Too much data making immediate and inevitable changes seem overwhelming? Maybe a little make believe will help those trapped in the current make believe world.
But wait, there's more.
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"The economics of the future are somewhat different." - Jean Luc Picard
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Postscarcity in Education
"Whenever we think scaling or automating things, or creating things that have zero incremental delivery cost, there's an implicit assumption that it's probably nice, probably good, and it's better than nothing (because of zero incremental delivery cost). But there's no way that it's going to better than the live, expensive, resource-scarce version of it." - Salmon Khan
And whenever we think that, we may be entirely wrong. #rethink #postscarcity
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- Intangible Value
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"The process has clearly begun" - The Economist
Remember the times you pondered the Star Trek economy back in the 60's and thought, "yeah, whatever; it'll be 20, 30, even 50 years before that happens." Guess what? It's been 50 years and our smartphones are way smarter than those chintzy communicators. But don't worry, if you lost count reelin' in the years, The Economist hasn't:
This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”
The process has clearly begun. And it is not just white-collar knowledge workers and middle managers who are being automated out of existence. As data-analytics, business-intelligence and decision-making software do a better and cheaper job, even professionals are not immune to the job-destruction trend now underway. Pattern-recognition technologies are making numerous highly paid skills redundant.
Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it.
Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.
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What Postscarcity has to do with AIDS, Malaria, Polio, and Poverty
Whenever a cause is seen as sufficiently urgent -- such as millions of people dying if we don't do something dramatic, immediately -- suddenly postscarcity is almost no problem at all, there's enough of whatever is needed to address the blight, in a very short time. In the LA Times, Magic Johnson explains:
"We're on the verge of opening a seventh AHF Magic Health Clinic," he says, referring to his AIDS Healthcare Foundation-sponsored storefronts. "All these people all over the country can come in and get their HIV meds for free. Can you imagine?" Yes, we can imagine, Magic, and we can imagine this urgency applying directly and immediately to the epidemic of poverty in America, and worldwide. John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, "24,000 people die every single day from hunger and hunger related diseases. At least 24,000."
As with many bleak statistics, we don't like to acknowledge them too publicly; the Deaths from Poverty numbers are likely understated, yet that is still nearly 9 million people dying from poverty every year. How many die from AIDS every year? The high estimate from international AIDS charity, Avert, is 2.1 million for 2009, about 5,700 per day. Tragic? Of course. Unacceptable? Of course.
"When he was asked in a televised interview who owned the patent to the [polio] vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" (Wikipedia). Yet, today Monsanto seems determined to patent the entire world's food supply." This contrast neatly illustrates the fundamental standoff between the pragmatic postscarcity and inertial scarcity world views. The good news is, we can save those 9 million dying every year from poverty without any of the expense or complexity of formulating and distributing modern pharmaceuticals. To make an immediate difference, to begin saving lives TODAY, what we need to do is declare the basic human right to a subsistence basic income and declare it in effect by reason Humanitarian Emergency. We are talking about a plague 6 times the magnitude of AIDS.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - PKD Perhaps if people haven't been able to comprehend the argument from logic and reason, they may need a slogan to get behind. I'm we can do better, but here's a first take, "If you're against the Basic Income Guarantee you are sentencing 9 million people to death again, this year alone; you killed 24,000 yesterday and are in the process of exterminating that many again, today. By your current philosophy and actions, you are steadfastly committed to growing that number, every day and every year, for the rest of your life. That about sums it up, right?"
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Accelerating Change and The Corrosive Effects of Relative Poverty
Clip: “Poor people have been demonized, poverty has been criminalized. 42% of our precious children, of all colors, live in or near poverty. That is a national disgrace,” Dr. Cornell West. As we've written over the past several years, we believe that America on the whole is a magnificent Success Story, one of the great success stories of all history. Yes, even in spite of such startling statistics. What we have attempted to convey is the fact that, as the result of Capitalism’s success – not it’s failure – we subsequently carry the burden of a sobering existential obligation; to responsibly model the end game and exit strategy for industrialization, so that other nations and civilizations may follow. This is not hubris, this is accountability.
Just 235 years into our American experiment, it would number among history’s greatest travesties should we arrive at this pinnacle of achievement, only to collapse under the obesity of our own gross overconsumption, strident fundamentalism, and self-entitled, hoarded super abundance. In the context of the sheer scale of our technological achievements, history will mock us far more harshly than it mocks the downfall of earlier experiments in Democracy. Yes, looking back, it is oh so easy to see the obvious mistakes that those unenlightened ancients made. Surely, we are so much more sophisticated than they. Or are we?
Current Economic Reality Author Philip K. Dick wrote, timelessly, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.” Today, we can’t get away from the inescapable reality that we live in the miraculous, robotized, space-faring, techno-utopian future imagined by our 18th century founders. We’ve made it. We have arrived. Great, great, great Grandma and Grandpa would be proud. Except for the fact that we haven’t slowed down for even a nanosecond, to take notice, to reflect. To introspect. To understand.
Accelerating change, like the very universe around us, is accelerating itself. How can something infinite, be expanding? Yet, that’s what we observe, thanks to the kind of fundamental research that enables Nobel Prizes. This is the reality that won’t go away, even if we close our eyes, hearts, and minds to it. We observe and interact with multiple artificial intelligences – from sophisticated, high frequency trading stock market bots to smartphone apps – extended and amplified human minds, where millions of hipster hip pockets are packed with a full blown Global Multicast Station, live-streaming anywhere an internet packet carrier signal can be found; where augmented social cognition, and synthetic life are ho-hum, everyday features.
So cheers to us! We made it. We have arrived. I'll hazard to propose that it’s safe to say, from such a vantage point, no thoughtful person argues against the fact that 19th century industrial capitalism is the very best way to transition a society from agriculture, to industry, to material abundance. Of course it is, okay Larry Kudlow? History has proved time and again that capitalism works -- for a particular phase of industrial development and cultural evolution. Today, we have successfully traversed that road. We did it! Good for us! Are we encouraging ourselves enough, yet? Maybe not.
Marshall McLuhan said, “The future of the future is the present; and that is something that people are terrified of.” An insight to which Alexi Murdoch might respond, “Its only fear, only fear … that keeps you locked in here.” So, we find ourselves living Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, hunkered down in isolation, hoping Kurzweil’s Singularity will be nice to us.
People are confused. Utterly dependent on vestigial routines staying the same, even as accelerating change has become the new normal. Yet, somehow, we know deep down in our knowers that 19th century methods are simply not viable means for adapting to the sustainable 22nd century planet, presently under construction. Right now, today, we are creating that world.
NOTE: Unfortunately, MSNBC's clip-n-share didn't generate a new thumbnail for this second clip; it's not a dupe. So, mute the commercial if you prefer, but please don't skip it, it's brief and explains the corrosiveness of relative poverty better than I'm able in this short space.
Clip: "This really isn't about Wall Street, it's about a society in which our values are out of whack," says Howard Dean. No less than former libertarian and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is equally quick to explain that growing and unsustainable resource skews threaten American Capitalism, itself. Yet, from Hollywood, to Silicon Valley, from Hamptons cocktail conversation to tea party affairs, relative poverty is dismissed as irrelevant, when compared the the utter blight of absolute poverty. A mistake that both cocktail and tea party crowds make is failure to accurately assess the corrosiveness of all poverty, period. Relative poverty is, in essence, another thinly veiled form of institutional corruption; a topic that Lawrence Lessig has been tirelessly educating us about, for years (Loss of Trust and Other Ramifications of Institutional Corruption). As Howard Dean and Joe Scarborough put it, “When Americans no longer believe in the system, then you know we have crossed the Rubicon."
The Poor Will Always Be With You Without waxing religious, many readers will doubtless be playing that partial tape in their heads. The poor will always be with you. It’s a convenient cliché commonly used in proper prosperity gospel company to dismiss our own personal responsibility with full Pharisaical self-righteousness. Jesus was not exactly the most cynical character in history. He wouldn’t say, “The poor will always be with you, so feck ‘em.” Rather, he said in a hundred different ways: take compassion on, and care for everyone in the community. Take care of the least. When you take care of the least, you care for me. It’ll be easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle; and so on. This isn’t the place for a sermon, only to dismiss another fatuous objection to doing the right thing for our communities, our country, and humanity.
I have no doubt that the best place for mainstreamers to begin getting educated about the magnitude of poverty in America will be Tavis Smiley and Cornell West’s collaboration, “The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience“ series now airing on PBS, October 10-14, 2011.
“Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature, with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span. Poverty is defined as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 43.6 million (14.3%) Americans were living in absolute poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million (13.2%) in 2008. The poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four. Seriously. Imagine a couple trying to live on $22,000, let alone four. No individual will be riding high on the hog with a $1,200 monthly Basic Income Guarantee, or $14,400 annually, in 2011 US dollars. The 2006 American Enterprise Institute book, “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State” called for $10,000 annually.
Similarly, when commentators use the inconsequential sounding, "15% of Americans are poor," remember that means 15% in absolute poverty. Like understatements of unemployment that use the low-ball U3 number instead of the closer-yet-still-understated U6 number, beware the "15% poor" deception. At least double that number barely subsist, not far above the official boundary. Don't just believe us or the commentators; double check our numbers and sources, do the homework for yourself at the U.S. Census Bureau and online. We're always happy to publish your corrections and better data.
So the fundamental challenge – and it is mostly a mental frame of reference challenge – at this historic juncture, is to continue the American Legacy of Einstein who said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge," of Henry Ford, “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business,” of Abraham Lincoln, “The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation,” and of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death."
“As if” Liberty is not American Liberty Wage slavery is not liberty. Working paycheck to paycheck, often at more than one job, in order to provide just the essentials of life is exactly the life that our sharecropper great grandparents lived. Work the land as if it were you own, but it will never actually be yours. You are owned, cradle to grave. That’s not the 21st century that our forebears had in mind.
America's opportunity and obligation today is to demonstrate the real incentive for the billions of human beings living on less than $2/day to adopt the model that served us so well, to pass the baton to them – not by clawing back 19th century manufacturing jobs that they need to advance – rather, by proving the attainable pay-off. The actualization of authentic and abiding liberty from tedious toil, and the flourishing realization of substantive economic justice for all.
Let’s be clear, my fellow Americans: liberty from tedious toil has nothing to do whatsoever with the end of WORK. Nor does the end of the J.O.B. as the only legitimate Justification Of Being as a contributing, valued member of civil society spell the end of productivity. As you study the dozens of web sites linked herein, you will learn that the concepts of work and job are as different as hope is from optimism. The former will always be with us; the latter are merely indicators of a particular set of conditions.
Where Do We Go From Here? There are a number of ways to demonstrate true American Leadership for the 21st and 22nd century, to not reject the dynamism of free markets, but to increment Capitalism (to use the programming notation, Capitalism++) into healthy and sustainable hybrid econo-systems. Most assuredly, new ways and means to raise the bar for humanity will emerge as the extended and augmented intelligence of the global cognition grid evolves, adapts, and becomes an increasingly natural and seamless feature of the fabric of global civilization; what Kevin Kelley refers to as The Technium; toward what Ray Kurzweil refers to as the Singularity.
Presently, there are two undeniably obvious realities which we can leverage to our advantage. First, and this one might surprise you, Wall Street's very own A.I. High Frequency Trading bots Secondly, over a half century of exhaustive and comprehensive scholarship and successful Case Studies for a Basic Income Guarantee; a simple matter of scaling up the long successful Alaska Permanent Fund. The two are like peanut butter and chocolate.
The first proposal is straightforward. Clusters of HFT bots can be programmed to maximize revenue for a handful of people, or they can be instructed to fund Basic Income. Yes, we still want and need markets. Yes, the coolest new cars and electronics might come from Namibia in 2024; good for them, is good for all of us. Yes, there will still be people astronomically richer than most of us. No, there will be nobody living in tents, cars, or under bridges for want of sufficient minimal greenbacks or equivalent. Mental health and homelessness? Yes, an ongoing challenge. In every case, Basic Income is a permanent economic stimulus that will only improve corporate sales.
Note to Wall Street: If your mighty trading bots are smart enough to create the Giant Pool of Money and fractal tranche synthetic CDO's, then they're smart enough to figure out #BasicIncome in the U.S. and worldwide. You don’t get it both ways. As for the second approach, oil is rightly accounted the common resource of all Alaskans, hence the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Similarly, so is the collective output of our highly advanced technium: aka, our GDP, the sum of all our efforts. From veritable armies of unpaid parent-labor raising the next Intel or IBM executives FOR FREE; to tutors; to volunteers; to peer counselors and friends and clerics who provide everyday psychological services that would otherwise cost hundreds of millions of dollars on the open market. People's lives contribute inherent value. Social capital is the substance of all enduring value.
Couch Potatoes, Cheetos, and the Idiot Box The raggedly tired 18th century Protestant specter, as we all know, goes something like this: “most of you – yes, you, readers – will sit in front of a 1950’s style 3-channel broadcast idiot box with a bag of Cheetos all day, happy to barely breath or think, bloating to maximum body mass and then popping in 40 or 50 years, all on a $1,200/mo. basic income.”
The first and most obvious problem with that argument is that this is the year 2011. Similar to opposition of marijuana legalization, people who are prone to do that are obviously already doing so. Remember the part about reality being that which doesn’t go away, just because you don’t believe in it? Yep, they’ll probably continue to do so until we learn better ways to reach them and help them heal; all too often from the injuries of post traumatic stress disorder suffered in childhood, at the hands of abusive parents who themselves were being pummeled by poverty – absolute and relative – who didn’t know any better themselves, for absence of role models, and were ill equipped to protect themselves and their families from the devastating psychological impacts of fighting for survival in such a hostile environment.
Moreover, as varieties of self-destructive behavior becomes apparent, this too is of greater benefit, for we will finally be able to better identify those of you – yes, you, if you choose to play the humans are lazy sloths card, because you likely most fear that others will act as dysfunctionally as you suspect of yourself – who need the help, education, and encouragement to lead normal, functional, balanced and productive lives.
The New Normal++ For most of us, the Basic Income Guarantee will simply encourage us to not give up in between work assignments; to not settle while seeking the best opportunity for both us and our next employer collaboration; maybe, to scrape by long enough to really create that work of art or literature; or enable these 40 lazy space engineers to keep helping that amazing, game-changing startup until they can connect with customers to really make a go of it. Instead, those engineers will be on the skids; told that they are not above taking a job at McDonalds or Wal-Mart if that’s what it takes to be a responsible human being.
The old normal wouldn’t blink to say, “yep, unemployed rocket scientists should compete with high school kids at McDonald’s if those are the only jobs available.” Utterly absurd.
Human beings are inherently industrious; not indolent, slothful, and lethargic. If humans were so deficient by nature, we would literally be hanging from our toes in the trees along side our kin, or evolution would have taken us out, long, long ago. We are not lazy and useless, by nature. We are imaginative, daring, productive, adventurous, curious, persistent, and creative creatures.
That's what implementing a Basic Income Guarantee says about us. That’s why we utterly reject the cynical, hateful violence of the brutish, bare-knuckles political opposition who's only arguments consist of red-baiting character bashing, "we'll become like those lazy Europeans, Marxists, Communists!" Oh, do you mean those lazy Europeans at CERN who invented the World Wide Web and are now pursuing the Higgs boson? Or the scientists in Moscow who put the first human being into space and without whose cooperative leadership there could be no International Space Station?
Bottom Line: The truly lazy people are those too torpid to think through the opportunities and obligations incumbent upon our generation. Here is what laziness looks like in 2011: demanding predictable, interchangeable, easily performed jobs, jobs, jobs, so you can vacate your mind for 8 hours a day of monotonous distraction and then go home and consume, consume, consume the rest of the planet into oblivion. That, is laziness.
The fear of Breaking the Job Trance is what keeps us locked in here. Maximizing human opportunities to do exciting and meaningful WORK is the solution. That simple distinction may be the most important one that we realize, stepping forward, leveling up our world game, to Capitalism++.
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
5 Billion People Want to Live Like 500 Million Do Today
Vinod Khosla continues the clarion call. Hello humans ... are we reaching?
5B people want to live like 500M do today - via @daniel_kraft
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
It's not fun. It's not acceptable.
All for the want of a measly $1,000/mo. basic income that would cover housing, healthcare, food so that human beings can have enough surplus attention to even begin thinking about how to become more productive.
Thanks for the outstanding work at InvisiblePeople.TV
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On Scarcity Logic and Abundance Logistics
It used to be that the poor didn't have a voice, because we were uneducated and people could play word games to placate us and make themselves feel justified in the sociopathological hoarding that causes our plight. Not any more. Today, a master's degree is the bachelor's degree of 1980. PhD's are likewise oversupplied to the point of diminishing returns. What we have today is a very large population of educated people for which the manufactured scarcity model of circulating resources simply will not work, any longer. This isn't a matter of debate, it's a matter of observing and comprehending that which is vs. that which we wish were true.
The Scarcity Logic to which most fundamentalists and Tea Party types cling, which won't see the fates of the global poor -- here and abroad -- as equivalent until we all start dying at the same rate, is a major roadblock on the path to sustainable postscarcity. I understand their confusion, but it's not okay to let that confusion set domestic, much less global, policy.
29,000 Dead in Past 90 Days. Inexcusable. Raising taxes on the Top 5% or even Top 1% so that we, as a nation, can continue to provide the humanitarian aid that makes us a humanitarian people is not a long term solution; but it is better than doing nothing, until we can move forward into a reasonable Mixed Global Economy that works for everyone.
This is a circulation problem, it's about Abundance Logistics. One key reason for the logistical lockup is the common misguided thinking that proclaims those in western relative poverty should feel grateful, because they aren't in the absolute poverty of Somalians. Believe me, we're grateful; and the only reason anyone could possibly believe that we are not equally emotionally traumatized and desperate is that you've never walked a single step, let alone a mile, in our shoes.
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The End of Poverty
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ApprehendingPostscarcity/~3/pa-weKSexeU/end-of-poverty.html
A Feature Film
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, author, "24,000 people die every single day from hunger and hunger related diseases. At least 24,000. That doesn't need to happen, we have plenty of resources, so that shouldn't happen; it happens because of the system we've created. We can say, without a doubt, that this system is an absolute failure. From the most rational, objective economic standpoint it's a failure. Less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States. We are consuming over 25% of the world's resources and creating roughly 30% of it's major pollution. That's a failure."
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
FRIDA: Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-Arm Assembly
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Idiocracy vs Postscarcity
Mark Taylor in Nature News suggests that we mustReform the PhD system or close it down. Awesome. Are we so pathologically obsessed with the status quo that we'd actually institute a systemic policy that intentionally retards the advance of knowledge and the continued growth of human intelligence? Really? It's not news to readers of this space that: Higher education in the United States has long been the envy of the world, but that is changing. The technologies that have transformed financial markets and the publishing, news and entertainment industries are now disrupting the education system. We'd rather shut down universities than contemplate ways to transcend this brief blip, this historical aberration known as the industrial capitalist, and post-industrial information revolutions? Why not declare victory, and move on to the next model? On the other disheartening hand, if the best that our best and brightest "surplus PhD's" can collectively figure out is to turn back to pre-middle ages, perhaps we deserve the inevitable zombie apocalypse idiocracy, after all.
Dude, that would totally suck. Let's please not.
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
A Poison Pill for the Scarcity Zeitgeist Zombie
In How to Kill a Debt Monster (The Ingenesist Project) explains: Suppose someone discovers a new form of energy that is free for all to use with no negative environmental impact. Suppose that another person creates a device that allows people to communicate telepathically. Suppose someone discovers an anti-gravity machine that can transport people and objects cheaply and rapidly. Suppose someone invents high-yield perennial food crops that don’t need to be replanted every year.
Each would deposit huge amounts of economic value while simultaneously wrecking havoc on the financial system. Oil companies would go out of business, telecoms would go bust, transportation industries would cease, and agribusiness would fail, etc. Millions would lose their jobs and mortgages would collapse, etc.This is the straightforward conundrum humanity faces at the inflection point from a scarcity to postscarcity existence. We achieve such overwhelming surpluses, in so many domains, that the Scarcity Game is literally laughed out of existence.
While the scenarios above illustrate the point well, we don't have to wait for telepathy to see these forces at work, right now. Today. Present tense. We have the "new form[s] of energy that is free for all to use with no negative environmental impact." They are called solar, wind, and geothermal. We have the devices that allow people to effectively communicate telepathically. They're called smart phones, bluetooth headsets, mobile chat, and SMS. We all have fun with this every day as we use this "digital telepathy" to talk with friends about the other people who are standing right there in front of us. As for perennial food crops, okay, this one maybe has a little ways to go; however, there's no debating the magnitude of the productive disruption created by improved technologies, genetically modified crops, and the bombastic Brute Forced Scarcity of various subsidies which are only in place in order to prevent the collapse of food prices described, above. Obviously, postscarcity isn't evenly distributed, yet. However like William Gibson's future itself, postscarcity is indeed already here. What's a bit counterintuitive is the discovery that it actually isn't about distribution at all, it's about circulation, sustainable flows, transpiration at the economic capillary level; at the edge, where all True Value is -- and always has been -- ascribed, created, and exchanged.
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- Intangible Value
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Highest Market Value is in Things That Weigh Nothing
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
What is Progressive Postscarcity?
Maybe it's as simple as Teddy Roosevelt 2.0.
"With its crowning invention of the Internet, the corporate-state apparatus has laid the seeds for its own obsolescence."
"We must usher in an era of flexible manufacturing networks, digital fabrication, and distributed production. This sort of resilient model is our only hope against the converging crises we are experiencing, from the economic to the ecological."
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Reinventing the Wheel
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ApprehendingPostscarcity/~3/YXWqGMeGFok/reinventing-wheel.html
This is another small data point perhaps indicating that, as a population, we have so much Cognitive Surplus available, and are seemingly so collectively bored, that we literally turn to finding all manner of new ways to reinvent the wheel.
The old cliche says, "don't waste time reinventing the wheel," it's all about worshipping ever greater commodity efficiency. But the new reality is, "don't waste mind rolling around on wooden wheels." Keep innovating. Keep incrementing. Keep adapting. Keep accelerating.
Efficiency for it's own sake is great, it has taken us so very far. Yet, to move forward, we must increasingly encourage Ingenuity, Inspiration, Inventiveness and find the resource circulation models that foster development and reward the outputs of the best of these human characteristics, which are notorious in their inability to generate rapid profits, yet are also undeniably the source of the greatest stores of enduring and sustainable human value.
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Please Pay Machine ONLY. *BEWARE* Do Not Pay Any Person.
SOURCE: Philip Greenspun
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Posted to apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com
Homeless? Just Hit Print.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ApprehendingPostscarcity/~3/dyoKj9oSy88/homeless-just-hit-print.html
NYTimes: 3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution http://nyti.ms/8XB6fZ
"A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house. It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods."
"Contour Crafting, based in Los Angeles, has pushe its limits. Based on research done by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, the University of Southern California, Contour Craftin printing device for building houses. The start-up com commercialize a machine capable of building an enti machine that fits on the back of a tractor-trailer."
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Posted to cliqset.com
silverton posted a note on Google Buzz
http://cliqset.com/user/silverton/FEMvgPBrlgYq1gee
silverton: Electricity from thin air ... okay, so it's thick air http://bit.ly/cyljn4 #postscarcity
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Change Is As Change Does
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ApprehendingPostscarcity/~3/uchdpATKfIs/change-is-as-change-does.html
In 1959 Sputnik was no ISS. In 2009 mechanosynthesis and electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3) are no Star Trek Replicator. Yet.
There were many people who may have talked a good game about the promise of space and telecommunications 50 years ago, while privately despising and even undermining the very people who Actually Made These Changes Happen. Doubt and fear bound humans have never understood change on that scale, much less at that velocity. Sputnik and the space race didn't cause that. However, they do provide a vivid depiction of technological change.
It's not entirely the doubters' fault. It's in our monkey genetic code. Different kinds of change frighten different types of monkeys (humans) on various levels. Even when we vote for change, we often don't really mean it. Often, what we really mean is: can I get that in blue instead of red? None of us is entirely immune to this desire for change that's not change.
Today, as in 1959, many continue to talk a good game about the promise of accelerating change, but privately they do not believe it for one second. They want to be perceived as hip and knowledgeable, while hedging their bets in private company; this, in order to not appear foolish, later. Ironically, that's the very strategy that ultimately exposes the timidity and indecisiveness that they attempted to hide.
We want change that's not change. We like our scarcity thinking. It's what we've always known. It puts some nebulous "they" in charge of the economy; the economy in charge of our everyday reality; and our dispassionate circumstances thereby dictate our every waking decision. Safe. Stagnant.
Postscarcity means that I may have to rethink all of that. I might have to make new decisions, based upon better conclusions, derived from closer inspection of the current situation.
What if postscarcity is not a cute little theory, but the long predicted result of the past 200 years of industrial development and success, the past five thousand years of cultural evolution and uplift? What if postscarcity brings with it today all the attendant organizational and institutional challenges that one might reasonably expect as we witness the last gasps of a dilapidated, pre-industrial ideological infrastructure that worked so very well, for so very few, for so long?
This is what cultural metamorphoses feels like; a gut wrenching transmutation of the vestigial, collective assortment of expectations and norms that forged the comforting mythological consensus reality affectionately referred to as emergent industrial America.
Scarcity and myth were our center, but the center didn't hold.
It's as if the forecasted inversion of the Earth's magnetic poles has occurred. East is the new West.
It's a confusing time. An uncomfortable time that just feels somehow unfinished, not properly planned, incomplete.
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Video: Espresso Book Machine now serving 3.6 million books, thanks Google #feedly #feedly
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/24/video-espresso-book-machine-now-serving-3-6-million-books-than/
Shared by @silverton
As Kevin Kelley says, "and yet, we're not amazed." That's what's so amazing. That, and the fact that we can live in THIS POST-INFORMATION WORLD where books are created by personal robots at the touch of a finger, and yet still be hypnotized by an 1850's resource circulation system. Come on, get real. It's way past time. http://capitalismplusplus.blogspot.com
Not sure how, but a deal with Google that gives On Demand Books access to an additional 2 million public-domain books slipped by us last week. On Demand Books, you'll recall, is the company behind the Espresso Book Machine -- an ATM, of sorts, for printing digital books. The machine prints, binds, and trims a single paperback-quality book with full-color cover in just a few minutes. So fast, in fact, that it's been captured in the 2 minute and 31 second video after the break. Mmm, candy.[Thanks, Raphael C.] Read [Warning: PDF]Continue reading Video: Espresso Book Machine now serving 3.6 million books, thanks GoogleFiled under: Misc. GadgetsVideo: Espresso Book Machine now serving 3.6 million books, thanks Google originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments [extracted from Video: Espresso Book Machine now serving 3.6 million books, thanks Google via feedly] [extracted from Video: Espresso Book Machine now serving 3.6 million books, thanks Google #feedly via feedly]
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Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last (via feedly)
http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_single.html?id=11038
Shared by @silverton: Old news from last week, but still worth sharing. Hello, Diamond Mechano-Synthesis! The first image of a molecule has been achieved by IBM researchers using atomic force microscopy (AFM).
-----(IBM and Science)
They imaged the organic pentacene molecule, overcoming the problem of the probe sticking to the molecule (from electrostatic and van der Waals forces) by fixing a single carbon monoxide molecule to the end of the probe so that only one atom of relatively inactive oxygen came into contact with the pentacene.
The IBM researchers believe their technique may open the door to super-powerful computers whose components are built with precisely positioned atoms and molecules. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17699-microscopes-zoom-in-on-molecules-at-last.html) [extracted from Microscopes zoom in on molecules at last via feedly]
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Value Flows from Abundance
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/08/value-flows-from-abundance.html
"Plentitude, not scarcity, governs the network economy." -- Kevin Kelly"Dealing with this plentitude is critical because the totals of everything we manufacture in the world are only compounding." -- Kevin KellySo this too is all brand new and shocking news, right? Wrong. Try 1998.
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More Self-Destructive Addictions: Scarcity Through Coercion
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-self-destructive-addictions.html
Benjamin Abbot comments on Accelerating Future:
"So far, human society has a poor track with abundance. We don’t know what to do with it, so we typically invent scarcity through coercion. We’ve had the technology to provide material comfort to everyone on the planet for decades now. It hasn’t happened."
Of course, I agree whole-heartedly with Benjamin. I want nanofactories and I believe that nanofactories will improve the capabilities of the overall system, and thus improve the material human condition; yet, a primary reason that I focus upon the proximate changes suggested herein and on sites like Capitalism++ is precisely as Benjamin describes. We must first change socio-psychological norms related to egalitarian equanimity; or the destructive memes will only follow us into our posthuman substrates, where they will due far more long term damage, IMHO. It's indeed likely that we must literally free our minds before we can transcend our bodies. As we accelerate into the future, we may ironically find ourselves accomplishing and encountering new means and methods that actually, finally, merely enable us to implement the most fundamental of ancient human solutions to achieve the best of humanity's most ancient aspirations.- Tags:
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How do u deal with ur parents being super rich?
http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/2009/08/how-do-u-deal-with-ur-parents-being-super-rich.html
Shared by @silverton: Okay. Fair enough. We believe you. Then MAKE YOUR PARENTS PROMOTE THIS http://bit.ly/1MillionStartups by buying media time, billboards, any and every other way within their (ahem) means. You can fly free, golden sparrow; may no gilded cage ever constrain you!
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Took this picture in my parents’ private jet. I am considering taking it down from facebook before I go to college so that I seem like a ‘normal kid.’ Photo via lookbookI have always wanted a normal upbringing, where I would have a healthy mix of ‘earning success’, along with some lil boosts along the way of having ‘nice shit handed to me.’ Unfortunately, as I have grown older, I have had to rely on the connections of my parents along with their financial support more than I would have liked to. It definitely changes the way that authentic people look at me. Most people can’t buy whatever they want and can’t do whatever they want [via financial constraints]. They think that I live in some sort of dream world, and that I’m not appreciative for what has been given to me, but I am actually very appreciative and very humble. I have problems that they can’t even relate to. I am rlly worried that when my parents die, I won’t be able to stay as rich as I am now. I feel like there is something inside of me that wants to make a lot of money so that I can be ‘double rich’ and just live in Manhattan or something. It would also be cool to marry another rich person, then we could pool our incomes and give money to ‘the arts’/'innercity schools.’ It’s hard dealing with social perception and class issues. I wish people could realize that rich ppl are ‘real people’ too, and that we want authentic human connections as much as other ppl. There’s more to people than ‘how much money they make.’ Wish people could see all the colours of the rainbow, instead of just ‘green’ [via metaphor about money]. R u ‘rich’? do u h8 ‘rich alts’ who buy ‘designer shit’? Would u trade ur ‘normal childhood’ for a $100K boost in ur parents’ income? Did ur parents make/lose a lot of money during ur childhood? R u afraid to fly in a private jet because of the increased risk of crash?
do u think that ‘money’ is ‘bullshit’ or ‘what makes the world go round’? Is it hard to form authentic connections with alternative ppl who have had ‘everything handed 2 them’? Is there such thing as an ‘authentic upbringing’? r u a ‘private jet alt’?
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Abundance: The Journal of Post-Scarcity Studies
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/07/abundance-journal-of-post-scarcity.html
"My friends, it is time to establish Abundance as a field of study. Our task is dauntingly difficult, as most of humanity has slumbered in a scarcity stupor for so long they cannot be easily awakened. The goal is ambitious: From 2009-2010 to lay out the central concepts and theoretical foundations of Abundance Studies. Establishing a journal is a way to focus our intellectual efforts, build a "brand" and create a home for this new field." - Joseph Jackson How can I possibly express sufficient professional appreciation and personal respect for the groundbreaking work of Joseph Jackson and all of those involved in this rigorous trailblazing academic work? Mere words or actions can never suffice. May this essential community of scholars forgive my own early participatory negligence, born only of one's own human limitations; and may the coming transition for our emergent global community and subsequent history itself render their due recompense to these incomparably prescient and bold leaders.
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Paul Romer: Many Hong Kongs
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/05/paul-romer-many-hong-kongs.html
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:28:40 -0700From: Stewart Brand Subject: Many Hong Kongs (Paul Romer talk)Repost from: [SALT] mailing listThis talk was the first public launch of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years.His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules.Technologies rearrange materials with ingenious recipes and formulas. More people create more technologies, which in turn generates more people. In recent decades technology has enabled the "demographic transition" which lowers birthrates and raises income per person even higher as population levels off.Rules structure the interactions between people. As population density increased, the idea of ownership became an important rule. A supporting rule for managing violations replaced the old idea of deadly vengeance with awarding damages instead: simply shifting value replaced destroying value. For the idea of open science, recognition replaced ownership as the main event, which means that whoever publishes first is most rewarded, and that accelerates science.Rules can amplify or stifle technological progress. China was the world leader in inventing new technologies until about a thousand years ago, when centralized dynastic rules slowed innovation almost to a stop.Romer notes that business keeps evolving as new companies introduce new rule sets. The good ideas are copied, and workers migrate from failing companies to the new and old ones where the new rules are working well.The same goes for countries. Starting about 1970, China took some of the effective rules of Hong Kong (which was managed from afar by England) and set up four special economic zones along the coast operating as imitation Hong Kongs. They worked so well that China rolled out the scheme for the whole country, and its Gross Domestic Product took off. "Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history."Romer suggests that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe import administrative control); rethink citizenship (support residency, but maybe import voice in political affairs); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on cities---on city states like Hong Kong and Singapore.)Paul Romer proposes that developing countries could invite instant Hong Kongs---new cities in new locations run by experienced governments such as Canada or Finland. They would enrich the country where they are built as special economic zones while also rewarding the distant government that makes the investment of building the new city state and installing a set of fair and productive rules. Over time, as with Hong Kong, the new city is turned over to the host country.The idea is getting some traction in the developing world. This summer Romer is going public with a Bridge Cities Institute website for further exploration and eventual application of the idea.One miracle of cities is that they sometimes renew themselves brilliantly. This could be a whole new form of that.-- Stewart Brand -- The Long Now Foundation -- Seminars & downloads at http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/
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Missed Paul Romer in Realtime
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/05/missed-paul-romer-in-realtime.html
Darn it. Missing this event Right Now ... in realtime.
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Star Trek: Postscarcity Economics for Dummies?
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/05/star-trek-postscarcity-economics-for.html
As far as I'm concerned, it's generally the chickenshit Status Quo Credibility Hedgers that hide behind the word "utopian," mostly because they are just too lazy or afraid to make the effort required to promote, provoke, and perpetuation progressive change. However, knowing that the world is as it is -- at least until we so-called utopians make it better for all of you; no thanks to your ankle biting -- it's worth noting small advances of popular awareness like this from Salon.com:[I]n the long run, suggests Romer and as potentially demonstrated by "Star Trek," the benefit of expanding knowledge and technological change will be widely distributed prosperity: an end to scarcity, a future where the fundamental challenge of providing for our basic needs has been solved.Click to read the rest of the story ...
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The Postscarcity Status
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/03/postscarcity-status.html
Look, by the time Every Person is Running a Robotic Outsourced Corporation, it will be far too late to adapt. That time may well come, but it's not required that any specific futurist vision come to pass for us to grasp and act upon the imperative of apprehending postscarcity as a fundamental requirement of adaptive human civilization development, right now.
A rising confluence of urgent pressing changes are already upon us, and the observations are increasingly plain and simple. For instance, the opportunity -- let alone requirement -- for the U.S. to be the world's manufacturer has clearly past. Denial of this fact will only doom us to decades of downturn and dysfunction. This need not happen. As I've said many times, we've "beat that level of the game" and we have to show the way to the next level. When we beat the whole game, then we have to write the next chapters. That's just how leadership works.
The fact is, those of us sufficiently fortunate to exist and operate at the very tip of the spear of economic and technological development have clearly Already Moved Beyond Scarcity. The top 2% have been here for a very long, long time, indeed.
Today, the challenge and charge to this generation is to Mass Produce and Distribute this long proven level of individual material sufficiency and existential liberty. We call this status postscarcity.
In the advanced nations, we've already mass produced and distributed every widget imaginable to mankind and this Stuff Network will continue to work for the yet unimagined stuff into the future. Everything that is needed and can be invented has NOT YET been invented; however, we do know how to make and move Stuff. We've beat that level of the game.
What we're working on now is mass production and distribution of the postscarcity status; a status which is actually quite a modest proportion of the same status that some of us have enjoyed for generations, thanks to our lineage in the top 2%. In the U.S. a universal $1,000.00/mo. Basic Income would bootstrap postscarcity and could be implemented immediately.
What's puzzling is that there is virtually universal unanimity of opinion that "sharing the oil wealth among all Iraquis" makes sense. Clearly, this has worked for the Alaska Permanent Fund for generations. So the idea and everyday practice of equitable distribution of Natural Resources which are pure Public Goods is not foreign to Americans. In fact, it's business as usual. Yet, people freak out over anything that hints at "redistribution." Hello, humans, economies are ALL distribution and redistribution. That's all they do. Period. When they fail in those functions, that's when they need to adapt and evolve.
What we've missed; or rather, what it appears that a handful of literally pathological hoarders at the very top of the top of the economic food chain have worked hard to discredit, is the fact that GDP is a Shared Fate Natural Resource like any other. We create GDP all together and it belongs to all of us.
A Basic Income is not a free lunch, it is a Dividend Reinvestment program that begins by declaring CENTURIES OF UNDECLARED PRODUCTIVITY DIVIDENDS that have been hoarded by the unsustainable misbehavior of a relatively few dysfunctional market participants. The market has worked and will continue to work, but only to the extent that we identify market failures along the way and correct them, thereby making markets increasingly efficient and EFFECTIVE at raising the standard of living for everyone.
So, a basic income is like the Alaska Permanent Fund, but it's a U.S. Permanent Fund, based upon the adaptive and ever expanding deep well natural resource of GDP rather than the limited and dwindling resource of oil. In this manner, basic income is even more logical and sustainable than the legacy Permanent Fund programs which have indeed worked well and continue to work well.
Postscarcity is the charge set forth upon this generation's 793 current U.S. Billionaires -- particularly those who are STILL billionaires today, even here, near a market bottom of 2009-2010. The Carnegies and Rockefellers and Fords had to figure out how to get the most Stuff to the most People possible. They succeeded. Now, it's our turn. They mastered the Stuff part of the equation, it's up to us to master the post-Stuff part of the equation: postscarcity.
Postscarcity is not some science fiction future theoretical state, it's a status that has existed for a long time in Royal Circles; from the DNA-based Royalty of ages past to the Industrial Oligarchic Royalty of present day America and the West. The "problem" is that the postscarcity status hasn't been mass distributed yet, and for the sake of continued adaptive success of the human race, we have to solve this problem RIGHT NOW because it will take generations to roll out to wider and wider populations as our technological means advance at an increasingly accelerating pace.
Obviously, industrialization is not "dead" and there are societies that need to traverse stages of development that we in the advanced nations have long left behind. Some may be able to leapfrog the more destructive aspects of early, mid, and late industrial stages, such as dependence upon carbon based fuels for energy used during industrialization. This isn't science fiction, it's the real work for this generation of IMF and international development gurus.
So let's git'r done. Now.
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Postscarcity Spawns from Overwhelming Cognitive Surplus
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2009/01/postscarcity-spawns-from-overwhelming.html
As mentioned before, a message that Clay Shirky has been refining for years, is finally coming into full 1080p resolution. Yes, American Industrial Capitalism succeeded beyond it's wildest dreams. So much so, that over half a century ago, we had to start scrambling to find ways to soak up the embarrassing abundance of productive human capacity in the system. This is the very foundation of the postscarcity scenario facing us today. It is our perceptions and our psychologies that are the ironic bottlenecks, even in the face of overwhelming raw cognitive abundance.Today, western industrial manufacturing psychologies and methods have created such a super saturated surplus of goods, services, and Productive Human Attention and Cognition that we are finally being forced from the trees, so to speak, just as our ancestors were forced to do at that stage of evolution. The prospects set before us are of no less consequence. On the one hand, this should become comforting, for we need not quibble over "whether or not" the postscarcity scenario "can" or "should" come to pass; it simply is what it is; it's an OUTCOME of eons of accrued prior actions. Of course, we obviously need to make some crucial adaptations to the bygone system which brought us this far.More importantly, perhaps, we must overcome much of our own psychological and philosophical inertia; our very deep, DNA-programmed Emotional Attachment to Scarcity. For most of our biological evolutionary history, that programming was adaptive, it made sense; but we've recently become the somewhat unwitting victims of our own progressively accelerating success.As in past human migrations, we as individual monkeys each have a variety of choices available to us as we make our best adaptive bets based upon whatever random slices of perception our environment and DNA lead us to believe are most rational.Every single one of these bets is hopelessly subjective and imperfect. Nevertheless, every single one of us, every single day, places our full stack of Attention and Energy chips upon the table.We are All In, All The Time, whether we realize it or not.The message here is almost embarrassingly simple. There are a number of more and less likely and more and less desirable Postscarcity Scenarios; however, they are all the inevitable byproduct of ever increasing Cognitive and Attentional Surpluses; surpluses which will only continue to accelerate at an increasing rate as we Augment and Extend our cognitive capacities in ways only glancingly imagined by the past century of our best science fiction writers.Related articles by ZemantaClay Shirky's on Media in 2009The shape of things to come (Guardian)Clay Shirky interviewed on CBC Radio show SparkShirky-load
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Tweetfeed for Postscarcity
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2008/12/tweetfeed-for-postscarcity.html
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Echoes of a Post-Scarcity Prophet
http://apprehendingpostscarcity.blogspot.com/2008/12/echoes-of-post-scarcity-prophet.html
Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future. From Reason Online, by Ronald Bailey.
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