religious or not is unclear, although that is plausible. It may be in part this need for groups of people to outdo each other. Each Easter Island statue has to be bigger and better than the last. A bit like our Olympic Games, or the building of cathedrals. The instinctive drive for growth. Nigel On 10/10/2012 07:20, Jeff Berkowitz wrote: Yes, I agree. I believe that work originated here: http://www.americanscientist.**org/issues/feature/rethinking-** the-fall-of-easter-island/1http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island/1 Feature article, so apparently not paywalled - I'm not a subscriber, but I can see it. Jeff On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 2:27 PM, David L Babcock ol...@rochester.rr.com wrote: On 10/9/2012 11:53 AM, Nigel Dyer wrote: I had thought that they destroyed their own environment through overharvesting and overhunting, ie the population was to large to live sustainably. This is not a particualrly religious reason. I had also gathered that the statues etc were an attempt to appease their gods in the hope that the gods would get them out of the mess that they had got themselves into. No Gods appeared to wave their magic wands. I've had a quick look at some of the summaries of Collapse and that seems to be what J Diamond says as well Nigel On 09/10/2012 14:36, Jed Rothwell wrote: fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed Just read, in Nat. Geographic, article on Easter Island. The best going theory now is apparently that the rats that the first settlers brought with them (as food stock, probably) were wildly successful. (No natural enemies). They ate all the tree seeds and the forest died out. Has the sound of truth. Ol' Bab
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
What I think would be a good wake up call would be for someone (the BBC) to do a six part drama that is as historically accurate as it can be that covers the experience of a family on Easter Island as they went through the period when they ran out of natural resources. I think that would be a very powerful wake up call for as all. Anyone have any contacts? Nigel On 09/10/2012 04:55, fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. Could that happen to us? Maybe the future is not so great.
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Few ideas to add... Some cogniticians have noticed the importance of the capacity of curiosity and boredom in learning. Game is important too. the kindergarten teacher gave us a pamphlet about kids education , and it is clearly said the the job of kids is to play. (same for scientists IMHO). Note that all of that is not specific to human, not even to primates, but seems to have strongly been developped by mammals (young rabits love to play, cows are very curious)... About sentient being, I suspect that the connection between an autonomous adaptative brain, and a physically constrained autonomous body, with many useless actioners and captors, yet unsifficient, is the key... Brain learn to be sentient by facing the complexity of controlling an overly-complex body, with need to filter, coordinate, accepting data flood and missing data... You cannot develop sentient brain with a rationally designed body.. About economy I've read an old article about a robot society of miners, collaboration in a free-market word. they were exchanging energy money against work. there were few rule for transaction, I remember: - price is established by negociation at 3 minimum - never let a brother die, what ever is his efficiency or price. implicitly all actors were of the same size, even if there was handicaped robots, living of public solidarity, but very useful sometime when everybody was needed. By the way that lesson was learned too in Commando training in France. Commando training is a sequence of physical challenge needed to be solved by 10 soldiers, not 9. For training they always include an handicapped soldier in the team (fat, stupid, awkward...). After that everybody know that they need every finger of the team... And the handicapped soldier is respected, proud, and often get better... that idea that you have to accept a kind of free-market economy, but also the need to protect any weak actor, to avoid to lose him, is also found in the book the next convergence. solidarity, inclusiveness is rational. It is in our DNA of social animal, like dogs/wolves, and we are social because alone we are weak, but together because we can coordinate our various weak strength, we become hugely stronger than lone fighters. You learn that in the army. The other place where I learn that was in a theater troupe. You can only forget that lesson if life is too easy, like in occidental countries. 2012/10/9 Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com Behind
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: My prediction is that first reusable spacecraft will reach orbit in early 2020's. The first reusable spacecraft achieved orbit on April 12, 1981.
RE: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
From: Jouni ... Also the difference between humans and most of the other smart animals, such as elephants, dogs and dolphins is that they lack motivation to develop themselves although here it is only a matter of degree, not qualitative difference such as between animals and computers. I realize the following reply is changing the subject a bit but I disagree with the conjecture that cetaceans (dolphins, etc...) lack motivation to develop themselves. A common standard of intelligence, or sentience, is the sophistication of play the species is capable of engaging in. The following You-Tube clip clearly shows a sophistication beyond the comprehension of many humans concerning the ability to generate bubble rings. These dolphins not only know how to control the reaction, they do so at their own whim. IMHO, it's not just the ability to generate these vortex bubble rings (Without the advantage of dexterous appendages like hands) it's how they interact with the artificially induced objects they have created, constantly guiding and nudging them along, and occasionally splitting them. There is deliberate calculated intent based on a playful intelligence that has acquired an intimate knowledge of physics involved in the water environment they live in. Granted, humans have learned to create similar bubble rings with their own mouths. We had to learn how to do it, just like dolphins had to learn how to do it - which they do much better than we. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwpNR=1v=mHyTOcfF99o In the following link I talk a little bit more about my own brief encounter with a small group of dolphins I saw in San Diego: http://personalpen.orionworks.com/essay-toroidal-vortices-dolphin-speak.htm BTW, dolphins and primates recognize their own image when presented with a mirror. That is another mark of sentience. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
RE: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I forgot the mention the fact that personalpen.orionworks.com is still under construction. Many of the links don’t work. ...Too little time... too much to do. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com wrote: There will be two options. First is a prefabrication that will come in massive scale that everyone in the face of the Earth will notice it in November 2012. Because Chinese are going to prefabricate and assemble the world's tallest building that is to be completed in March 2013. That is interesting! Many years ago Japanese architects working on plans for super-tall building concluded that the only way to build them in a reasonable amount of time would be to use robots and prefabricated parts. Second option is just brute force 3D-printing of houses. This process will suit well for two storey bungalows. So, we have serious problem in near future. Do we want a mile high megacities where a single prefabricated skyscraper will actually hold the whole city with full city infrastructure or that everyone has afford to dirt cheap bungalows with huge environmental footprint? That depends on the location. In some places we want high density, and in other places low density. I would love to see mile-high prefabricated food factories. In the book, I assumed the highest building we can make is ~500 m, the height of the World Trade Center. I assumed that multi-story food factories would have a shorter distance between floors than buildings intended for human occupation. In other words, food would be grown on shelves about 1 m apart, so you can fit 400 or more in a 500 m building. Anyway, based on this, I figured that we could grow as many crops in an area the size of Greater New York City as we now grow in the entire U.S.A. If we can make building 1000 m tall, that would be even better. We would not actually cram all of the building in one location. I have in mind building them in or near every major city and town. We would not actually have to have building poke up 1000 m to do this. They might be 500 m below ground and 500 above. Most people in favor of this intend to use sunlight which means they would be above ground. I was thinking of using LED artificial illumination, like the Cosmoplant factories in Japan (which went bankrupt). Less extreme versions of this idea are shown here: http://www.verticalfarm.com/ - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I had thought that they destroyed their own environment through overharvesting and overhunting, ie the population was to large to live sustainably. This is not a particualrly religious reason. I had also gathered that the statues etc were an attempt to appease their gods in the hope that the gods would get them out of the mess that they had got themselves into. No Gods appeared to wave their magic wands. I've had a quick look at some of the summaries of Collapse and that seems to be what J Diamond says as well Nigel On 09/10/2012 14:36, Jed Rothwell wrote: fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed
RE: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
This economic system has already been developed. It is called socialism, or what some people would call communism. When there is no more need for human labor, it is obvious that governments are going to have to allocate resources. Capitalism obviously won't work. Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 17:36:21 -0400 From: jedrothw...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: It's my suspicion that with ensuing advancements of technology, automation and robotics, traditional capitalism as it is currently practiced will have to evolve... Capitalism, communism, Feudalism, mercantalism and every other economic system ever invented can be defined as: A system to allocate human labor, goods and services. Some of these systems have been efficient; others were inefficient. Some were just; others were unjust, and still others tyrannical. No economic system could exist until people achieved some level of agriculture and the ability to gather in villages and later towns and cities. Human labor is now losing value. Robots and intelligent computers are replacing human workers in many fields, including ones that people previously thought could never be done by machines. Within 20 to 100 years, human labor will be worthless. In the distant future, machines will supply all of the food we want. They will capable of supplying 10 times the food we want, or a thousand times. They will be capable of manufacturing a car for every driver, or 100,000 cars for every driver, or enough cars to cover the whole surface of Mars with automobiles in piles 100 cars high. Material scarcity and human labor allocation will become distant memories, the way waterborne infectious disease has in first world countries. The concept of economic justice will become meaningless. The distinction between capitalism and communism will be meaningless, like the difference between Protestants and Catholics is to an atheist. As this transition occurs, all economic systems will gradually collapse. This is already happening. When labor is worth nothing, you cannot predicate your economic system on it. With the Internet we have seen the cost of transferring information drop so close to zero it no longer matters. No one bothers to account for it. As that happened, people who made a living selling information that was difficult to access went out of business. It become like selling water by the river, as the Zen proverb has it. Some new economic system must emerge. It will not be capitalism or communism. No human institution lasts forever; when we have no need for these things, they will vanish as surely as Feudalism did, or slavery did in the first world. I am confident that something new will emerge. If we can devise these wonderful machines capable of fulfilling all of our material needs and desires, surely we can also devise some practical means to allocate the output of the machines so that everyone can have whatever they need, if not everything they desire. As Romney put it, even today, people feel they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing. Naturally, they feel that way! Since we can have these things in abundance in the first world, people have every right to feel that way. In the future, everyone living in every part of the solar system will take it for granted that they have a birthright to healthcare, food, housing, education, energy, internet access and much else. These things will cost nothing. Virtually nothing; the per capita cost to supply food, health care and so on will be roughly what it costs us today to supply a house with clean, potable water in a first-world household. That's $335 per year average in the U.S. Keeping track of such trivial expenses would be a waste of time. Collecting taxes to pay for them would be a waste of time. In any case, you can't collect taxes when most people do not bother to work, or have not need to work. Cold fusion will play a large roll in making this transition possible. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I've heard that the story of overcutting trees causing and ecologic is a legend. it seems that too small civilisation collapsed because of a series of dry years,while demography was too high. This is a small isolated island, and a climate bad sequence caused a black swan that swept the organisation of the society. I think that this was the same event that swept french kingdom... 2012/10/9 Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk I had thought that they destroyed their own environment through overharvesting and overhunting, ie the population was to large to live sustainably. This is not a particualrly religious reason. I had also gathered that the statues etc were an attempt to appease their gods in the hope that the gods would get them out of the mess that they had got themselves into. No Gods appeared to wave their magic wands. I've had a quick look at some of the summaries of Collapse and that seems to be what J Diamond says as well Nigel On 09/10/2012 14:36, Jed Rothwell wrote: fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Socialism has always failed because it merely replaces private sector rent-seeking with public sector rent-seeking. You have to disintermediate the public sector bureaucracy with a citizen's dividend. On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Jarold McWilliams oldja...@hotmail.comwrote: This economic system has already been developed. It is called socialism, or what some people would call communism. When there is no more need for human labor, it is obvious that governments are going to have to allocate resources. Capitalism obviously won't work. -- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 17:36:21 -0400 From: jedrothw...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: It's my suspicion that with ensuing advancements of technology, automation and robotics, traditional capitalism as it is currently practiced will have to evolve... Capitalism, communism, Feudalism, mercantalism and every other economic system ever invented can be defined as: A system to allocate human labor, goods and services. Some of these systems have been efficient; others were inefficient. Some were just; others were unjust, and still others tyrannical. No economic system could exist until people achieved some level of agriculture and the ability to gather in villages and later towns and cities. Human labor is now losing value. Robots and intelligent computers are replacing human workers in many fields, including ones that people previously thought could never be done by machines. Within 20 to 100 years, human labor will be worthless. In the distant future, machines will supply all of the food we want. They will capable of supplying 10 times the food we want, or a thousand times. They will be capable of manufacturing a car for every driver, or 100,000 cars for every driver, or enough cars to cover the whole surface of Mars with automobiles in piles 100 cars high. Material scarcity and human labor allocation will become distant memories, the way waterborne infectious disease has in first world countries. The concept of economic justice will become meaningless. The distinction between capitalism and communism will be meaningless, like the difference between Protestants and Catholics is to an atheist. As this transition occurs, all economic systems will gradually collapse. This is already happening. When labor is worth nothing, you cannot predicate your economic system on it. With the Internet we have seen the cost of transferring information drop so close to zero it no longer matters. No one bothers to account for it. As that happened, people who made a living selling information that was difficult to access went out of business. It become like selling water by the river, as the Zen proverb has it. Some new economic system must emerge. It will not be capitalism or communism. No human institution lasts forever; when we have no need for these things, they will vanish as surely as Feudalism did, or slavery did in the first world. I am confident that something new will emerge. If we can devise these wonderful machines capable of fulfilling all of our material needs and desires, surely we can also devise some practical means to allocate the output of the machines so that everyone can have whatever they need, if not everything they desire. As Romney put it, even today, people feel they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing. Naturally, they feel that way! Since we can have these things in abundance in the first world, people have every right to feel that way. In the future, everyone living in every part of the solar system will take it for granted that they have a birthright to healthcare, food, housing, education, energy, internet access and much else. These things will cost nothing. Virtually nothing; the per capita cost to supply food, health care and so on will be roughly what it costs us today to supply a house with clean, potable water in a first-world household. That's $335 per year average in the U.S. Keeping track of such trivial expenses would be a waste of time. Collecting taxes to pay for them would be a waste of time. In any case, you can't collect taxes when most people do not bother to work, or have not need to work. Cold fusion will play a large roll in making this transition possible. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years - Easter Island
On 10/9/2012 11:53 AM, Nigel Dyer wrote: I had thought that they destroyed their own environment through overharvesting and overhunting, ie the population was to large to live sustainably. This is not a particualrly religious reason. I had also gathered that the statues etc were an attempt to appease their gods in the hope that the gods would get them out of the mess that they had got themselves into. No Gods appeared to wave their magic wands. I've had a quick look at some of the summaries of Collapse and that seems to be what J Diamond says as well Nigel On 09/10/2012 14:36, Jed Rothwell wrote: fznidar...@aol.com wrote: The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. They did not die out. They were still there a century or two later when Europeans showed up. Granted, they were in dire straits. They destroyed their own environment, apparently for religious reasons. See J. Diamond, Collapse. - Jed Just read, in Nat. Geographic, article on Easter Island. The best going theory now is apparently that the rats that the first settlers brought with them (as food stock, probably) were wildly successful. (No natural enemies). They ate all the tree seeds and the forest died out. Has the sound of truth. Ol' Bab
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Alain Sepeda alain.sep...@gmail.com wrote: I've heard that the story of overcutting trees causing and ecologic is a legend. Not according to J. Diamond and other recent books. They cut all the trees to erect the statues. When a wooden British sailing ship arrived decades later, they came aboard and they were thrilled to see wood again. They reportedly stroked the wood in tears. It was one of the spooky moments in human history. We will feel the same way if we manage to flood the coasts and destroy North American agriculture with global warming -- as we may well do. We will pay a tremendous price for a trivial benefit. To say a few pennies per kilowatt hour we would destroy our food supplies and turn the whole nation into a stinking desert! - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Assuming in the near future advances in robotics automation will eventually manufacture all of our basic needs; we will be forced to redefine what gives us value and purpose as we go about the business of managing our daily lives. Regardless of whether we consciously realize it or not most of us tend to place a great deal of personal identification on the jobs we perform for approximately 40 - 60 hours a week - all in the name of paying the rent and putting food on the table. If 99% of jobs whose primary purpose had been to help us put food on the table or pay the rent become outsourced to the scourge of automation and robots much of society will lose a huge chunk of what gave them value and purpose in the management of their daily lives. We will have to find new activities that give us fulfillment and purpose. No doubt there will be a few lucky souls that won't have a problem finding useful and fulfilling activities to occupy all of their free time with. there will probably be a lot more professional surfers and holodeck players... and lots of contests to boot! But there will be also many who will struggle with their new freedoms. They will have a very hard time finding meaningful activities. They will feel lost in a sea of choices that seem to have no value to them. For some of these individuals addressing chronic depression or spiraling into cycles of self-destruction will become a major concern for which society will have to address. A future highly automated society will be in danger of spawning a much higher percentage of disenfranchised daredevils that will not make it past their 20s. Such issues may turn out to be the most important dangers society will have to grapple with for a long time. To counter these destructive problems I think it will be important for society to instill at a very early age a strong sense of self-improvement (whatever self-improvement might mean to that individual) combined with the importance of giving something collectively back to the society. It seems to me that evolution designed us biologically to struggle throughout most of our lives. If we didn't struggle we were likely to die of hunger or perhaps end up being eaten by other creatures including by our own species - who were at the time struggling more than we were. We MUST find better more constructive challenges in which to pit our biologically inherited sense of survival against. Instilling such characteristics in a more constructive way ought to help open up a golden age for all sorts of pursuits like, art, science, theoretical studies, technology, and the exploration of inner and outer space. * * * * * Finally, in the grand scheme of things I suspect society will eventually splinter into countless separate groups. Many groups will choose to go their separate ways across the galaxy, essentially becoming wandering nomads. Eventually they will lose touch with each other. Perhaps some will continue the never-ending quest for additional automation, their BORG-ification, though hopefully with a kinder gentler outcome. Where these folks will eventually end up, who knows - perhaps ultimately engrained within the quantum framework of the universe itself. Meanwhile, others will want to forget it all. Life is just too damned complicated, with so many choices and unwanted freedoms to grapple with! They will long for the good ol'days, of getting back to nature, of living in caves and dancing around camp fires, and creating legends based on distant memories of their forefathers fruit. They will welcome forgetting it all, of reentering the dreamland. For them the cycle of evolution begins anew. It would not surprise me in the least if that’s exactly how we came about on Earth many yarns ago. ;-) Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
RE: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
It's a lot better than trying to reform capitalism. Also, you can have robots running the government and allocating resources, so there would be no bureaucracy. Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 16:18:39 -0500 Subject: Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years From: jabow...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Socialism has always failed because it merely replaces private sector rent-seeking with public sector rent-seeking. You have to disintermediate the public sector bureaucracy with a citizen's dividend. On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Jarold McWilliams oldja...@hotmail.com wrote: This economic system has already been developed. It is called socialism, or what some people would call communism. When there is no more need for human labor, it is obvious that governments are going to have to allocate resources. Capitalism obviously won't work. Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 17:36:21 -0400 From: jedrothw...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: It's my suspicion that with ensuing advancements of technology, automation and robotics, traditional capitalism as it is currently practiced will have to evolve... Capitalism, communism, Feudalism, mercantalism and every other economic system ever invented can be defined as: A system to allocate human labor, goods and services. Some of these systems have been efficient; others were inefficient. Some were just; others were unjust, and still others tyrannical. No economic system could exist until people achieved some level of agriculture and the ability to gather in villages and later towns and cities. Human labor is now losing value. Robots and intelligent computers are replacing human workers in many fields, including ones that people previously thought could never be done by machines. Within 20 to 100 years, human labor will be worthless. In the distant future, machines will supply all of the food we want. They will capable of supplying 10 times the food we want, or a thousand times. They will be capable of manufacturing a car for every driver, or 100,000 cars for every driver, or enough cars to cover the whole surface of Mars with automobiles in piles 100 cars high. Material scarcity and human labor allocation will become distant memories, the way waterborne infectious disease has in first world countries. The concept of economic justice will become meaningless. The distinction between capitalism and communism will be meaningless, like the difference between Protestants and Catholics is to an atheist. As this transition occurs, all economic systems will gradually collapse. This is already happening. When labor is worth nothing, you cannot predicate your economic system on it. With the Internet we have seen the cost of transferring information drop so close to zero it no longer matters. No one bothers to account for it. As that happened, people who made a living selling information that was difficult to access went out of business. It become like selling water by the river, as the Zen proverb has it. Some new economic system must emerge. It will not be capitalism or communism. No human institution lasts forever; when we have no need for these things, they will vanish as surely as Feudalism did, or slavery did in the first world. I am confident that something new will emerge. If we can devise these wonderful machines capable of fulfilling all of our material needs and desires, surely we can also devise some practical means to allocate the output of the machines so that everyone can have whatever they need, if not everything they desire. As Romney put it, even today, people feel they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing. Naturally, they feel that way! Since we can have these things in abundance in the first world, people have every right to feel that way. In the future, everyone living in every part of the solar system will take it for granted that they have a birthright to healthcare, food, housing, education, energy, internet access and much else. These things will cost nothing. Virtually nothing; the per capita cost to supply food, health care and so on will be roughly what it costs us today to supply a house with clean, potable water in a first-world household. That's $335 per year average in the U.S. Keeping track of such trivial expenses would be a waste of time. Collecting taxes to pay for them would be a waste of time. In any case, you can't collect taxes when most people do not bother to work, or have not need to work. Cold fusion will play a large roll in making this transition possible. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Sorry, would need to wait at least a thousand years for that. On 09-Oct-12 19:44, Jarold McWilliams wrote: It's a lot better than trying to reform capitalism. Also, you can have robots running the government and allocating resources, so there would be no bureaucracy.
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jed, I think that Diamond's idea is old, although I do not know what else recent book you did refer. However, Alain refers to Hunt Lipo rat theory, where rats ate the seeds of the native forests. The theory was explained in their 2011 book, The Statues that Walked: http://www.thestatuesthatwalked.com/ But this is not what caused the collapse of Rapa Nui civilisation, but ultimately it was Jared's own favourite i.e. measles and smallpox (curiously the Finnish word for smallpox is translated as bigpox) did the final devastation of the population. As Hunt Lipo theory is based on widest yet archeological research I did find it sound and believable, and old collapse hypothesis is thoroughly refuted. E.g. if I recall correctly that Jared assumed violence in the islands due to hunger, diminishing resources and over population, but there is no archeological evidence to support overpopulation or violence. Also the moving of statues was not very large feat, because statues did indeed walk to the shores and they were definitely not dragged like Jared assumed (iirc)! There were roads constructed for walking purpose and always when the moving project failed and statue fell, those fallen statues were lying on their belly, if it was downhill and on their back if it was an up hill. Also the centre of gravity was as such that it supported optimally the walking. The larger the statue, the lower the centre of gravity, although sometimes statues were finished when they were at target location, to smoothen the excess belly. I do not think that there was deep religious reasons behind making statues, but they were made just because they could do it and there were plenty of excess food available to do such deeds. However I agree that forests are the key in environmentalism. The destruction of forests was not good thing for the Rapa nui. If we would just get rid of agricultural subsidies and protectionism, this would immediacy free the area sized of Brazil that is currently consumed by agricultural overproduction. Almost 50 % of US corn production goes for bioethanol production and just less than 5 percent is for human consumption. Also as there is no protectionism it would be good idea to buy food from ultra fertile regions such as Sudan and Ethiopia that are currently starving, because westerners do not want to invest for the irrigation systems and buy the cheap food what they could grown there. I would estimate that those two countries alone could import food for one or two billion people globally. And as there is no forests, the food production there would be environmentally sound, unlike in Europe where lust and temperate forests are mostly cleared because of the agriculture. There is also additional benefits that the regrowing of forests that is sized of Brazil would probably soak most of the excess greenhouse gases and store it to living biomass. And most importantly, forests has the key role of controlling and moderating the local climate as they increase greatly the local water cycle and slows down the rate how long it will take that water is flown back to the ocean. Currently observed desertification is not due to climate change, but because e.g. Spain is almost completely cleared from forest. And also some Amazon regions are threatened to collapse, because there is cleared so much of the forests that water cycle is disturbed. ―Jouni On Oct 10, 2012, at 12:31 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Alain Sepeda alain.sep...@gmail.com wrote: I've heard that the story of overcutting trees causing and ecologic is a legend. Not according to J. Diamond and other recent books. They cut all the trees to erect the statues. When a wooden British sailing ship arrived decades later, they came aboard and they were thrilled to see wood again. They reportedly stroked the wood in tears. It was one of the spooky moments in human history. We will feel the same way if we manage to flood the coasts and destroy North American agriculture with global warming -- as we may well do. We will pay a tremendous price for a trivial benefit. To say a few pennies per kilowatt hour we would destroy our food supplies and turn the whole nation into a stinking desert! - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jarold, no, it is not called socialism. See my first post in this threat. Socialism is based on public ownership of means of production AND the price regulation. If income is just redistribute via basic income, it does not have an effect of the ownership of means of production and definitely it does not have an effect for price regulation. On the contrary, because increasing median purchasing power of people will increase the power of free market economy, because free market economy is based on the supply and consumer demand. This is polar opposite to that of socialism and free market economy does work the better the higher is the median purchasing power of the people. Therefore only thing what distinguishes socialism from ricardian capitalism, that in ricardian capitalism Rockefeller owns the means of production and controls the prices, but in socialism state owns the means of production and controls the prices. For individual consumer they both are the same, because democracy is lacking in both systems. And indeed without keynesian redistribution of wealth and antitrust laws, Rockefeller would indeed have the monopoly of production. The new economic system that Jed is referring is called Keynesian redistribution. That was widely practiced in 1960's, that was the golden age of keynesian redistribution. However, I would think that we need to modify keynesian redistribution in various ways. I personally would like to call the new keynesian economy as Star Trek economy, where there is no scarcity of basic needs ― globally! ―Jouni Sent from my iPad On Oct 9, 2012, at 11:14 PM, Jarold McWilliams oldja...@hotmail.com wrote: This economic system has already been developed. It is called socialism, or what some people would call communism. When there is no more need for human labor, it is obvious that governments are going to have to allocate resources. Capitalism obviously won't work.
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.comwrote: Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts, then there is enough room for humans to live comfortably in bungalows. So we turn the idea of city and country side upside down. That in the future humans will live in countryside, while food is produced in the cities and skyscrapers! This is what I would like to see -- for roads to disappear from cities and be replaced by walkways between buildings that are built downwards for the most part rather than upwards. The tallest buildings would not be taller than three stories in most urban areas. You could get the population density needed for mass transit by building several stories downwards, around open-air gardens at the bottom of a wide column. The buildings would be all but hidden by trellises and greenery. In an economy of prosperity, rather than one of subsistence and want, there would be more than enough work to keep people quite occupied. As people's tastes are refined, they will start taking a liking for rarer cultivars, and they will often choose to maintain their own gardens. In the Bay area there is currently a flourishing of food trucks, where people try the kind of well-prepared food that you would otherwise have to travel some distance to get at a nice restaurant; I see this trend continuing and doubt that robots will ever become better chefs than the best human ones. There is also the problem of governance, which has been mentioned. And there is plenty of scope for a whole industry of hand-made furniture and textiles. Eventually people will see the kitschy mass-produced clothing and furniture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an embarrassing infatuation with the mechanization introduced during the industrial revolution. There will always be a need for gardeners and stone masons. Imagine the beautiful buildings that could replace the visionless industrial architecture that blights many north American cities these days. There will be a need for scientists and journalists and event organizers. There will be a need for people who sit at a terminal, making sure the mining robots are not broken. Eric
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
If only that were true. If you were to do some research into the final years of Marconi in the UK, you would find that the reality was far from the picture that you paint. The senior managers made some absolutely disastrous business decisions, buying up highly overvalued companies, putting Marconi into debt which it could not service such that eventually we went bankrupt. During this time the managers were paid handsomely in bonuses etc, and we are just beginning to realise how much such highly paid people were able to use clever accounting such that they paid very little tax (so contributing little to funding the police etc) , following Leona Helmsley's infamous maxim. While what you say is true of some companies, it is not true of many. That is why we do indeed need a new economic system. However, I have yet to see someone come up with what I believe to be a workable answer. That's why I am sticking to trying to sort out LENR, and also sorting out the riddle of conciousness, two far more tractable problems. Nigel On 07/10/2012 23:08, Eric Walker wrote: We must add some context to your account. While you were working hard, the effects of which were to put in place a new technology that ended up making thousands of people redundant, there was a captain of industry who was working harder and more cleverly than you, directing the show and making sure that you and others of your kind were on the straight path. Because of the benefit that his brilliance brought to society in the form of increased productivity, despite all of the layoffs and the attendant economic stagnation in your area that followed upon his decisions, he was no doubt compensated manyfold what you were paid. In the UK, the government no doubt recouped some of the money that were required for the police force and the fire department and so on, which were essential to making this endeavor possible. In the US, this additional dimension of the question is largely elided, and the executive is understood to have achieved all that has been accomplished by the sweat of his own brow, thereby richly earning the fruits of this remarkable redistribution of wealth from the many thousands that were laid off to him and the shareholders of the company. Eric
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: In a few hundred years, the coastal nations of the world will be required to move their coastal cities inland 100 miles more or less to keep their cities above water. Robots cannot do that sort of construction. They cannot do it now. What makes you think they will not be able to do it in 200 years? Given the progress they have made in the last 30 years I think it is inevitable they will. Look how well a robot can explore Mars. I predict they will be far better at construction than people are, just as today they are better at assembling automobiles. Unless you know of some specific technical limitation, material shortage, law of nature, or some other factor that will prevent progress toward a given goal, it is safest to assume that progress will continue and the goal will be met. There is no indication that robots are inherently unable to do any phase of construction. The fact that they cannot do it at present means nothing. You might as well say that Celani's cell produces only 15 W so we know that similar devices cannot produce petawatt levels needed to power the entire earth. The Curies' radioactive samples produced a fraction of a watt of heat, but it turned out you could make a 50 gigaton bomb out of similar radioactive materials, and you could power every machine on earth with uranium. My all-time favorite quote about this, always worth repeating: Eighty-five percent of the horse-drawn vehicle industry of the country is untouched by the automobile. In proof of the foregoing permit me to say that in 1906 - 7, and coincident with an enormous demand for automobiles, the demand for buggies reached the highest tide of its history. The man who predicts the downfall of the automobile is a fool; the man who denies its great necessity and general adoption for many uses is a bigger fool; and the man who predicts the general annihilation of the horse and his vehicle is the greatest fool of all. - The Keynote Speaker at the National Association of Carriage Builders, 1908, the year the Model T Ford went into production - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I wrote: Unless you know of some specific technical limitation, material shortage, law of nature, or some other factor that will prevent progress toward a given goal, it is safest to assume that progress will continue and the goal will be met. There is no indication that robots are inherently unable to do any phase of construction. This is quite different from saying that computers will definitely become sentient (that is, self-aware; conscious). We do not yet understand what sentience is so we cannot predict with confidence that machines can achieve it. I expect they can. That is an unsupported opinion. I do not think biological carbon based computers (brains) have any special properties that cannot be emulated in silicon or other materials, but I could be wrong. Robot can already do complex assembly jobs better than the best-trained human being. They do these jobs in factories or on the operating table during Lasik eye surgery. They cannot work on construction sites outdoors mainly because these sites are chaotic and primitive, unlike organized factory environments. I expect that robots are used in the construction of prefabricated houses in Japan, and in things like prefabricated all-in-one bathtub and shower units in the U.S. They certainly could be. Perhaps it is not economical yet. In the future I expect every phase of house and building construction will be prefabricated. Only the final assembly will be on site. The site will be better organized than today, and construction will occur in a tightly organized and scheduled sequence, like the construction of a tall building in a major city today. When I say you can predict a technological outcome with confidence, I mean an outcome that has a clear path where the physics are understood. Also I mean something with a reasonably short-term payback, and a market that anyone can see exists. Thus, I would not predict that gigantic passenger interstellar space craft that operate close to the speed of light are inevitable. That is much too far from today's technology. On the other hand, I see no reason why interplanetary human colonization cannot be achieved, with travel time between the planets of weeks or months. This is especially likely if something like a space elevator can be constructed. It seems likely to me that an elevator is possible, based on the book The Space Elevator. It is impossible to predict whether people will summon the will to make a space elevator, or the capital. I am sure that people will make robots capable of construction as soon as they can. Robot RD is paying for itself at every stage, nowadays. The final RD expense to make construction site robots will be tiny compared to the payback. Whether this will happen in 30 years, 50 years, or 100 years I cannot guess. I suppose it will happen in stages, starting with something like a robot that only lays roof shingles and hammers them down. I do not know enough about robots to predict this in detail. I am in the same position as someone looking at the steamship The Great Western in 1838 and predicting that someday, within 50 to 100 years, all transatlantic passenger service would be by steamship. That was a safe bet. As it happens, that took about 60 years. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jed said: That is an unsupported opinion. I do not think biological carbon based computers (brains) have any special properties that cannot be emulated in silicon or other materials, but I could be wrong. There are some biological carbon based computers (brains), that cannot ever be duplicated by any other brain whether it is carbon or silicon based. I personally would like to visit a church built and/or decorated by Michelangelo Buonarroti than by a robot or computer. But that’s just me. Of course the future time of robots will be a different world indeed. ** Cheers:Axil On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I wrote: Unless you know of some specific technical limitation, material shortage, law of nature, or some other factor that will prevent progress toward a given goal, it is safest to assume that progress will continue and the goal will be met. There is no indication that robots are inherently unable to do any phase of construction. This is quite different from saying that computers will definitely become sentient (that is, self-aware; conscious). We do not yet understand what sentience is so we cannot predict with confidence that machines can achieve it. I expect they can. That is an unsupported opinion. I do not think biological carbon based computers (brains) have any special properties that cannot be emulated in silicon or other materials, but I could be wrong. Robot can already do complex assembly jobs better than the best-trained human being. They do these jobs in factories or on the operating table during Lasik eye surgery. They cannot work on construction sites outdoors mainly because these sites are chaotic and primitive, unlike organized factory environments. I expect that robots are used in the construction of prefabricated houses in Japan, and in things like prefabricated all-in-one bathtub and shower units in the U.S. They certainly could be. Perhaps it is not economical yet. In the future I expect every phase of house and building construction will be prefabricated. Only the final assembly will be on site. The site will be better organized than today, and construction will occur in a tightly organized and scheduled sequence, like the construction of a tall building in a major city today. When I say you can predict a technological outcome with confidence, I mean an outcome that has a clear path where the physics are understood. Also I mean something with a reasonably short-term payback, and a market that anyone can see exists. Thus, I would not predict that gigantic passenger interstellar space craft that operate close to the speed of light are inevitable. That is much too far from today's technology. On the other hand, I see no reason why interplanetary human colonization cannot be achieved, with travel time between the planets of weeks or months. This is especially likely if something like a space elevator can be constructed. It seems likely to me that an elevator is possible, based on the book The Space Elevator. It is impossible to predict whether people will summon the will to make a space elevator, or the capital. I am sure that people will make robots capable of construction as soon as they can. Robot RD is paying for itself at every stage, nowadays. The final RD expense to make construction site robots will be tiny compared to the payback. Whether this will happen in 30 years, 50 years, or 100 years I cannot guess. I suppose it will happen in stages, starting with something like a robot that only lays roof shingles and hammers them down. I do not know enough about robots to predict this in detail. I am in the same position as someone looking at the steamship The Great Western in 1838 and predicting that someday, within 50 to 100 years, all transatlantic passenger service would be by steamship. That was a safe bet. As it happens, that took about 60 years. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: We must make a human use of human beings as N. Weiner put it. The problem is that the scope of human uses for human beings is getting narrower and narrower. No we musn'nt. Humans, standing alone, are organisms with a relation to the natural world that is as purposeful as any other organism's relation to the natural world. Human use of humans is merely double-talk for the purpose of forming multicellular agglomerations without the time-space bounds set by sex-death. Those who find it appealing to be a mere asexual cell acting as part of such a whole have lost the meaning of sex and therefore the value of death. The problem was masterfully laid out by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (referenced above). Here is how I would describe it: When only a person can do a task, and no machine is capable of it, is is ennobling work. It gives purpose and meaning to life. When a machine can do it far more cheaper, faster and better than a human, that same task then becomes worse than slavery. This is the problem of sustainability as a delicate balance between resilience and efficiency. See this video for a description of the relevance to theories of economic efficiencyhttp://www.tedxberlin.de/tedxberlin-2009-bernard-lietaer-why-this-crisis .
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On Oct 8, 2012, at 6:07 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: This is quite different from saying that computers will definitely become sentient (that is, self-aware; conscious). We do not yet understand what sentience is so we cannot predict with confidence that machines can achieve it. I expect they can. That is an unsupported opinion. I agree, but I doubt that they can be sentient in foreseeable future. And I base my unsupported opinion that sentience is not just making an intelligent computer, but it is more about motivation. And in the case of human's the motivation to be sentient is quite strongly moulded by evolution. Also the difference between humans and most of the other smart animals, such as elephants, dogs and dolphins is that they lack motivation to develop themselves although here it is only a matter of degree, not qualitative difference such as between animals and computers. I would speculate that this strong motivation of humans, is coevolved with the language. Similarly as dogs are coevolved with humans, so that dogs can understand humans better than any other animals expect other humans. Therefore, if we are to make sentient machines, there would need to be preprogrammed huge amounts of irrational motivations, behaviour and sex drives to do, to progress and to thrive. Learning, reading books and thinking (what we are right now doing) is itself non-rational process and machine will not just get it without complex and subtle pre-programming. And the programming task is not easy, but it must probably be done using directed and accelerated artificial evolutionary process. But I doubt that that this is done soon, because while developing sentience we must face huge ethical dilemma that is it right to discard semi-sentient, lets say chicken level immortal and artificial beings just because we are learning to program cat level sentience? And from cat level, there must be created probably billions of sentient beings until we reach primate and dolphin level sentience not to mentioning if we want to go beyond humans. And also there is problem that it might be impossible to direct artificial evolutionary process accurately enough that it will suit our needs. I do not think that there are short cuts for sentience. However artificial intelligence is by itself evolving rapidly and I would expect that we will make a breakthrough in genuinely intelligent algorithms during the next 30 years. Although strong AI is like hot fusion, that it is always looming 30 years ahead in the future. And cybernetics is the way to go near future! I do not think biological carbon based computers (brains) have any special properties that cannot be emulated in silicon or other materials, but I could be wrong. Yes, I indeed thing that you are wrong, because silicon based brains lack the evolutionary process. Behind human brain, there is 200 million years of evolutionary selection. This is not something that can be done overnight. And I really doubt that kurzweilian neurone by neurone simulation of brain will bear fruits. But I could be wrong. In the future I expect every phase of house and building construction will be prefabricated. Only the final assembly will be on site. There will be two options. First is a prefabrication that will come in massive scale that everyone in the face of the Earth will notice it in November 2012. Because Chinese are going to prefabricate and assemble the world's tallest building that is to be completed in March 2013. There has already been prefabricated 17 smaller skyscrapers, but this one will be the biggest building in the world with 800 000 residential square metres. The cost of construction per m² will be just one sixth of that of Bjur Khalifa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City_(Changsha) Note that in Wikipedia there is an old completion estimate in January 2013. Second option is just brute force 3D-printing of houses. This process will suit well for two storey bungalows. So, we have serious problem in near future. Do we want a mile high megacities where a single prefabricated skyscraper will actually hold the whole city with full city infrastructure or that everyone has afford to dirt cheap bungalows with huge environmental footprint? As due to virtual reality, distances do not matter that much. Build a custom home in 20 hours using a giant 3D printer http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/build-a-custom.php Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts, then there is enough room for humans to live comfortably in bungalows. So we turn the idea of city and country side upside down. That in the future humans will live in countryside, while food is produced in the cities and skyscrapers! On the other hand, I see no reason why interplanetary human colonization cannot be achieved, with travel time between the planets of weeks or months. Contrary to popular belief, Venus is most
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
The Easter Island society ran out of wood and could not fish. The society died out. Could that happen to us? Maybe the future is not so great. -Original Message- From: Jouni Valkonen jounivalko...@gmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Mon, Oct 8, 2012 10:39 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years On Oct 8, 2012, at 6:07 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: This is quite different from saying that computers will definitely become sentient (that is, self-aware; conscious). We do not yet understand what sentience is so we cannot predict with confidence that machines can achieve it. I expect they can. That is an unsupported opinion. I agree, but I doubt that they can be sentient in foreseeable future. And I base my unsupported opinion that sentience is not just making an intelligent computer, but it is more about motivation. And in the case of human's the motivation to be sentient is quite strongly moulded by evolution. Also the difference between humans and most of the other smart animals, such as elephants, dogs and dolphins is that they lack motivation to develop themselves although here it is only a matter of degree, not qualitative difference such as between animals and computers. I would speculate that this strong motivation of humans, is coevolved with the language. Similarly as dogs are coevolved with humans, so that dogs can understand humans better than any other animals expect other humans. Therefore, if we are to make sentient machines, there would need to be preprogrammed huge amounts of irrational motivations, behaviour and sex drives to do, to progress and to thrive. Learning, reading books and thinking (what we are right now doing) is itself non-rational process and machine will not just get it without complex and subtle pre-programming. And the programming task is not easy, but it must probably be done using directed and accelerated artificial evolutionary process. But I doubt that that this is done soon, because while developing sentience we must face huge ethical dilemma that is it right to discard semi-sentient, lets say chicken level immortal and artificial beings just because we are learning to program cat level sentience? And from cat level, there must be created probably billions of sentient beings until we reach primate and dolphin level sentience not to mentioning if we want to go beyond humans. And also there is problem that it might be impossible to direct artificial evolutionary process accurately enough that it will suit our needs. I do not think that there are short cuts for sentience. However artificial intelligence is by itself evolving rapidly and I would expect that we will make a breakthrough in genuinely intelligent algorithms during the next 30 years. Although strong AI is like hot fusion, that it is always looming 30 years ahead in the future. And cybernetics is the way to go near future! I do not think biological carbon based computers (brains) have any special properties that cannot be emulated in silicon or other materials, but I could be wrong. Yes, I indeed thing that you are wrong, because silicon based brains lack the evolutionary process. Behind human brain, there is 200 million years of evolutionary selection. This is not something that can be done overnight. And I really doubt that kurzweilian neurone by neurone simulation of brain will bear fruits. But I could be wrong. In the future I expect every phase of house and building construction will be prefabricated. Only the final assembly will be on site. There will be two options. First is a prefabrication that will come in massive scale that everyone in the face of the Earth will notice it in November 2012. Because Chinese are going to prefabricate and assemble the world's tallest building that is to be completed in March 2013. There has already been prefabricated 17 smaller skyscrapers, but this one will be the biggest building in the world with 800 000 residential square metres. The cost of construction per m² will be just one sixth of that of Bjur Khalifa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City_(Changsha) Note that in Wikipedia there is an old completion estimate in January 2013. Second option is just brute force 3D-printing of houses. This process will suit well for two storey bungalows. So, we have serious problem in near future. Do we want a mile high megacities where a single prefabricated skyscraper will actually hold the whole city with full city infrastructure or that everyone has afford to dirt cheap bungalows with huge environmental footprint? As due to virtual reality, distances do not matter that much. Build a custom home in 20 hours using a giant 3D printer http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/build-a-custom.php Perhaps if we force agriculture to skyscrapers and deserts, then there is enough room for humans to
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jed may think he's writing about economics, but he's actually writing about morality and politics, because people pursue their economic policies in their quest for morality. For instance, Venezuela is falling apart. Venezuela is falling apart. http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/07/what-has-hugo-chavez-done-for-venezuela http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/08/24/venezuela-imports-oil-despite-having-huge-reserves/ Another experiment in socialism leads to where every other experiment has led. That people continue to try this social experiment, is evidence that people will follow their moral conscience despite all the empirical evidence in the world against it. People desperately need to discover morality, and not just any morality, but the only morality possible which is universal and treats everyone equally. This the key: morality must be universal, and the only moral principle possible which treats everyone as equals, is the non-aggession principle. All others break universality in some way, shape, or form, and create extra-moral agents, like governments, which create the moral rules which we are all then required to follow. When people respect others, and do not threaten violence against them to achieve desired social and political goals, then the resulting economic system is capitalism. Craig
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
extreme and idealistic systems are often bad... It is often hard for thos in the system to admit it, and roland benabou have made a paper about that : belief in a just world and redistributive politic http://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/BJW.pdf what is sure is that human species is a social animal, and like many primate, and even more because we understand higher level of concept and compute better (when motivated to), human love justice, and are even ready to lose so they can punish unfair facts. It has been measured, for humans of many culture and some primates. It has also been shown that unfairness and inequality block growth, and cause violence. even if surprisingly it is not necessarily violence by the poor. (terrorist are often higher class, because ideology is expensive for the brain, and poor focus their energy on survival) funny to see american discuss politics, because it is like looking at europe in a mirror. note tha both our system are falling apart for opposite reason. as said in the article, both our system have the same social mobility, with only minor and non intuitive difference (germany is the most fair, italy the least and US in the middle) 2012/10/7 Craig Haynie cchayniepub...@gmail.com Jed may think he's writing about economics, but he's actually writing about morality and politics, because people pursue their economic policies in their quest for morality. For instance, Venezuela is falling apart. Venezuela is falling apart. http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/07/what-has-hugo-chavez-done-for-venezuela http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/08/24/venezuela-imports-oil-despite-having-huge-reserves/ Another experiment in socialism leads to where every other experiment has led. That people continue to try this social experiment, is evidence that people will follow their moral conscience despite all the empirical evidence in the world against it. People desperately need to discover morality, and not just any morality, but the only morality possible which is universal and treats everyone equally. This the key: morality must be universal, and the only moral principle possible which treats everyone as equals, is the non-aggession principle. All others break universality in some way, shape, or form, and create extra-moral agents, like governments, which create the moral rules which we are all then required to follow. When people respect others, and do not threaten violence against them to achieve desired social and political goals, then the resulting economic system is capitalism. Craig
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Craig Haynie cchayniepub...@gmail.com wrote: When people respect others, and do not threaten violence against them to achieve desired social and political goals, then the resulting economic system is capitalism. I believe you are missing the point. I am talking about the future, not the present. At present, if you were to go to a farm and take away the crops by force, that would morally wrong. The farmer worked hard and risked his own capital to grow that food. So you are correct: capitalism is called for. The farmer should be allowed to sell the fruits of his labor on the open market. Now think about how the world will be in 100 years. There will be no farmers. All manual labor will be done by robots. There will probably be no farms; everything will be grown in indoor food factories. The cost of the food will be a factor or 10 or more cheaper than it is now. It will still be morally wrong to barge into a food factory and take what you want, because a corporation will have set up the factory, and invested capital and RD in it. Now think about the world 200 or 300 years from now. The cost of building food factories will be far cheaper. Robots will not only build and maintain the building, and operate all of the equipment, they will also bring in raw materials from all over the solar system. Intelligent computers will design improved versions of the factories and equipment. They will build or upgrade as many factories as needed without human intervention. The production cost of the food will be as cheap per kilogram as tap water is today. When we reach that stage, charging for food becomes ridiculous. It would be like standing on a street today charging pedestrians for the use of the sidewalk or drinking fountain, in units of $0.0001. It is no longer a moral issue. After hundreds of years of development, the food factories have become standard and commodified to the point where there is no risk, and no profit. They might as well be run as public utilities, like today's water fountains or escalators in railroad stations. Grave moral problems in one era can become trivial technical issues in the next, thanks to scientific progress. A century ago, and even 20 years ago, it was difficult for us to provide all students with up-to-date textbooks. It cost society money, and it was a moral issue. Should we see to it that all children got the latest version of textbooks? Was it morally right to have some public schools in South Carolina with 40-year-old textbooks, while others had up-to-date textbooks? Now, with the Internet, we could easily give every child on planet earth the latest textbooks at a trivial cost. I expect the schools in South Carolina still use 40-year-old textbooks, but there is no technical reason why they should. There is no reason why we should charge the parents or schools or anyone else for these books. The authors and editors have to be paid, but we do not need publishers. The total payment for the author per book can be a few pennies. Excellent textbooks and lessons are available for free everywhere on earth already. See: http://www.khanacademy.org/ - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I wrote: Intelligent computers will design improved versions of the factories and equipment. They will build or upgrade as many factories as needed without human intervention. The production cost of the food will be as cheap per kilogram as tap water is today. Not just food, either. Hundreds of years from now, if you decide to tear down your house and build a brand new one, it will take less human effort than it now takes to deliver a pizza. The raw materials will be dirt-cheap. I mean literally as cheap as a dumptruck of dirt. For common elements such as carbon or iron, replicator machines will produce all objects at about the same cost per kilogram. (Assuming there is no industrial scale transmutation.) Overall I suppose a new house will cost a few hundred dollars and take a week to deliver. Regarding my projected cost of food, I said food will cost roughly as much as tap water today. I mean that water is the main ingredient of all food. Also, I mean it will take about as much machinery and human intervention as tap water takes. Tap water costs ~$1 per 500 gallons, or 4,000 lbs, or 1800 kg. The average person eats 5 lbs per day, so it comes to $0.50 per year. Okay, I may be off by a factor of 100, but it still will not be worth the effort to charge people $50 per year. Earlier I estimated that the total cost of supplying all necessities will be roughly equivalent to supplying tap water today. We use a lot of tap water in the U.S. The cost is $335 per year. I figure this will be roughly the cost of providing all of the necessities of life, such as food, rent for a reasonable amount of space, internet access, travel around the solar system, and so on. People who want to live in sprawling mansions or who want to commute every month to Mars may have to pay more, out of pocket. If we ask people to work to earn this money, and we pay them today's average salary, they will work for 3 days per year. That's absurd for several reasons: 1. Why bother? 2. Who is going to remember how to do a useful task that you perform only a few days a year? I guess if we are talking about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey I can remember how to do it, but that is not something anyone would pay me to do today. I am sure household robots in 500 years will do a better job cooking turkeys than I ever could. Something you do 3 days a year is a ritual, not a job. 3. What work are people going to do in competition with robots? Consider that 3 days of robot labor will cost a few pennies at most. I cannot imagine people doing intellectual tasks such as city planning in competition with supercomputer cogitation. People will make decisions about how we want our cities and transportation networks to look, and where to build a new airport, but computers will handle all the technical details. I doubt anyone will even understand the technology. There will still be important jobs for some people in the future. We will need decision makers, movers and shakers and politicians. Someone has to decide where to build the new airport, even if the machines handle all technical details. You can have any house you want in a week for a few hundred dollars, but there will still be zoning regulations and neighbors will still complain about houses. We will need parents, teachers and artists. We cannot let our children be raised by machines. I doubt there will be any doctors or gourmet cooks. I am certain there will be no taxi drivers, factory workers or farmers. Probably they will be gone in 50 years. The sooner the better. If you don't think so, you probably have not driven a taxi or worked on a farm. Having people do most kinds of work in the future would be like paying Post Office employees to deliver paper transcriptions of e-mail messages in today's world. That would be an absurd waste of time and resources. It would be such an annoyance for everyone, it would not even constitute make-work. No one could even pretend there is a use for it. Having people do such idiotic tasks would be an insult to everyone involved, most of all the workers. It would be like paying people to dig holes with shovels and fill them up all day long. Putting aside economics, this world of the future will be an enormous challenge for the reasons described by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. See: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200391.txt Starting here: The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench for a water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth out in a couple of minutes. . . . - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed, but some elements are already present. The first twenty years of my working life were spent automating the production of telephone exchange equipment, which resulted in many 1000s of people who used to work on the production lines being made redundant. Many of them still do not have jobs, and the area is now one of the most deprived areas in the UK. A small number of people (such as myself) were paid a lot more to do the continuing design work, until we were made redundant when the production and design was moved to China. So yes we need a new economic system to distribute the wealth in a workable way as people like me continue to make millions of people redundant, or maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging trenches, rather than sitting at home watching daytime TV. Nigel On 07/10/2012 22:16, Jed Rothwell wrote: Not just food, either. Hundreds of years from now, if you decide to tear down your house and build a brand new one, it will take less human effort than it now takes to deliver a pizza. The raw materials will be dirt-cheap. I mean literally as cheap as a dumptruck of dirt. For common elements such as carbon or iron, replicator machines will produce all objects at about the same cost per kilogram. (Assuming there is no industrial scale transmutation.) Overall I suppose a new house will cost a few hundred dollars and take a week to deliver. Regarding my projected cost of food, I said food will cost roughly as much as tap water today. I mean that water is the main ingredient of all food. Also, I mean it will take about as much machinery and human intervention as tap water takes. Tap water costs ~$1 per 500 gallons, or 4,000 lbs, or 1800 kg. The average person eats 5 lbs per day, so it comes to $0.50 per year. Okay, I may be off by a factor of 100, but it still will not be worth the effort to charge people $50 per year. Earlier I estimated that the total cost of supplying all necessities will be roughly equivalent to supplying tap water today. We use a lot of tap water in the U.S. The cost is $335 per year. I figure this will be roughly the cost of providing all of the necessities of life, such as food, rent for a reasonable amount of space, internet access, travel around the solar system, and so on. People who want to live in sprawling mansions or who want to commute every month to Mars may have to pay more, out of pocket. If we ask people to work to earn this money, and we pay them today's average salary, they will work for 3 days per year. That's absurd for several reasons: 1. Why bother? 2. Who is going to remember how to do a useful task that you perform only a few days a year? I guess if we are talking about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey I can remember how to do it, but that is not something anyone would pay me to do today. I am sure household robots in 500 years will do a better job cooking turkeys than I ever could. Something you do 3 days a year is a ritual, not a job. 3. What work are people going to do in competition with robots? Consider that 3 days of robot labor will cost a few pennies at most. I cannot imagine people doing intellectual tasks such as city planning in competition with supercomputer cogitation. People will make decisions about how we want our cities and transportation networks to look, and where to build a new airport, but computers will handle all the technical details. I doubt anyone will even understand the technology. There will still be important jobs for some people in the future. We will need decision makers, movers and shakers and politicians. Someone has to decide where to build the new airport, even if the machines handle all technical details. You can have any house you want in a week for a few hundred dollars, but there will still be zoning regulations and neighbors will still complain about houses. We will need parents, teachers and artists. We cannot let our children be raised by machines. I doubt there will be any doctors or gourmet cooks. I am certain there will be no taxi drivers, factory workers or farmers. Probably they will be gone in 50 years. The sooner the better. If you don't think so, you probably have not driven a taxi or worked on a farm. Having people do most kinds of work in the future would be like paying Post Office employees to deliver paper transcriptions of e-mail messages in today's world. That would be an absurd waste of time and resources. It would be such an annoyance for everyone, it would not even constitute make-work. No one could even pretend there is a use for it. Having people do such idiotic tasks would be an insult to everyone involved, most of all the workers. It would be like paying people to dig holes with shovels and fill them up all day long. Putting aside economics, this world of the future will be an enormous challenge for the reasons described by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. See:
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed, but some elements are already present. The first twenty years of my working life were spent automating the production of telephone exchange equipment, which resulted in many 1000s of people who used to work on the production lines being made redundant. Many of them still do not have jobs, and the area is now one of the most deprived areas in the UK. A small number of people (such as myself) were paid a lot more to do the continuing design work, until we were made redundant when the production and design was moved to China. So yes we need a new economic system to distribute the wealth in a workable way as people like me continue to make millions of people redundant, or maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging trenches, rather than sitting at home watching daytime TV. We must add some context to your account. While you were working hard, the effects of which were to put in place a new technology that ended up making thousands of people redundant, there was a captain of industry who was working harder and more cleverly than you, directing the show and making sure that you and others of your kind were on the straight path. Because of the benefit that his brilliance brought to society in the form of increased productivity, despite all of the layoffs and the attendant economic stagnation in your area that followed upon his decisions, he was no doubt compensated manyfold what you were paid. In the UK, the government no doubt recouped some of the money that were required for the police force and the fire department and so on, which were essential to making this endeavor possible. In the US, this additional dimension of the question is largely elided, and the executive is understood to have achieved all that has been accomplished by the sweat of his own brow, thereby richly earning the fruits of this remarkable redistribution of wealth from the many thousands that were laid off to him and the shareholders of the company. Eric
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed, but some elements are already present. I do not think there is any technical reason why things will not go as far as I predict, or even farther to the brain in the bottle predicted by Orwell. However, social forces may prevent it. People may decide they do not want this. As Orwell shows, this might be a wise choice. Politics or greed may interfere. Civilization may suffer some catastrophe, and a new Dark Ages. If people such as Frank Close and Robert Park remain in charge of scientific research, they will succeed in stopping cold fusion. Such people at heart are opposed to all new ideas and all progress. To take a more extreme case, in the U.S. we are plagued with people such as Rep. Paul Broun on the House Science Committee. He told a church-sponsored banquet in his home state of Georgia that the theories of evolution and the big bang are 'lies straight from the pit of hell.' With enough leaders like that over a few centuries, I suppose the U.S. would gradually devolve into something resembling Afghanistan. I am not exaggerating. I assume that if Broun had his way, we would not teach these things in schools. In Texas they are working vigorously to eliminate them. This is like throwing acid into the faces of girls who try to learn to read, the way the Taliban does. You cannot have a high tech society run by lunatics who prevent people from learning the fundamental laws of science. . . . maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging trenches . . . What would be the point? In what sense would that be work? It would be a useless waste of time, and an insult. Even if the task had some purpose, we all know that a machine can do it far better. It would be like having people work in banks keeping accounts with a paper and pencil, doing arithmetic by hand. We all know that a computer costing a few hundred dollars can do more arithmetic in a single second than a person can do in a lifetime. That knowledge would make the task a crushing burden. We must make a human use of human beings as N. Weiner put it. The problem is that the scope of human uses for human beings is getting narrower and narrower. The problem was masterfully laid out by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (referenced above). Here is how I would describe it: When only a person can do a task, and no machine is capable of it, is is ennobling work. It gives purpose and meaning to life. When a machine can do it far more cheaper, faster and better than a human, that same task then becomes worse than slavery. I do not see any easy solutions to this problem. I don't think it will go away on its own. Having said that, I think there are still many jobs that can only be done by people, and that people on welfare should be given. For example, taking care of elderly people or children, cleaning up and repairing parks and public places, building houses for poor people in projects like Habitat for Humanity and so on. Some of this work is menial but at present no robot can do it, so it still has dignity. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On 10/07/2012 04:11 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: [...] Now think about the world 200 or 300 years from now. The cost of building food factories will be far cheaper. Robots will not only build and maintain the building, and operate all of the equipment, they will also bring in raw materials from all over the solar system. Intelligent computers will design improved versions of the factories and equipment. They will build or upgrade as many factories as needed without human intervention. The production cost of the food will be as cheap per kilogram as tap water is today. When we reach that stage, charging for food becomes ridiculous. It would be like standing on a street today charging pedestrians for the use of the sidewalk or drinking fountain, in units of $0.0001. It is no longer a moral issue. After hundreds of years of development, the food factories have become standard and commodified to the point where there is no risk, and no profit. They might as well be run as public utilities, like today's water fountains or escalators in railroad stations. [...] With great wealth comes greatly decreasing prices. When things are so cheap to make, then providing necessities to the less fortunate becomes that much more easy for the philanthropists and private charities. Today, people say that we have to threaten those who have money, with violence, so that we can take some of their money to help those who are less fortunate. But all we really do is institutionalize violence as a solution to our social problems; then we wonder why society seems to become more violent as we use this tool more and more. Years ago, Immanuel Kant wrote that inter-personal morality cannot be derived through reason alone. I just disagree... http://craighaynie.iprx.com/files/4313/4270/2993/TheGenesisImperative.pdf Craig
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
In a few hundred years, the coastal nations of the world will be required to move their coastal cities inland 100 miles more or less to keep their cities above water. Robots cannot do that sort of construction. Cheers: Axil On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed, but some elements are already present. I do not think there is any technical reason why things will not go as far as I predict, or even farther to the brain in the bottle predicted by Orwell. However, social forces may prevent it. People may decide they do not want this. As Orwell shows, this might be a wise choice. Politics or greed may interfere. Civilization may suffer some catastrophe, and a new Dark Ages. If people such as Frank Close and Robert Park remain in charge of scientific research, they will succeed in stopping cold fusion. Such people at heart are opposed to all new ideas and all progress. To take a more extreme case, in the U.S. we are plagued with people such as Rep. Paul Broun on the House Science Committee. He told a church-sponsored banquet in his home state of Georgia that the theories of evolution and the big bang are 'lies straight from the pit of hell.' With enough leaders like that over a few centuries, I suppose the U.S. would gradually devolve into something resembling Afghanistan. I am not exaggerating. I assume that if Broun had his way, we would not teach these things in schools. In Texas they are working vigorously to eliminate them. This is like throwing acid into the faces of girls who try to learn to read, the way the Taliban does. You cannot have a high tech society run by lunatics who prevent people from learning the fundamental laws of science. . . . maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging trenches . . . What would be the point? In what sense would that be work? It would be a useless waste of time, and an insult. Even if the task had some purpose, we all know that a machine can do it far better. It would be like having people work in banks keeping accounts with a paper and pencil, doing arithmetic by hand. We all know that a computer costing a few hundred dollars can do more arithmetic in a single second than a person can do in a lifetime. That knowledge would make the task a crushing burden. We must make a human use of human beings as N. Weiner put it. The problem is that the scope of human uses for human beings is getting narrower and narrower. The problem was masterfully laid out by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (referenced above). Here is how I would describe it: When only a person can do a task, and no machine is capable of it, is is ennobling work. It gives purpose and meaning to life. When a machine can do it far more cheaper, faster and better than a human, that same task then becomes worse than slavery. I do not see any easy solutions to this problem. I don't think it will go away on its own. Having said that, I think there are still many jobs that can only be done by people, and that people on welfare should be given. For example, taking care of elderly people or children, cleaning up and repairing parks and public places, building houses for poor people in projects like Habitat for Humanity and so on. Some of this work is menial but at present no robot can do it, so it still has dignity. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Or possibly beneath the oceans, floating on the oceans or in the air if
energy is free...
We still need to deal with asteroid dark matter strikes. I think we can
head off the worst ones with gravitational redirection if we can detect
them early enough in space. Although I think the biggest current problem
is the sun is pelting us with most of the dark matter during high solar
activity and that might be very hard to stop given the relatively short
distance time.
My research is leading me to believe the 1811 comet was actually a
primordial black hole that tore up New Madrid, Ark. for 3 months and was
witnessed by Napoleon and his troops It triggered 7 years of extreme
volcanism and climate change as well. It was observed for almost 10 months
in the sky before it or an orbital partner struck earth. They get hotter
as they get smaller so they are easier to detect.
My research is also telling me we cannot stockpile any spent nuclear fuel
because at any given time orbital dark matter could cause it to go
critical. Similar to the current events in Bayou Corne, LA. with
underground storage of hydrocarbons only probably much worse.
Cold fusion seems to match most closely with hot dark matter which is known
to trigger beta decays.
Peurto Rico has had approx 900 mini earthquakes in the past six weeks and
they are continuing. I am still looking for a low pressure system to move
in.
Stewart
Http://darkmattersalot.com
On Sunday, October 7, 2012, Axil Axil wrote:
In a few hundred years, the coastal nations of the world will be required
to move their coastal cities inland 100 miles more or less to keep their
cities above water. Robots cannot do that sort of construction.
Cheers: Axil
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Jed Rothwell
jedrothw...@gmail.comjavascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'jedrothw...@gmail.com');
wrote:
Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
'l...@thedyers.org.uk'); wrote:
I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed,
but some elements are already present.
I do not think there is any technical reason why things will not go as
far as I predict, or even farther to the brain in the bottle predicted by
Orwell. However, social forces may prevent it. People may decide they do
not want this. As Orwell shows, this might be a wise choice. Politics or
greed may interfere. Civilization may suffer some catastrophe, and a new
Dark Ages.
If people such as Frank Close and Robert Park remain in charge of
scientific research, they will succeed in stopping cold fusion. Such people
at heart are opposed to all new ideas and all progress.
To take a more extreme case, in the U.S. we are plagued with people such
as Rep. Paul Broun on the House Science Committee. He told a
church-sponsored banquet in his home state of Georgia that the theories of
evolution and the big bang are 'lies straight from the pit of hell.' With
enough leaders like that over a few centuries, I suppose the U.S. would
gradually devolve into something resembling Afghanistan. I am not
exaggerating.
I assume that if Broun had his way, we would not teach these things in
schools. In Texas they are working vigorously to eliminate them. This is
like throwing acid into the faces of girls who try to learn to read, the
way the Taliban does. You cannot have a high tech society run by lunatics
who prevent people from learning the fundamental laws of science.
. . . maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging
trenches . . .
What would be the point? In what sense would that be work? It would be
a useless waste of time, and an insult. Even if the task had some purpose,
we all know that a machine can do it far better. It would be like having
people work in banks keeping accounts with a paper and pencil, doing
arithmetic by hand. We all know that a computer costing a few hundred
dollars can do more arithmetic in a single second than a person can do in a
lifetime. That knowledge would make the task a crushing burden.
We must make a human use of human beings as N. Weiner put it. The
problem is that the scope of human uses for human beings is getting
narrower and narrower.
The problem was masterfully laid out by Orwell in The Road to Wigan
Pier (referenced above). Here is how I would describe it:
When only a person can do a task, and no machine is capable of it, is is
ennobling work. It gives purpose and meaning to life. When a machine can do
it far more cheaper, faster and better than a human, that same task then
becomes worse than slavery.
I do not see any easy solutions to this problem. I don't think it will go
away on its own.
Having said that, I think there are still many jobs that can only be done
by people, and that people on welfare should be given. For example, taking
care of elderly people or children, cleaning up and repairing parks and
public places, building houses for poor people in projects like Habitat
for
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
The *Central Artery/Tunnel Project* (*CA/T*), known unofficially as the *Big Dig*, was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the Central Artery (Interstate 93), the chief highway through the heart of the city, into a 3.5-mile (5.6-km) tunnel *The Boston Globe* estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038. What will it cost to move the world trade center, wall street in NY, all the airports on the east and west coasts, all the costal sea ports, the railroads, the highways, the water and sanitary systems...it goes on and on into the 1000's of billions. Cheers: Axil On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 11:01 PM, ChemE Stewart cheme...@gmail.com wrote: Or possibly beneath the oceans, floating on the oceans or in the air if energy is free... We still need to deal with asteroid dark matter strikes. I think we can head off the worst ones with gravitational redirection if we can detect them early enough in space. Although I think the biggest current problem is the sun is pelting us with most of the dark matter during high solar activity and that might be very hard to stop given the relatively short distance time. My research is leading me to believe the 1811 comet was actually a primordial black hole that tore up New Madrid, Ark. for 3 months and was witnessed by Napoleon and his troops It triggered 7 years of extreme volcanism and climate change as well. It was observed for almost 10 months in the sky before it or an orbital partner struck earth. They get hotter as they get smaller so they are easier to detect. My research is also telling me we cannot stockpile any spent nuclear fuel because at any given time orbital dark matter could cause it to go critical. Similar to the current events in Bayou Corne, LA. with underground storage of hydrocarbons only probably much worse. Cold fusion seems to match most closely with hot dark matter which is known to trigger beta decays. Peurto Rico has had approx 900 mini earthquakes in the past six weeks and they are continuing. I am still looking for a low pressure system to move in. Stewart Http://darkmattersalot.com On Sunday, October 7, 2012, Axil Axil wrote: In a few hundred years, the coastal nations of the world will be required to move their coastal cities inland 100 miles more or less to keep their cities above water. Robots cannot do that sort of construction. Cheers: Axil On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed, but some elements are already present. I do not think there is any technical reason why things will not go as far as I predict, or even farther to the brain in the bottle predicted by Orwell. However, social forces may prevent it. People may decide they do not want this. As Orwell shows, this might be a wise choice. Politics or greed may interfere. Civilization may suffer some catastrophe, and a new Dark Ages. If people such as Frank Close and Robert Park remain in charge of scientific research, they will succeed in stopping cold fusion. Such people at heart are opposed to all new ideas and all progress. To take a more extreme case, in the U.S. we are plagued with people such as Rep. Paul Broun on the House Science Committee. He told a church-sponsored banquet in his home state of Georgia that the theories of evolution and the big bang are 'lies straight from the pit of hell.' With enough leaders like that over a few centuries, I suppose the U.S. would gradually devolve into something resembling Afghanistan. I am not exaggerating. I assume that if Broun had his way, we would not teach these things in schools. In Texas they are working vigorously to eliminate them. This is like throwing acid into the faces of girls who try to learn to read, the way the Taliban does. You cannot have a high tech society run by lunatics who prevent people from learning the fundamental laws of science. . . . maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging trenches . . . What would be the point? In what sense would that be work? It would be a useless waste of time, and an insult. Even if the task had some purpose, we all know that a machine can do it far better. It would be like having people work in banks keeping accounts with a paper and pencil, doing arithmetic by hand. We all know that a computer costing a few hundred dollars can do more arithmetic in a single second than a person can do in a lifetime. That knowledge would make the task a crushing burden. We must make a human use of human beings as N. Weiner put it. The problem is that the scope of human uses for human beings is getting narrower and narrower. The problem was masterfully laid out by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (referenced above). Here is how I would describe it:
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
I think it is cheaper to build a huge dam. 2012/10/8 Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com The *Central Artery/Tunnel Project* (*CA/T*), known unofficially as the *Big Dig*, was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the Central Artery (Interstate 93), the chief highway through the heart of the city, into a 3.5-mile (5.6-km) tunnel *The Boston Globe* estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038. What will it cost to move the world trade center, wall street in NY, all the airports on the east and west coasts, all the costal sea ports, the railroads, the highways, the water and sanitary systems...it goes on and on into the 1000's of billions. Cheers: Axil On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 11:01 PM, ChemE Stewart cheme...@gmail.com wrote: Or possibly beneath the oceans, floating on the oceans or in the air if energy is free... We still need to deal with asteroid dark matter strikes. I think we can head off the worst ones with gravitational redirection if we can detect them early enough in space. Although I think the biggest current problem is the sun is pelting us with most of the dark matter during high solar activity and that might be very hard to stop given the relatively short distance time. My research is leading me to believe the 1811 comet was actually a primordial black hole that tore up New Madrid, Ark. for 3 months and was witnessed by Napoleon and his troops It triggered 7 years of extreme volcanism and climate change as well. It was observed for almost 10 months in the sky before it or an orbital partner struck earth. They get hotter as they get smaller so they are easier to detect. My research is also telling me we cannot stockpile any spent nuclear fuel because at any given time orbital dark matter could cause it to go critical. Similar to the current events in Bayou Corne, LA. with underground storage of hydrocarbons only probably much worse. Cold fusion seems to match most closely with hot dark matter which is known to trigger beta decays. Peurto Rico has had approx 900 mini earthquakes in the past six weeks and they are continuing. I am still looking for a low pressure system to move in. Stewart Http://darkmattersalot.com On Sunday, October 7, 2012, Axil Axil wrote: In a few hundred years, the coastal nations of the world will be required to move their coastal cities inland 100 miles more or less to keep their cities above water. Robots cannot do that sort of construction. Cheers: Axil On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: I am not sure that it will go anything like as far as you believe Jed, but some elements are already present. I do not think there is any technical reason why things will not go as far as I predict, or even farther to the brain in the bottle predicted by Orwell. However, social forces may prevent it. People may decide they do not want this. As Orwell shows, this might be a wise choice. Politics or greed may interfere. Civilization may suffer some catastrophe, and a new Dark Ages. If people such as Frank Close and Robert Park remain in charge of scientific research, they will succeed in stopping cold fusion. Such people at heart are opposed to all new ideas and all progress. To take a more extreme case, in the U.S. we are plagued with people such as Rep. Paul Broun on the House Science Committee. He told a church-sponsored banquet in his home state of Georgia that the theories of evolution and the big bang are 'lies straight from the pit of hell.' With enough leaders like that over a few centuries, I suppose the U.S. would gradually devolve into something resembling Afghanistan. I am not exaggerating. I assume that if Broun had his way, we would not teach these things in schools. In Texas they are working vigorously to eliminate them. This is like throwing acid into the faces of girls who try to learn to read, the way the Taliban does. You cannot have a high tech society run by lunatics who prevent people from learning the fundamental laws of science. . . . maybe people would prefer to be in work, even if it is digging trenches . . . What would be the point? In what sense would that be work? It would be a useless waste of time, and an insult. Even if the task had some purpose, we all know that a machine can do it far better. It would be like having people work in banks keeping accounts with a paper and pencil, doing arithmetic by hand. We all know that a computer costing a few hundred dollars can do more arithmetic in a single second than a person can do in a lifetime. That knowledge would make the task a crushing burden. We must make a human use of human beings as N. Weiner put it. The problem is that the scope of human uses for human beings is getting narrower and narrower. The problem was masterfully laid
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: We are not capable of anything like the fully automated version in which all of the necessity of life are handed out for free. That will take 100 years. Maybe 200 years. As an interesting side note to the economic discussion, there is the cautionary tail of the Speenhamland system in England in the late 1700s. I suspect the difficulties have been exaggerated or even misdiagnosed, but one can still be warned about attempting anything more than piecemeal social engineering. (Not that anyone has suggested that here.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system Eric
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jed says:
...
Capitalism, communism, Feudalism, mercantalism and every other economic system
ever invented can be defined as:
A system to allocate human labor, goods and services.
Some of these systems have been efficient; others were inefficient. Some were
just; others were unjust, and still others tyrannical.
...
Well.
I'd like to comment on this a bit:
1) any economic system is embedded in a system of societal beliefs -- how the
world works --
2) a) ...human labor... is a western abstraction
b) ...goods... is a societal construct ('basic needs' being somewhat more
universal)
c) ...services... a modern concept applicable to societies western style.
A priest could be understood as providing a 'service'. For a shaman
or monk this is not so easy.
3) ...efficient... depends on the frame of reference, and has astong
teleological component. EG biosystems/ecosystems are often termed inefficient
-see photosynthesis being only 0.5 to 1% 'efficient'.
question: 'efficient' wrt what?
See:
...A simple way of distinguishing between Efficiency and Effectiveness is the
saying, Efficiency is doing things right, while Effectiveness is doing the
right things. This is based on the premise that selection of objectives of a
process are just as important as the quality of that process
(wikipedia)
cf also the myth of the lazy native
http://multiworldindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/THE-MYTH-OF-THE-LAZY-NATIVE.doc
or the collection of medicinal herbs in Tibet, where 'time' for collection and
preparation traditionally does not play any role and is not understandable
within the western conceptions of 'efficiency', 'labor' etc.
Sorry for being so picky.
Guenter
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Is ancient China included as being part of the west? A quick check of some basic history of ancient china seems to suggest that what I would consider to be the organisation of human labor was present going right back to the very earliest dynasties. However, I would tend to think that so many things have now changed so much, that we cannot simply assume that any economic system that was appropriate in the past is necessarily right for the future. Nigel On 06/10/2012 10:44, Guenter Wildgruber wrote: Well. I'd like to comment on this a bit: 1) any economic system is embedded in a system of societal beliefs -- how the world works -- 2) a) ...human labor... is a western abstraction Sorry for being so picky. Guenter
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Ironically, the transition to a post-labor political economy I worked out in a white paper 20 years ago (1992)http://ota.polyonymo.us/others-papers/NetAssetTax_Bowery.txtwas motivated by my experience getting legislation drafted and signed into law that privatized government technology programshttp://push.pickensplan.com/profiles/blogs/2187034:BlogPost:822703, including the US fusion energy programhttp://www.oocities.org/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html. Essentially the idea is to replace all government functions with market functions that are supported by a citizen's dividend. Critically, however, that citizen's dividend must be funded by a net asset tax during the transition. This view resulted from my confronting not only the public sector rent-seeking embodied in government programs -- centralizing power in the public sector -- but the manifest capital market failure resulting from private sector rent-seeking and the concomitant centralization of wealth in the private sector without that sector taking on the risk of technology development. The political economy debate has been limited to basically a choice between Keynesian school public-sector trickle-down economics and Austrian school private-sector trickle-down economics. Neither one works -- especially in a post-labor economy. Since that time, in addition to refining the operational definitions, I've expanded the scope of that political economy to reformulate the fundamental approach to human rights around the citizen's dividend so that rather than voting in the ballot box, people vote with their feet to assortatively migrate to live among those sharing their strongly held beliefs in causal laws of human ecology (sociology). This rescues the social sciences from the quasi-theocratic morass in which it has wandered by offering voluntary controlled experiments to test strongly held beliefs in causal laws of human ecology. On Sat, Oct 6, 2012 at 7:00 AM, Nigel Dyer l...@thedyers.org.uk wrote: Is ancient China included as being part of the west? A quick check of some basic history of ancient china seems to suggest that what I would consider to be the organisation of human labor was present going right back to the very earliest dynasties. However, I would tend to think that so many things have now changed so much, that we cannot simply assume that any economic system that was appropriate in the past is necessarily right for the future. Nigel On 06/10/2012 10:44, Guenter Wildgruber wrote: Well. I'd like to comment on this a bit: 1) any economic system is embedded in a system of societal beliefs -- how the world works -- 2) a) ...human labor... is a western abstraction Sorry for being so picky. Guenter
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
From Jed: ... Human labor is now losing value. Robots and intelligent computers are replacing human workers in many fields, including ones that people previously thought could never be done by machines. Within 20 to 100 years, human labor will be worthless. As you have previously suggested, reading Lights in the Tunnel is definitely worth it. http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/ I suspect Jed's recent commentary is more in the future than the ones I'm about to suggest: There is considerable debate concerning how we will go about re-employing those displaced by the inevitable march of innovation and automation. LITT argues from the premise that surviving companies that continue to take advantage of automation and robotics may need to be taxed with something akin to a re-employment tax. Monies collected would be used to either pay the salaries of new kinds of jobs, jobs that have not yet manifested in today's society - or perhaps to fund the technical cultural education of displaced workers. Some might cry foul, that this smells of socialism. But what of it? LITT also wonders if there will even be jobs, as perceived in the traditional sense, in the not too different future. If that turns out to be the case how do we then go about redistributing wealth in such a manner that everyone can buy services and resources. My own suspicion is that society through the inevitability of emergent behavior will eventually resolve such matters - and possibly even without all that much help from government meddling. In any case, while our generation can afford to prattle on on about such things, I suspect that this is something our grand children, great, and great-great grandchildren may have to start working out in earnest. Perhaps if I manage to come back as a new edition in another 100 years or so, I can get a job in theoretical research studying the subtle effects of quantum fluctuations. I think I might like to focus on mapping out the unpredictable choices these fluctuations are constantly making - their psychology so to speak. Perhaps my colleagues will also be studying why is it that quantum fluctuations remain so unpredictable, and is there any way one can consciously influence the choices they seem to be making? What if we can influence the decisions they are making? What then! Be careful what you ask for. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
Jed pointed out the economic problem that we are facing. But I think that it is more about semantics than the real problem. If we just change our language, then we can do correct economic policy, because this new-speak will inherently force us to think in terms what we do really want for the economy. (My reference to Orwell was intended although not in dystopic sense, but to underline the power of semantics at current political discourse.) On 5 October 2012 23:02, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: I continue perceive myself as a capitalist at heart. I think that the main problem here is that terms to describe modern society are outdated and they are mostly meaningless. It is just mistake to think society in terms of socialism and capitalism, because both of them are outdated and they do not have had any relevance for the past 30 years. Just have a glance towards modern communist China and see that the divide between socialism and capitalism is silly. And also China is good example, that high corporate taxes seem not to restrain the economic growth, contrarily to some economic theories. Other even more more remarkable contradiction is that Denmark is classified as the most socialistic country in Europe due to highest tax rate in the world, but at the same time it is also the most capitalistic country because market economy is mostly unregulated there. One country cannot be at the same time the most socialistic and the most capitalistic country, because there is a logical inconsistency. Therefore it would be better to redefine term capitalism as an opposite to consumer demand led economy or pure market economy. Market economy on the other hand would mean that capital is distributed mostly for the 99% of people as purchasing power. This is quite useful distinction because it would clarify the discussion. If some country would be purely capitalistic, then it would mean that almost all of the wealth would be in the hands of bankers and venture capitalists and most importantly in the hands of those who own the means of production. And rest of the people, who do not own the means of production, would live in ricardian subsistence level income just like workers live and work at Foxconn's factory while manufacturing iPad's. In ricardian capitalistic economy, workers would not be consumers, but they would in effect be the property of the owners of the factory, although they are not technically slaves, because they can always jump from the roof and hence not to do work like it is too common practice at Foxconn's factory. This classical ricardian definition for pure capitalism would be most clear. The opposite for ricardian capitalism is however consumer demand led market economy, where commodity prices are based on the law of supply and demand. When we have pure market economy, there is hardly any capital available for investments, but entrepreneurs are forced to gain their cash for expansion solely from the sales of goods that they are manufacturing. It goes without saying that both are bad choices in pure form. Pure ricardian capitalism will suffocate the law of supply and demand because all the capital is invested to increase the supply of goods, but as there is no demand for goods, capitalists do not know what they should produce. Hence the housing bubble in Australia and elsewhere, where consumer demand was too weak to direct the investments reliably. And pure demand led market economy is also problematic, because if all the capital is in the hands of consumers, there is not enough capital available to be invested into means of production. And different crowdfunding schemes are ineffective and difficult to direct. But those two contradictory economic forces are not meant to be in existence alone in pure form, but we must find proper level that balances them and gives the best of both contradictory worlds.The whole is infinitely greater than the sum of it's parts. And as Jed pointed out. Robotized manufacturing and especially near future additive manufacturing will have huge effect what is the natural balance between the consumer demand and availability of capital. Because wages are inefficient to distribute the wealth, there must be highly progressive taxation that redistributes the wealth more evenly, because natural state of the economy is drifting towards ricardian capitalism. –Jouni PS. I just started to read Chris Anderson's new book: Makers: The new Industrial Revolutionhttp://www.amazon.com/Makers-ebook/dp/B008K4JDLA/ref=tmm_kin_title_0. I cannot say yet that it is good, but it looks interesting.
Re: [Vo]:A new economic system will be needed in the next 20 to 100 years
OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: LITT argues from the premise that surviving companies that continue to take advantage of automation and robotics may need to be taxed with something akin to a re-employment tax. Monies collected would be used to either pay the salaries of new kinds of jobs, jobs that have not yet manifested in today's society - or perhaps to fund the technical cultural education of displaced workers. Some might cry foul, that this smells of socialism. But what of it? As Deng Xiaoping put it: black cat or white cat, who cares, as long as it catches mice. This LITT system would be a hybrid of today's capitalism and the fully automated, no-economic-system needed distant future. It would be an intermediate system. Our present economic system is also a way station along the road to full automation. If we were to suddenly put it back to what it was before the New Deal, I think it would be catastrophic. On the other hand, if we tried to convert to full-on LITT-type system today, that would be a disaster. We are not capable of anything like the fully automated version in which all of the necessity of life are handed out for free. That will take 100 years. Maybe 200 years. We need to adjust the system step by step to deal with circumstances as they evolve. The right system for 1890 did not work in 1930, and the 1930 version did not work in 1990. Since I the proverbial man who has only a hammer, I see all problems as a nail. From my point of view this is mostly about technology. There is no morally right or morally wrong economic system. There is only a system that works well the machinery of life we had back in 1890 (horses, coal, mostly manual labor, 30% of workforce in agriculture), and another system that works well with the technology we have now. The direction of technology is perfectly clear to me. The ultimate goal is to eliminate human labor and make every good end every service available in unlimited quantities, subject only to demand, and to practical limitations such as the fact that we don't want the entire surface of the Earth covered by black and white televisions. * Our present limitations in material resources and energy are not caused by actual, physical limits or scarce resources. They are caused by ignorance. Ignorance, stupidity and greed. We talk about an energy crisis when the sun produces enough energy to supply every person with roughly 4,000 times more energy than the entire human race now consumes. - Jed * In the late 1940s, my mother pointed out the absurdity of straight line social science projections by calculating that the world will soon be knee deep in black and white televisions if present trends continue. Present trends never continue to extremes. Not in society. Sometimes, natural trends do, resulting in things like supernova explosions.
