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Post-Scarcity and the Real World

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Fri, 2012-07-20 01:55
#1
TekHed TekHed's picture
Post-Scarcity and the Real World
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Is it really a myth, though? In the end, we are still beholden to our genetic lineage. And despite how much we want to believe ourselves logical beings, we are still slaves to our instincts. Competition is an instinctive trait for tribal primates… and that's exactly what we are.
The genetic determinant for behavior is largely refuted in the third film. In short, our genetic expression is activated by environmental (including social) factors.
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And the wealthy aren't happy by merit of wealth, but by merit of ambition. Ambition drives them to accrue wealth, and it is the acquisition that brings them happiness, not the wealth itself. That's why you'll rarely ever see an executive happy during a time of terrible losses, even if his social status still places him among the ranks of the elite (or hyperelite). His happiness comes from the fulfillment of his ambitions, not from the fulfillment of monetary needs.
Except I have friends who know some of the current generations of Morgans, Rothschilds etc. and they are neither fulfilled nor ambitious...they have ALL the money...to the point it is largely meaningless. I also know many successful people have also realized that money alone is meaningless...it is the experiences you really want. Richard Branson is a good example of a more achievement motivated 1%. Basically those in power don't really have to work that hard for money...it's all too easy at that point for the investment class.
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And therein lies the crux of the problem: how do you cure a man of ambition? For many, resource balance would be a wonderful harmony; but for the ambitious, resource balance is tantamount to stagnation. You can take an ambitious man out of a social structure where ambition dominates, but that does nothing to quell their ambition. Or as it is said in an older adage, "you can take the beast out of the wild, but not the wild out of the beast".
I disagree that it is stagnation...ambitions will turn towards physical, mental, scientific, and social achievement. Come talk to me after you have seen Moving Forward, and we can discuss the effect of environment on behavior. The genetic determinant argument is an age-old and very popular trap.
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Post-scarcity would quell the issue of ambition forcing others into a state of suffering by means of resource depletion, but it will simply shift the nature of ambition towards the next form of scarcity. And according to my conjecture, the next form of scarcity will be fame. When resources cease to be a power structure, popularity will continue to be one (especially if we expect democracy to be the prevailing government; democracy is effectively powered by popularity). By the very nature of this, social order will continue to be.
I agree popularity will still be an important human sociological factor, but what will happen when popularity is determined by your contribution to your fellow humans, because in a resource based economy, everyone's discovery is shared with everyone else, so everyone's work uplifts everyone.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 02:37
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Edit: By the way, this conversation started in another thread as things went off topic. It got momentum around reply #28. http://eclipsephase.com/making-biomorph-space-adapted
TekHed wrote:
As is, even the haves are surrounded by death, starvation, ecological disasters, and poverty...how happy can anyone truly be?
I don't think we have the required biological mechanisms to ever be happy or satisfied. I think that things like emotions exist to encourage activities that have been proven prudent for the survival and reproduction of our species (they continue to exist, so they must be good for something). Such emotions have developed in response to the struggles that survival demands (much like the other traits we have). We experience fear. Fear exists to get us to avoid potential dangers, or destroy them. If we didn't have these fears, we wouldn't survive long. We fear natural hazards like falling off cliffs or fire so we avoid putting ourselves in danger. We fear animals that can hunt and kill, and we often retaliate to destroy them. The rate our species kills sharks is in far excess of the few humans they accidentally kill per year. We experience lust. We seek to have sex so that we reproduce, thus ensuring that there will always be another generation. We suffer pain. Suffering damage is not good for us. Pain is one way our biology tells us that we shouldn't be doing things that could get us hurt. ---- Removing and replacing such behaviors to enable greater good would be the tricky part. The trick is, how to do so without being conquered by those who didn't. Unfortunately, I haven't come up with a good answer to that... yet.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 02:54
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
We do have the biology required...serotonin, oxytocin, among other things. Again, what happens when a generation isn't raised with the hormones of undue fear? What happens when sex is no longer strangeled with puritannical notions, when STDs and easy contraceptives are universal? Moving Forward does a great job of addressing criminal behavior, and why ideas like "genetic pre/all determinism" are so paralyzing to change, because its so easy to use it as a way to cop out of our own culpability.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 03:32
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
The genetic determinant for behavior is largely refuted in the third film. In short, our genetic expression is activated by environmental (including social) factors.
But the same is true in the inverse. Every civilization is inspired by the successes and failings of civilizations before it. This goes all the way back to the proto-civilized tribal structures our ancestors lived in before what we call civilization today even existed. In that sense, civilization itself is in the throes of evolutionary process. It's relationship to us is akin to an echo box… our tribal instincts created society, and the advancement of society shapes our attitudes and motivations, which in turn reshapes and transitions society. So instincts do have to play a part in social engineering. They are a part of who we are.
TekHed wrote:
Except I have friends who know some of the current generations of Morgans, Rothschilds etc. and they are neither fulfilled nor ambitious...they have ALL the money...to the point it is largely meaningless. I also know many successful people have also realized that money alone is meaningless...it is the experiences you really want. Richard Branson is a good example of a more achievement motivated 1%. Basically those in power don't really have to work that hard for money...it's all too easy at that point for the investment class.
But again you're missing the point. Money is not the purpose of ambition, and it is not a source of happiness for [i]anyone[/i]. It is a transitionary concept. No one actually wants money itself… they want things that require money to attain. Having a vast cache of money ensures that you have the means to acquire that which you desire in the future.
TekHed wrote:
I disagree that it is stagnation...ambitions will turn towards physical, mental, scientific, and social achievement. Come talk to me after you have seen Moving Forward, and we can discuss the effect of environment on behavior. The genetic determinant argument is an age-old and very popular trap.
If you are talking about part I of that movie, I do not disagree with the concept. I've never said that genetics are the sole determinant with regards to human behavior. But to say that they are a non-factor is insane, no matter how dramatic an influence one's environment is. Much of our instincts are determined internally, regardless of environment. Tribal bonding and sexuality are the first concepts that come to mind, and the former is most definitely crucial to social structure.
TekHed wrote:
I agree popularity will still be an important human sociological factor, but what will happen when popularity is determined by your contribution to your fellow humans, because in a resource based economy, everyone's discovery is shared with everyone else, so everyone's work uplifts everyone.
But it will still benefit some before others. That is the point. Even in a capitalistic society, all work uplifts everyone… eventually. The automobile was once a luxury item reserved to nobility and the elite in the 19th century, but eventually became the de facto standard of transportation for the entire human race. Computers were once relegated to governments and universities; they now are propogated among nearly half the human race, and drive the most integral elements of the information age. Even literacy, which was once a marking of the elite, is now a talent that 80% of the human race shares. No matter the civilization structure, every contribution will uplift the human race over time. A post-scarcity society might propogate such contributions faster, but this will do nothing to stop the formation of the usual social order.
—
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Fri, 2012-07-20 03:48
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
The author (Peter Joseph) mentioned that you could punch a hole or ten in RBA (resource based economy) and that it requires constant maintenance so it isn't abused by malign individuals but after couple of generations you will have social response/mechanism to deal with resources hoarding (you have always enough: do you hoard air for breathing=> only if there isn't enough), power mongering can be usefully channeled so: as long as you work beneficially for the society you get power to make influential decision and lack of private life is price for being in power, etc... After you watch the movies many 'truths' that are taken for granted are dissected, proven false and explained: I'd actually like for someone to question these so we don't take them as canon but scientifically come to conclusion (if possible).
—
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 04:47
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Decivre wrote:
...I've never said that genetics are the sole determinant with regards to human behavior. But to say that they are a non-factor is insane, no matter how dramatic an influence one's environment is. Much of our instincts are determined internally, regardless of environment...
No one is questioning genes as building blocks (I think) but the thing is that humans are incredibly adaptable (not physically and not AGAINST the 'tribe' we live in) but intellectually and emotionally so we can overcome the problems we face. For example: in the movie it is explained that 'aggressiveness gene' (gene found in majority of aggressive criminals) can be found in many more 'normal' people. Only when their lives are in environments that 'require' violence: like abusive family, violent neighborhood, victims of violance... does they become violent criminals. Otherwise people with agg. gene are even calmer then norm. (New Zealand study http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-204_162-517241.html)
Decivre wrote:
But it will still benefit some before others. That is the point. Even in a capitalistic society, all work uplifts everyone… eventually. The automobile was once a luxury item reserved to nobility and the elite in the 19th century, but eventually became the de facto standard of transportation for the entire human race. Computers were once relegated to governments and universities; they now are propogated among nearly half the human race, and drive the most integral elements of the information age. Even literacy, which was once a marking of the elite, is now a talent that 80% of the human race shares. No matter the civilization structure, every contribution will uplift the human race over time. A post-scarcity society might propogate such contributions faster, but this will do nothing to stop the formation of the usual social order.
Yes, you are right but we are living better despite the system, not because: all moving forward (better life for everyone) is hampered by so many problems, backsteps, malign interests that it's a wonder we are living so good (I think third of world population would strongly disagree with my 'life is better' statement but I'm talking from my perspective/environment). To stop generalizing: with current debt creation it't is wonder we don't have to work much longer with more unemployed people, with scarcity as base of our economy we produce a lot (some miners might disagree with that too http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/23/spain-desperate-miners-prote... , as less raw materials mean less competition and less products with greater price...), etc... Formation of usual social order is only possible when majority is unaware/uninterested of how power is gained/distributed (aka. sheep) where accountability for malign action can be deflected by corrupt media/judiciary system. In society with total surveillance this would be hard (not impossible but more unlikely). For those who want to look at some current perspective & solutions visit: http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 06:10
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Not to be rude, but isn't the thread title a bit misleading? This isn't about the real world, but the Zeitgeist world. Which seems somewhat divergent from the real. Two issues: There is a bundle of reasons resource based economies, stretching back all the way to the American Technocracy movement in the 30's, are not taken seriously by real economists. IMHO the biggest problem is that most modern economies are dominated by services - certainly dependent on some resources, but the big economic flows are set by values that are not tied to anything physical. Second, the discussion here seems to assume a Homo sovieticus view of human nature: just change the material and social conditions, and behaviour will follow in a few generations. This seems patently untrue from what we actually know from past experiments, evolutionary psychology and other relevant areas of cognitive science. We are certainly changed by our circumstances (the Flynn effect, for example), but not always in the traits we want (despite plenty of food evolved tendencies to overeating persist). And some problems go deeper than merely human nature: game theory applies even to utopias, and they better embody evolutionarily stable strategies against defectors or they will fail. I'm all for attempts at creating utopias. Sometimes they do produce useful partial results or interesting data. But most of them tend to crash. Partially because they cannot conceive of themselves being wrong about core ideas.
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Extropian
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Fri, 2012-07-20 07:19
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Quote:
But the same is true in the inverse. Every civilization is inspired by the successes and failings of civilizations before it. This goes all the way back to the proto-civilized tribal structures our ancestors lived in before what we call civilization today even existed. In that sense, civilization itself is in the throes of evolutionary process. It's relationship to us is akin to an echo box… our tribal instincts created society, and the advancement of society shapes our attitudes and motivations, which in turn reshapes and transitions society. So instincts do have to play a part in social engineering. They are a part of who we are.
Agreed. I think we had to go through the stages we did to get here, but to think we are done evolving would be a mistake. Our civilization is not the pinnacle of what we can achieve, not by a long shot. However, to get there, we are going to have to let go of the ideas that aren't serving us, that only serve a few at the expense of the biosphere and all the species in it.
Quote:
But again you're missing the point. Money is not the purpose of ambition, and it is not a source of happiness for anyone. It is a transitionary concept. No one actually wants money itself… they want things that require money to attain. Having a vast cache of money ensures that you have the means to acquire that which you desire in the future.
Correct...a scarcity hoarding mindset. What happens when there is no need to hoard anymore?
Quote:
If you are talking about part I of that movie, I do not disagree with the concept. I've never said that genetics are the sole determinant with regards to human behavior. But to say that they are a non-factor is insane, no matter how dramatic an influence one's environment is. Much of our instincts are determined internally, regardless of environment. Tribal bonding and sexuality are the first concepts that come to mind, and the former is most definitely crucial to social structure.
Also agreed...but we didn't get to be the top predators on this planet because we were all sociopathic...we are weaker than other beasts. More intelligent yes, but it was our ability to form tribes and cooperate that let us take down mammoths and feed the tribe. What needs to happen now is for the old tribal allegiances to recognize they are obsolete. If we are to survive and flourish, we have to include the whole race of us, as well as the biosphere and other species with which we are symbiotic as our "tribe." We have to expand the notion of "us" and get rid of the notion of "them" as it pertains to cooperation.
Quote:
But it will still benefit some before others. That is the point. Even in a capitalistic society, all work uplifts everyone… eventually. The automobile was once a luxury item reserved to nobility and the elite in the 19th century, but eventually became the de facto standard of transportation for the entire human race. Computers were once relegated to governments and universities; they now are propogated among nearly half the human race, and drive the most integral elements of the information age. Even literacy, which was once a marking of the elite, is now a talent that 80% of the human race shares.
And yet (as the movie explains) it is more profitable to keep using oil (for example) than to redesign a non-scarce energy infrastructure. It is more profitable to treat symptoms than cure disease...and so with profit as our guiding force it actually puts a stranglehold on progress...our system demands that we sustain or even create problems. For the same reason, our monetary system is designed to consolidate wealth, which puts a stranglehold on our economies...currency comes from the word current, meaning it needs to flow. When the top companies and families are hoarding the wealth and trading it around themselves in a massive ponzi scheme it actually hinders development. Take the myth of the investors as driving the economy...I think this man debunked it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDAwD5uS5bM
Quote:
No matter the civilization structure, every contribution will uplift the human race over time. A post-scarcity society might propogate such contributions faster, but this will do nothing to stop the formation of the usual social order.
A point you will likely hear me repeat is this: We don't know what will happen. What I am talking about, what Peter Joseph, and Jacque Fresco, and Buckminster Fuller are talking about is something that is unprecedented...we have never before in our known history had the knowledge, the know how, the technology, the ability to move beyond our notions of scarcity. Indeed our economic models were conceived in an era where the theorists just sort of assumed that unlimited growth was possible...and our systems are built on it...that is why it is so damn hard for us to stop and change directions....
Quote:
Not to be rude, but isn't the thread title a bit misleading? This isn't about the real world, but the Zeitgeist world. Which seems somewhat divergent from the real.
You missed my meaning with the thread title. I wanted to have a discussion about the idea of post resource economies as they pertain to the real world and not an RPG. I want to talk about the world that we can see from here, the obstacles that are in it's way, and perhaps even a plan to transition. That is one of the biggest criticisms against Fresco's work, or Bucky's...we need a viable transition strategy. Some ideas in that regard...we stop hoarding foods to subsidize the markets. We have enough food to feed everyone and yet people are starving...this is plain wrong. Fuck the markets...feed the people. Extrapolating to the rest of what needs to be done, check out this page: http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/mods/theme_a/interact/www.worldgame... Seriously...a thousand words could not say better what that infographic does...or explain how seriously wrong and fucked up our global civilization is. It would be so easy...as Fresco says it would take literally only about 10 years to transform our planet into a new Eden...sure much of the cleanup and bioremediation will take a lot longer, but we would actually have peace on earth and the ills of our age, which are so very solvable, would be in the past. The only reason we haven't done so already is that the folks at the top of the game won't let it, and the rest of us have bought into the illusion of the system so thoroughly that we can't see the forest for the fucking trees!
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Two issues: There is a bundle of reasons resource based economies, stretching back all the way to the American Technocracy movement in the 30's, are not taken seriously by real economists. IMHO the biggest problem is that most modern economies are dominated by services - certainly dependent on some resources, but the big economic flows are set by values that are not tied to anything physical.
Most of those service jobs...indeed most jobs can and should be replaced by automation...but people fear automation because it costs workers jobs so we fight it, because "people have to earn a living." Well...what if they didn't? Sure some jobs would still be necessary, maybe 15-20% of the total jobs we have now, but the whole point of technology is to free up human hands...and minds for greater exploration, discovery, and creation. As of right now most our minds have been dumbed down in such a way as might be considered criminal by future generation of humans. And you are correct in your last sentence there but perhaps not the way you meant...the whole money system (as others have said) is built on debt. There is actually not enough money in physical existence to pay off all the debt...most of the money in circulation exists only on computers, was created on computers and moves around computers and may never even be cashed out.
Quote:
Second, the discussion here seems to assume a Homo sovieticus view of human nature: just change the material and social conditions, and behaviour will follow in a few generations. This seems patently untrue from what we actually know from past experiments, evolutionary psychology and other relevant areas of cognitive science. We are certainly changed by our circumstances (the Flynn effect, for example), but not always in the traits we want (despite plenty of food evolved tendencies to overeating persist). And some problems go deeper than merely human nature: game theory applies even to utopias, and they better embody evolutionarily stable strategies against defectors or they will fail. I'm all for attempts at creating utopias. Sometimes they do produce useful partial results or interesting data. But most of them tend to crash. Partially because they cannot conceive of themselves being wrong about core ideas.
It is this kind of train of thought that frustrates me and makes me feel despair... Do you not understand? People are so quick to say "oh that's utopian, it will never work...people have tried and failed, yadda yadda." Again what I am saying is...what needs to happen is something unprecedented. And it has to be global in nature. When I was in school for ecological design one of the concepts drilled into us was synergistic effects and whole-systems thinking. Some engineers were hired to help make a plant in Singapore more efficient...when they looked at the layout of the plant it was obvious what was going on. Most of the energy used in manufacturing goes to drive motors that power pumps...and in this case the pump was really far away from where it needed to go to. So they redesigned the pumps to be right next to where it needed to go. The result was that they needed less pumps...they could also use smaller pipes as well so the materials cost went down even further. This applies to what needs to happen in the real world... The trouble is that your viewpoint rests in your present understanding within the present system. We have never ever seen before what the world would be like if we threw away money and built a new system from the ground up. We have never tried...indeed we've never been able to..until now. NOW we actually have the ability to do so, but it is going to take some kind of mass movement, and education to make it happen. None of your utopian theories apply here because we are talking about something new...something that has never been tried. Past utopias failed because they were small and isolated experiments surrounded on all sides by the same systems we now live in. There was still a scarcity because such communities were limited to whatever resources they could muster, and the people in power succumbed to corruption because they still wanted more. In order for the next phase to happen, it has to be everywhere. It won't work in isolation. It has to be a global paradigm shift.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 08:21
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Arenamontanus wrote:
... the discussion here seems to assume a Homo sovieticus view of human nature: just change the material and social conditions, and behaviour will follow in a few generations. This seems patently untrue from what we actually know from past experiments, evolutionary psychology and other relevant areas of cognitive science. We are certainly changed by our circumstances (the Flynn effect, for example), but not always in the traits we want (despite plenty of food evolved tendencies to overeating persist). And some problems go deeper than merely human nature: game theory applies even to utopias, and they better embody evolutionarily stable strategies against defectors or they will fail.
First, I have huge respect for you and your knowledge but why are making binary division of human nature? I hate (passionately and almost) everything that Soviet Union represents and it's failures so being equalized with them, kind of... sucks ;) Call me Utopian, naive or unrealistic but not soviet-like. I'm sure you already know that obesity in western civilization is product of many factors other then availability (I LIKE cooking, eating, talking about the subject and I'm thin and while not having tapeworm or fast metabolism...)
Arenamontanus wrote:
I'm all for attempts at creating utopias. Sometimes they do produce useful partial results or interesting data. But most of them tend to crash. Partially because they cannot conceive of themselves being wrong about core ideas.
I'm not saying utopia-like-society is going to be easily built but if people work hard on them it can be done (or at least try, that is all I ask, to try and if it fail you can always say 'told you so' :)
Arenamontanus wrote:
Not to be rude, but isn't the thread title a bit misleading? This isn't about the real world, but the Zeitgeist world. Which seems somewhat divergent from the real.
I'd argue about what is real and what is not: let's take Roman empire. Slavery was norm and very real. Even slaves had slaves... So in this society thinking about state without slaves was ludicrous and unrealistic... we changed that reality. After centuries (some evidence indicate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine) of progress, steam machine was invented and rejected because what would all these slaved do when exempt from hard field labor. So even when technology could made slaves obsolete they stick to the verified ways that made their reality and we all know how that ended...
Arenamontanus wrote:
Two issues: There is a bundle of reasons resource based economies, stretching back all the way to the American Technocracy movement in the 30's, are not taken seriously by real economists. IMHO the biggest problem is that most modern economies are dominated by services - certainly dependent on some resources, but the big economic flows are set by values that are not tied to anything physical.
Good, I like you to use your massive intellect and find ALL holes in the RBA so it can be made functional or abandon this idea and use something different because current system is making Lemmings of us all...
—
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 08:23
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Arenamontanus wrote:
Not to be rude, but isn't the thread title a bit misleading? This isn't about the real world, but the Zeitgeist world. Which seems somewhat divergent from the real.
Actually, I'm arguing purely from the perspective of someone who has not really seen the films, but still thinks that many elements of its claims are either not valid or feasible. I'm working on his presentation of the material, a synopsis I gave a glance over, and my personal understanding of social and economic structure. I am probably going to watch them once I'm done downloading them.
Arenamontanus wrote:
Two issues: There is a bundle of reasons resource based economies, stretching back all the way to the American Technocracy movement in the 30's, are not taken seriously by real economists. IMHO the biggest problem is that most modern economies are dominated by services - certainly dependent on some resources, but the big economic flows are set by values that are not tied to anything physical.
Agreed, but many of those services are inherently tied to physical concepts. A case in point would be the housing market, which is largely a service sector based around mortgages than an actual trade in the physical goods of land. The innate volatility of the mortgage market, brought on by speculative trading, is what caused the market bubble to collapse in the U.S.; despite the fact that the relevant product , livable land, never decreased or increased. The music industry is another service sector, even though it still has albums that are physically existent (when they aren't digital, of course). When one thinks of it, even money itself is a service rather than a resource. It can be printed at the whims of the issuing bank (in the case of the dollar, the federal government of the United States), as demand requires. So it isn't really a resource so much as it's a printing service.
Arenamontanus wrote:
Second, the discussion here seems to assume a Homo sovieticus view of human nature: just change the material and social conditions, and behaviour will follow in a few generations. This seems patently untrue from what we actually know from past experiments, evolutionary psychology and other relevant areas of cognitive science. We are certainly changed by our circumstances (the Flynn effect, for example), but not always in the traits we want (despite plenty of food evolved tendencies to overeating persist). And some problems go deeper than merely human nature: game theory applies even to utopias, and they better embody evolutionarily stable strategies against defectors or they will fail. I'm all for attempts at creating utopias. Sometimes they do produce useful partial results or interesting data. But most of them tend to crash. Partially because they cannot conceive of themselves being wrong about core ideas.
This is my presumption exactly. That's why earlier in the previous thread this conversation started from, I said that the death of currency will be a natural one caused by market forces brought on from the transition to a post-scarcity scenario where it gradually becomes unnecessary, in my opinion. If you want to see how it will happen, look at the scribe. It was once one of the most powerful job sectors in the world, and it was completely destroyed in a few generations by the creation of the Gutenberg press. When a market force comes about that disrupts the usefulness of money in our society, that too will collapse.
—
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Fri, 2012-07-20 09:18
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
Agreed. I think we had to go through the stages we did to get here, but to think we are done evolving would be a mistake. Our civilization is not the pinnacle of what we can achieve, not by a long shot. However, to get there, we are going to have to let go of the ideas that aren't serving us, that only serve a few at the expense of the biosphere and all the species in it.
Pinnacle is an imprecise term; evolution is not a progression upward, even in the case of civilization. Rather, it is a progression towards whatever is necessary for society to thrive. We might like to think it is always upward, but this isn't the case. Democracies can give way to totalitarian governments if that's what is necessary for society in a local sense to continue on.
TekHed wrote:
Correct...a scarcity hoarding mindset. What happens when there is no need to hoard anymore?
Hoarding will likely still continue. The habit has to be broken. I know this because I too horde… digital files. Apparently, the post-scarcity nature of digital data has not stopped me from having an urge to collect things.
TekHed wrote:
Also agreed...but we didn't get to be the top predators on this planet because we were all sociopathic...we are weaker than other beasts. More intelligent yes, but it was our ability to form tribes and cooperate that let us take down mammoths and feed the tribe. What needs to happen now is for the old tribal allegiances to recognize they are obsolete. If we are to survive and flourish, we have to include the whole race of us, as well as the biosphere and other species with which we are symbiotic as our "tribe." We have to expand the notion of "us" and get rid of the notion of "them" as it pertains to cooperation.
I argue the opposite of the premise in this first sentence; we got to be the top predators because sociopathy is rare in our species. Or, if sociopathy is common, then we are designed to willfully ignore sociopathic tendencies when dealing with our tribal bonds. We tend towards tribal unity and social unification. In fact, humans that are taken into scenarios where social interaction is nonexistent tend to do far worse, or even go insane. We need it, and crave it. It might even be an innate addiction produced earlier in our species' evolutionary line. The problem with changing our tribal allegiances is that they are rather innate. We tend towards protecting our family as an instinct. We tend towards dehumanizing our enemies, even when they are human. It's a part of who we are. That's why racism has been so damn hard to shake. We always tend to segregate the world with an "us and them" mindset. No matter how logical one might be, this is the case. And it's put into us at a very young age. The minute your parents tell you "don't talk to strangers", they are beginning the long term process of defining your worldview of the human race by "people you know and care about vs people you don't know and don't care about". When you think about it in that context, how do you fight our tendency toward tribalism? How would we even begin to go about curing it?
TekHed wrote:
And yet (as the movie explains) it is more profitable to keep using oil (for example) than to redesign a non-scarce energy infrastructure. It is more profitable to treat symptoms than cure disease...and so with profit as our guiding force it actually puts a stranglehold on progress...our system demands that we sustain or even create problems. For the same reason, our monetary system is designed to consolidate wealth, which puts a stranglehold on our economies...currency comes from the word current, meaning it needs to flow. When the top companies and families are hoarding the wealth and trading it around themselves in a massive ponzi scheme it actually hinders development. Take the myth of the investors as driving the economy...I think this man debunked it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDAwD5uS5bM
Actually, I'd argue that investors [i]do[/i] drive our economy, just not in the manner that he talks about. Investors craft the economy that exists, for good or bad. And while the middle class does produce a healthy economy through the production of demand and therefore jobs, they have not the monetary means or resources to create market entities that the wealthy have. Therefore, while the middle class creates jobs, the wealthy still define the market. Profits in a capitalistic society are dependent on fulfilling people's wants and needs at a price. The reason that capitalistic societies disdain socialist programs is because if you fulfill a need by a method that produces no profit, then you effectively destroy a market, and therefore destroy profit potential. The problem with the hypercapitalist society today is that the service-based nature of modern society only produces jobs based upon the number of consumers that are serviced. But since only a small percentage of society holds all the wealth, the service-sector can do with only a small percentage of the population being its only consumers. High-end businesses could care less about the non-elite, we simply do not make the expenditures that the elite do. In effect, this goes back to my reference to tribalism. In this case, the elite and hyperelite have created their own elite tribe, within which they care about the survival of the tribe, but have virtually no regard for the non-elite outside of it.
TekHed wrote:
A point you will likely hear me repeat is this: We don't know what will happen. What I am talking about, what Peter Joseph, and Jacque Fresco, and Buckminster Fuller are talking about is something that is unprecedented...we have never before in our known history had the knowledge, the know how, the technology, the ability to move beyond our notions of scarcity. Indeed our economic models were conceived in an era where the theorists just sort of assumed that unlimited growth was possible...and our systems are built on it...that is why it is so damn hard for us to stop and change directions....
Except we already have a mild idea of what happens in a post-scarcity social structure, because one already technically exists; the internet. For all intents and purposes, the internet is a civilization within civilization, where tribal bonds are replaced by new ones (that have been observed to exist alongside traditional ones), and the resources that exist within it are post-scarcity. We already can observe the failings of capitalistic attempts at trying to shove post-scarcity products into the traditional market model with the current piracy wars, and these have given birth to new profit structures that coexist with post-scarcity (Kickstarter, for example). So while post-scarcity in a broader sense is still eluding us, post-scarcity in a limited sense is already here. And we can already observe its effects on society.
TekHed wrote:
You missed my meaning with the thread title. I wanted to have a discussion about the idea of post resource economies as they pertain to the real world and not an RPG. I want to talk about the world that we can see from here, the obstacles that are in it's way, and perhaps even a plan to transition. That is one of the biggest criticisms against Fresco's work, or Bucky's...we need a viable transition strategy. Some ideas in that regard...we stop hoarding foods to subsidize the markets. We have enough food to feed everyone and yet people are starving...this is plain wrong. Fuck the markets...feed the people. Extrapolating to the rest of what needs to be done, check out this page: http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/mods/theme_a/interact/www.worldgame... Seriously...a thousand words could not say better what that infographic does...or explain how seriously wrong and fucked up our global civilization is. It would be so easy...as Fresco says it would take literally only about 10 years to transform our planet into a new Eden...sure much of the cleanup and bioremediation will take a lot longer, but we would actually have peace on earth and the ills of our age, which are so very solvable, would be in the past. The only reason we haven't done so already is that the folks at the top of the game won't let it, and the rest of us have bought into the illusion of the system so thoroughly that we can't see the forest for the fucking trees!
It's actually quite obvious why these problems never get solved. There has never been a real-life example of a corporation or business based around long-term profits or strategy. Every corporation, every single business model in use today, is based around the fiscal year; the idea that your successes and failings are solely pinned on annual profitability. And long-term goals do not make for annual profits.
TekHed wrote:
Most of those service jobs...indeed most jobs can and should be replaced by automation...but people fear automation because it costs workers jobs so we fight it, because "people have to earn a living." Well...what if they didn't? Sure some jobs would still be necessary, maybe 15-20% of the total jobs we have now, but the whole point of technology is to free up human hands...and minds for greater exploration, discovery, and creation. As of right now most our minds have been dumbed down in such a way as might be considered criminal by future generation of humans. And you are correct in your last sentence there but perhaps not the way you meant...the whole money system (as others have said) is built on debt. There is actually not enough money in physical existence to pay off all the debt...most of the money in circulation exists only on computers, was created on computers and moves around computers and may never even be cashed out.
What's worse is that we've turned intellectually stimulating people into a profit market as well. Universities, rather than being focused on training the next generation, have become focused on siphoning as much money out of their pockets as physically possible. And this occurs simply because it's an industrial monopoly; we need higher education, and higher education institutions know that demand is high enough that they get to decide how much profit they make. And this problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the government, rather than regulate the price-fixing of the higher-education structure, has simply thrown money into the hands of people so they can get that education. Universities and colleges are effectively stealing from the government and rapidly increasing national debts, all in the sake of unmitigated profits. As for our debt society, do note that there will never be enough money to pay off all the debt. Interest makes it impossible for enough money to exist to pay it all off for everyone. Somebody has to be in debt at any given time, and the amount of debt that much exist in the world is ever-increasing because of the practice of usury.
TekHed wrote:
It is this kind of train of thought that frustrates me and makes me feel despair... Do you not understand? People are so quick to say "oh that's utopian, it will never work...people have tried and failed, yadda yadda." Again what I am saying is...what needs to happen is something unprecedented. And it has to be global in nature.
Unfortunately, I agree with Arenamontanus. I see utopia in the same light as I see perfection; better conceived as a journey than a destination. We may never actually achieve true utopia. But society will likely encroach ever-closer to the concept. That said, I don't know if a forced global shift is a good idea. Russia and China tried that in the early 20[sup]th[/sup] century, and we all know how that turned out. I agree that the work towards a utopian restructuring of society must begin [i]yesterday[/i], but it must be done in a manner that not only transitions society, but also does not create an opportunity for a negative paradigm shift. Lest we create the next totalitarian state.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 09:20
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Merged post. We really need a way to delete our own posts, dammit.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 11:13
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Anarhista wrote:
Good, I like you to use your massive intellect and find ALL holes in the RBA so it can be made functional or abandon this idea and use something different because current system is making Lemmings of us all...
I only have 24 hours a day, even when I take my cognitive enhancer drugs. I have a slew of xrisk-related projects. And despite my decent COG, I don't have that high skill in Academics: Economics, so I think I would like to pass the whole issue over to (say) the Institute for New Economic Thinking down the road. That said, I think the real problem is this: we evolved in a different environment, not just in terms of resources but also in terms of social group size and intellectual complexity. It is unsurprising that our minds are lagging, especially since it takes generations for even simple economic concepts like the Law of Comparative Advantage to diffuse into common knowledge. And that is essentially just a meme, something that is good at spreading. Societal institutions update more slowly than people, and we should expect even more of a lag. But there is a bright light: technology enables new possibilities, and we can invent new institutions at a decently rapid rate. This allows some leeway for experimentation and innovation, and sometimes we stumble upon disruptive ideas that raze the old stuff in creative destruction (industrialisation, containerization, the web, etc). But figuring out which ideas are like that usually takes plenty of trial and error rather than brilliant planning. Now, one of the problems I see with RBA is that most thinking about it presupposes that in order to be tested it has to encompass a fairly sizeable society. There doesn't seem to be a way of testing it in a small scale experiment, like you could with bitcoin. This means that it has a low probability of ever being tested... or that, if you think it has something going for it, you should try to construct a mini-version that can be tested on a small scale, and - if successful - spread and scale up. A post scarcity economy is in a sense impossible, because there are some things that are always more scarce than we would like: social recognition, attention, the front seats at the great concert, true love, answers to the questions *we* think are important but nobody else cares about. Fix material scarcity and other kinds of scarcity become more obvious (so, you can print out a palace? Fine, but the Malibu beach-front is already taken). Even in Iain M. Banks Culture novels, where material, energy, space and intellectual scarcity are solved problems there is a demand for meaningful action that cannot be met fully. Of course, fixing material scarcity is a *good thing* and we should pursue it with enthusiasm, but it is not going to solve all problems. Fine, but maybe we can fix the allocation part? Right now we allocate stuff according to economic efficiency mediated by money. We know barter allocation is too inflexible, and that central planning breaks down due to information limitations. Reputation economies might turn allocation into a popularity contest, for good and ill. What to base the money on is largely a side issue: the truly important thing is the principles telling us who gets what. They may contain some moral views and nice theory, but in the end it is the actual outcomes that matter. Often these outcomes are extremely nontrivial and impossible to predict beforehand, since they are produced by millions of minds rather than the handful of system designer minds. Again, I think the solution is experimentation. Both theoretical and simulation, but more importantly, in the form of small setups or institutions that can scale up if things look promising. Hence my interest in ideas like bitcoin rather than fragile all-or-nothing utopia projects. (OK, that was a *good* cup of coffee... or maybe I just got possessed by the ghost of Hayek)
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Fri, 2012-07-20 11:26
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
If I were smart, I'd stay out of this conversation. But I'm not very smart :( I'm an hour into the Moving Forward, and starting to get a little frustrated. Yes, it's better than the original Zeitgeist movie in that it avoids the ridiculous conspiracy theories. But the way it presents its data is just as flawed. Once you move past all of the movie-framing tricks (and I don't blame the artists for this. That's part of making a documentary; you frame the 'enemy' in dark rooms doing nefarious stuff. And indeed, the director has done a VERY good job of providing the visuals and music for this movie,) the actual arguments are full of holes. They tend not to answer the questions they themselves bring up, or follow their ideas to the logical conclusion (for example; 'we are not pre-determined by genetics', it says over and over. 'Fetuses in the womb exposed to food shortages are more likely to suffer metabolic diseases later in life'. Well how does the fetus 'know' to develop that sort of super-efficient metabolism? The mother's hormones et al. inform the cellular growth, but the cellular growth is guided by itself, through ... genetics. It's as though they proved the simple argument, 'if you are genetically predisposed towards X, it does not mean you are doomed to X', but then failed to answer to the more complex scenario, 'if you are exposed to X circumstances, that will alter your genetic response, to result in circumstances Y'). It misleads the viewer. It claims that the GDP from the medical industry is a sign that more people are sick and dying. The truth is that, in the US, the reason why the medical industry is doing so well is because so many people are *NOT* dead, who otherwise would be, i.e. the large population surviving over 65, people with expensive, but treatable diseases such as Diabetes, and people with expensive, but less treatable diseases like cancer. They imply medical costs represent people getting sick who would otherwise be well, rather than the truth of people who are getting better who otherwise would be dead. They're also completed misframing the concept of money as a measure of value, which kills any productive conversation. I'll keep watching. I'm sure I'll have another comment, but I'll try not to complain too much. Regardless, it's not a great start to my entry into the discussion :(
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Fri, 2012-07-20 15:00
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
WHEW finally finished that movie. Crazy long. Fortunately, the first hour was the worst part, and really so irrelevant, I'd recommend people skip it. Unfortunately, a lot of the complaints are based off of a simplistic and flawed understanding of the monetary system. All economic systems will have aspects in which they excel, and aspects in which they don't. The video did capture a lot (but not all) of the ways that capitalism fails. Capitalism is just a way of prioritizing resources and work, based on competition and ideas of value. Some of the big failures of capitalism are: 1) It has difficulty assigning value to some things, especially to things which are valuable only to people who do not contribute to the system (such as homeless people), and ideas such as freedom or friendship. 2) It is an ecnomic system, not a system of philosophy or ethics, and can't be used to judge these things. 3) It still has loopholes which can be 'gamed' by individuals for great personal gain at the expense of society. However, capitalism has some major benefits as well: 1) It performs complex analysis of needs and benefits without requiring actual computing power (this is oftentimes represented by the metaphor "the invisible hand of the market", but it is in fact just a result of humans serving as processing nodes, judging prices and values, as part of a massive algorithm). 2) It does appraise current and future availability of resources, and helps in locating new resources, preventing critical dependencies, etc. 3) It encourages efficiency, reducing the resources required to create a product or service. 4) It makes more resources available to individuals at all levels of society, even individuals who fail to contribute directly to it. 5) It pushes people to fill roles where they will contribute the most to society, and motivates them to contribute, even when they have no other motivation to. The system recommended in the video is basically one of 'create a giant computer which optimizes resource use'. The benefits of this, presumably, are: 1) It provides complex analysis of needs and benefits (using actual computing power). 2) It appraises current and future availability of resources. 3) It encourages efficiencies, and can be programmed to focus on particular categories of efficiency, which adds precision not available in classic capitalism. 4) It makes more resources available to all individuals? (Not clear if this is the case.) The downsides of this are: 1) It has difficulty assigning value to some things, as it relies on the judgment of the programmer (or programmer's managers), and so shares their human failings. 2) It attempts to make moral and philosophical judgments on behalf of ALL PEOPLE involved in the system. 3) Like all algorithms, it will have loopholes which can be gamed by people in the system. 4) Being a new system, and again, fraught with human failings, it is more vulnerable to failure or oversights. 5) It does not have a way to motivate people to fulfill particular necessary role, or motivate them to perform well in their roles. 6) It keeps the system in the hands of an elite few. 7) It assumes (and assumes and assumes) that future technology will work as advertised, to provide food, energy, and production, at or above current levels, without significant costs. 8) It requires the agreement and obedience of everyone in the entire world, ever. 9) It requires those with the most power and resources to voluntarily relinquish those resources and live at a lower standard of living. Eclipse Phase at least creates a secondary economic system to replace capitalism in the form of the reputation economy. I'm still competing for resources, but instead of getting dollars for it, I get bings and bumps on my rep score. There's also the initial assumption as part of the setting that 3D printing is as super as advertised, and energy is as cheap as we can imagine.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 17:04
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Arenamontanus wrote:
That said, I think the real problem is this: we evolved in a different environment, not just in terms of resources but also in terms of social group size and intellectual complexity. It is unsurprising that our minds are lagging, especially since it takes generations for even simple economic concepts like the Law of Comparative Advantage to diffuse into common knowledge. And that is essentially just a meme, something that is good at spreading. Societal institutions update more slowly than people, and we should expect even more of a lag. But there is a bright light: technology enables new possibilities, and we can invent new institutions at a decently rapid rate. This allows some leeway for experimentation and innovation, and sometimes we stumble upon disruptive ideas that raze the old stuff in creative destruction (industrialisation, containerization, the web, etc). But figuring out which ideas are like that usually takes plenty of trial and error rather than brilliant planning. Now, one of the problems I see with RBA is that most thinking about it presupposes that in order to be tested it has to encompass a fairly sizeable society. There doesn't seem to be a way of testing it in a small scale experiment, like you could with bitcoin. This means that it has a low probability of ever being tested... or that, if you think it has something going for it, you should try to construct a mini-version that can be tested on a small scale, and - if successful - spread and scale up.
Agreed. I've always said that the best way to get a post-scarcity society going is to create a village based around the concept. Implementing any new social theory is damn difficult on a national level, let alone on a global scale. All of the most durable social memes spread naturally, not forcibly, over a populace; religion, democracy, secularity, civil equality, and more work best when they are implemented in a gradual manner. Oftentimes when something is implemented quickly, it is a sure sign that it is ephemeral.
Arenamontanus wrote:
A post scarcity economy is in a sense impossible, because there are some things that are always more scarce than we would like: social recognition, attention, the front seats at the great concert, true love, answers to the questions *we* think are important but nobody else cares about. Fix material scarcity and other kinds of scarcity become more obvious (so, you can print out a palace? Fine, but the Malibu beach-front is already taken). Even in Iain M. Banks Culture novels, where material, energy, space and intellectual scarcity are solved problems there is a demand for meaningful action that cannot be met fully. Of course, fixing material scarcity is a *good thing* and we should pursue it with enthusiasm, but it is not going to solve all problems. Fine, but maybe we can fix the allocation part? Right now we allocate stuff according to economic efficiency mediated by money. We know barter allocation is too inflexible, and that central planning breaks down due to information limitations. Reputation economies might turn allocation into a popularity contest, for good and ill. What to base the money on is largely a side issue: the truly important thing is the principles telling us who gets what. They may contain some moral views and nice theory, but in the end it is the actual outcomes that matter. Often these outcomes are extremely nontrivial and impossible to predict beforehand, since they are produced by millions of minds rather than the handful of system designer minds.
Exactly. Even today, we see the effects of popularity as a scarce resource within the context of democracies… memes and candidates become laws and representatives simply through the process of being voted in by the most people. In many scenarios, this is a good thing, but a pure democratic or reputation-based model always runs the risk of tyranny by the majority. The question becomes how to balance that in this theoretical new model.
Arenamontanus wrote:
Again, I think the solution is experimentation. Both theoretical and simulation, but more importantly, in the form of small setups or institutions that can scale up if things look promising. Hence my interest in ideas like bitcoin rather than fragile all-or-nothing utopia projects.
Exactly. Any sound new social structure requires modularity and the ability to exist on any scale. The problem I see with RBA is that it only seems to work if implemented globally. But that's an insane manner to structure a government; it'd be like designing a building that must be assembled all at once. In the case of RBA, I see it having two fundamental problems; an extremely difficult structure to implement initially, and a structure that collapses should it not be successfully installed within even only a small portion of human society. Lack of scalability is a terrible disadvantage for a government to have.
Arenamontanus wrote:
(OK, that was a *good* cup of coffee... or maybe I just got possessed by the ghost of Hayek)
I agree. Salma Hayek is gorgeous. Hmm? What's that? Who the hell is Friedrich Hayek?! :D
—
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Fri, 2012-07-20 17:39
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
A real RBE as proposed by Zeitgeist (and actually, I first discovered it through Bucky Fuller over 15 years ago, so it wasn't new to me) MUST be done globally...you can't do it on a village scale because the whole point is that resources are scattered randomly and unequally throughout the globe. The first step of an RBE is to tally ALLy resources..i.e how many tons of each kind of ore, how much steel currently already in the world (in every building, car, etc.) so that it can be distributed in such a way with the most cutting edge tech so that everyone has enough of everything...naturally many wasteful and inefficient technologies (like gas powered vehicles and airplanes) will need to be replaced by more efficient methods of achieving their aims (like vacuum-sealed maglev tubes replacing air travel), and everything needs to be designed from the ground up to last as long as possible (good-bye planned obsolescence and the parts industry!), be upgradable, and fully recyclable when it is finally no longer relevant. We've seen some shifts towards this kind of manufacturing in Europe.
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Fri, 2012-07-20 18:52
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
A real RBE as proposed by Zeitgeist (and actually, I first discovered it through Bucky Fuller over 15 years ago, so it wasn't new to me) MUST be done globally...you can't do it on a village scale because the whole point is that resources are scattered randomly and unequally throughout the globe.
And that is why it is unlikely to ever work. Incidentally, this is why Bucky-domes are relatively rare: they are also unstable until complete. Builders generally like to have buildings that hold together during construction.
Quote:
and everything needs to be designed from the ground up to last as long as possible (good-bye planned obsolescence and the parts industry!), be upgradable, and fully recyclable when it is finally no longer relevant. We've seen some shifts towards this kind of manufacturing in Europe.
Where? I am certainly not seeing it from my horizon in the UK and Sweden. This kind of perfectionist design is very brittle: everything depends on the genius of the planner, who has to foresee every little detail. I think Bruce Sterling got things more right in his book on spimes ("Shaping Things"), where he argued that we can not know what we will need, so we should construct as much as possible to be data gathering, easy to make or unmake, but most importantly easy to change and customize. Linux instead of Mac.
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Extropian
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Fri, 2012-07-20 18:57
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
A real RBE as proposed by Zeitgeist (and actually, I first discovered it through Bucky Fuller over 15 years ago, so it wasn't new to me) MUST be done globally...you can't do it on a village scale because the whole point is that resources are scattered randomly and unequally throughout the globe. The first step of an RBE is to tally ALLy resources..i.e how many tons of each kind of ore, how much steel currently already in the world (in every building, car, etc.) so that it can be distributed in such a way with the most cutting edge tech so that everyone has enough of everything...naturally many wasteful and inefficient technologies (like gas powered vehicles and airplanes) will need to be replaced by more efficient methods of achieving their aims (like vacuum-sealed maglev tubes replacing air travel), and everything needs to be designed from the ground up to last as long as possible (good-bye planned obsolescence and the parts industry!), be upgradable, and fully recyclable when it is finally no longer relevant. We've seen some shifts towards this kind of manufacturing in Europe.
Such a structure is damn near infeasible to implement. Society does not shift so quickly, and so dramatically. Even the fastest memes have to propogate in a relatively gradual process… no governmental structure can be implemented in excess of the speed of LOLcats without resistance. So this system is effectively doomed to fail. It might be better implemented as a last-step recalibration of another, more gradual transitional model. Unless you wish to implement your new system via military might and force of will, it will require three elements, only one of which RBE seems to have: [b]Autonomy[/b]: This is the one that RBE can pull off. A feasible replacement model needs to be able to sustain itself. This doesn't have to be present right away; many fledgling models may very well be reliant on other entities to survive early on (as it acquires the resources it needs to achieve autonomy, for instance). But any feasible model must attain this before it can be considered viable: without it, any model is merely a sub-model of whatever it happens to be reliant on. [b]Scalability[/b]: All feasible models must be workable under nearly any social scale that might exist. Whether it be a family, a village, a nation or a planet, the model must be able to function as any of these. And while I know that an optimal system has access to all resources, modern systems must be able to cope with the possibility that this can't be the case. After all, what if we run out of a resource? How will RBE be able to cope with that? [b]Compatibility[/b]: Lastly, every feasible model must be able to interact in some way with other models. Whether through trade, social interaction, or something else, the model cannot fold if it comes in contact with another social structure. This one is one of the most integral, and most crucial to creating a worldwide revolution. Ideas spread memetically, through the inspiration of others. A social structure is, at its essence, a meme. Therefore to spread it, you must inspire others to implement it as well. An insular community simply does not inspire and propogate; which is why communes don't tend to spread. Furthermore, if the social structure is so fragile that exposure to other systems risks its destruction, then it cannot function as a social paradigm. This is the downfall of many dictatorships, as totalitarian dominance does not remain sustainable when the populace is introduced to ideologies like democracy, natural human rights and secularism. The last one is the biggest downfall of RBE. It simply does not take into account the existence of other civilizations. It only works if it exists as a closed system. But how can that be feasible? What if a branch of humanity decides to offshoot, how will it cope? How will it handle coming into contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should one exist? Without all these things, no new system can be successful. They are absolutely essential. If you can implement RBE in a manner that espouses all these properties, then it's a possibility. Until then, no.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Fri, 2012-07-20 19:04
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
A real pessimist aren't you? ;) Of course it isn't likely. Life isn't likely. Sapience isn't likely. The internet and this conversation happening aren't likely. Neither was going to the moon. History is full of unlikely things happening because people wanted them to. Yes, for a true global RBE we would have to essentially forgo our small minded nationalistic identities (sure some regional culture and tradition would still flourish) in favor of a united world, where everyone has more than enough. The real kick in the nuts about this topic is that the scarcity we think we're living in, where poverty, starvation and death are tolerated or even encouraged...is entirely artificial. As Bucky said "there isn't a crisis of energy, there is a crisis of ignorance." His whole train of thought was doing more, much more, with less and less...spiraling efficiency, automation and decentralization to free up humans to be survival-worthy generalists devoted to livingry, instead of easy-to-extinguish specialists focused on weaponry. Interesting thing about geodesics...once you get them up they are actually stronger and more stable the larger you build them. I read somewhere once that putting a dome over Manhattan would pay for itself quickly in the savings that would accrue from climate control alone...
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Fri, 2012-07-20 20:20
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
A real pessimist aren't you? ;) Of course it isn't likely. Life isn't likely. Sapience isn't likely. The internet and this conversation happening aren't likely. Neither was going to the moon. History is full of unlikely things happening because people wanted them to. Yes, for a true global RBE we would have to essentially forgo our small minded nationalistic identities (sure some regional culture and tradition would still flourish) in favor of a united world, where everyone has more than enough.
There is a difference between those things and RBE. Sapience came gradually. The internet came gradually. Traveling to the moon came gradually. Even this conversation came about as a byproduct of previous things, the least of which was the success of this game and the foundation of these forums. But RBE is a system reliant on the idea that it can be implement worldwide in one fell swoop. That's a bit more unlikely than the previous examples. It's about as likely as a religion converting the entire human race overnight.
TekHed wrote:
The real kick in the nuts about this topic is that the scarcity we think we're living in, where poverty, starvation and death are tolerated or even encouraged...is entirely artificial. As Bucky said "there isn't a crisis of energy, there is a crisis of ignorance." His whole train of thought was doing more, much more, with less and less...spiraling efficiency, automation and decentralization to free up humans to be survival-worthy generalists devoted to livingry, instead of easy-to-extinguish specialists focused on weaponry. Interesting thing about geodesics...once you get them up they are actually stronger and more stable the larger you build them. I read somewhere once that putting a dome over Manhattan would pay for itself quickly in the savings that would accrue from climate control alone...
True, but if we were building a geodesic structure, we would likely do so by creating an underlying support structure to hold it up while it is being constructed. One that trades long-term stability for modularity and scalability. That's the problem with RBE. It does not have an underlying social structure to support it during implementation.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sat, 2012-07-21 04:29
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Well, I certainly agree that the transitionary phase is the most difficult aspect and is the crux of my concern and thoughts. I don't think it is impossible though...consider the power of the media. The trouble is, the media is almost wholly controlled by the ruling financial elite. There are enough people more or less awake, and enough people hungry for change, that if the nations of the world all put forward a campaign to make a global change, and fed it with the right kinds of media messages and really delivered on the goods, people would cooperate in droves to make the shift happen relatively painlessly. Otherwise...I fear it is going to take hyperinflation, perhaps plague, civil unrest, and worse to jar people into an awakening..and the trouble there is we are just as likely to end up in some form of post-apocalyptic scenario or a totalitarian state as we are the promised land. This country was founded on violent revolution...too bad the current powers that be are not of Jefferson's ilk. Either that, or the aliens are going to have to land or...something. Humanity needs to take it's collective head out of it's ass. Edit: Have you watched the films yet? I think, if we are going to expend energy in conversation then: a.) Can we all agree that our current system of inequality is NOT working for everyone, that it is destroying the health of our environment and ourselves.? That it MUST change? b.) If we can all agree on a.), then it makes less sense to keep talking about "how it will never work" and more sense to talk about how it might work, how it could work? For those who are convinced a RBE will just never work...how about putting forward your better ideas then? The core concept of a RBE is to maximize efficiency. The reason we experience scarcity is because we are MASSIVELY wasteful. A post-scarcity economy means that waste and inefficiency must be designed out of the system...so how would you do that, if not a computer controlled resource management system? Do you think we could do it with legislation and enforcement alone in our existing system? Can we have post-scarcity, at the same time as a central bank controlled fractional reserve debt-based system? I would argue no. Seriously...if you're just going to nay-say, you're defending the status quo and you're being part of the problem. Can we focus on discussing possible solutions, and how they might be implemented? That is where the juice lies, not in pessimistic resignation.
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Sat, 2012-07-21 06:35
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
I don't think it is impossible though...consider the power of the media. The trouble is, the media is almost wholly controlled by the ruling financial elite.
I think this is an example of something that wouldn't work even if *all* ruling elites agreed and tried. It is simply too unstable. In game theory there is a concept called evolutionarily stable strategies, ESS. These are strategies that are stable not only if all follow them, but also if enough of a majority do. Anybody who deviates from them will do worse than the followers, so agents gravitate towards them. Think of choosing between which way of the road to drive: you benefit enormously from doing the same as everybody else even without police to enforce it. The RBA proposals does not seem to be ESSes: a defector can do very well by exploiting the system, and a group of defectors can do even better. So even if you could magic things so everybody starts out in RBA, you will likely get defections that undermine the whole thing.
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This country was founded on violent revolution...too bad the current powers that be are not of Jefferson's ilk.
Well, it was also largely an agrarian society with very simple governance structure. It is much easier to reform simple societies than complex ones.
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a.) Can we all agree that our current system of inequality is NOT working for everyone, that it is destroying the health of our environment and ourselves.? That it MUST change?
No. Sorry, but this is handwavey (beyond the first sentence tautology). We do not have *a* current system but quite a lot of different ones, each with different effects. And they are going to change no matter what anyway. We want change in some (as yet undefined) nice direction, and it might be a moral imperative to get there. But even that end does not necessarily justify all means.
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b.) If we can all agree on a.), then it makes less sense to keep talking about "how it will never work" and more sense to talk about how it might work, how it could work? For those who are convinced a RBE will just never work...how about putting forward your better ideas then?
What about futarchy? http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.71.8309 Note that this goes beyond just resource allocation, this is actually about how to get good decisions.
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The core concept of a RBE is to maximize efficiency. The reason we experience scarcity is because we are MASSIVELY wasteful. A post-scarcity economy means that waste and inefficiency must be designed out of the system...
Wait a minute here. A post-scarcity economy would *encourage* waste and inefficiency, since there would be no penalty for it. Merely reducing waste does not produce a post-scarcity economy, you need the innovations that make resources extremely easy to get. A world of perfect recycling is not post-scarcity, since every single object is tracked and accounted for, and you will be made aware where it is needed: it is in a psychological sense a scarcity economy even if there is plenty. Maximizing efficiency also requires you to define what goals are being optimized for. The beauty of markets is that they can handle new and emergent goals: if I want to collect beetles I can buy them and send price signals that more beetles are needed, but this works very badly in centrally controlled systems (submit a form to the Economat computer or Gosplan to get my hobby approved?) In particular, there are goals that are not consciously known, and often innovations introduce new goals.
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so how would you do that, if not a computer controlled resource management system?
You are aware of the economic calculation problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem , right? (There is a mention at the end of Cockshott and Cottrell, who think computers could do it, but there has never been any demonstration of anything that works - check the literature, lots of claims, no demonstrations ever)
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Can we focus on discussing possible solutions, and how they might be implemented? That is where the juice lies, not in pessimistic resignation.
Personally I think the solution lies in freer markets, with stronger transparency and reputation systems. Get rid of a lot of the big state structures we do not need, construct lightweight government and transnational APIs that make it easier to do coordination. But then again, see my signature-bar...
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Sat, 2012-07-21 12:27
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Decivre wrote:
no governmental structure can be implemented in excess of the speed of LOLcats without resistance.
I just had to repeat that line. Sorry to interrupt :P
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Sat, 2012-07-21 17:56
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
I need to stop being absent for days at a time. I miss good chances to enter a conversation.
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Agreed. I've always said that the best way to get a post-scarcity society going is to create a village based around the concept. Implementing any new social theory is damn difficult on a national level, let alone on a global scale. All of the most durable social memes spread naturally, not forcibly, over a populace; religion, democracy, secularity, civil equality, and more work best when they are implemented in a gradual manner. Oftentimes when something is implemented quickly, it is a sure sign that it is ephemeral.
I remember there was a kickstarter project that wanted funding so they could develop an open source village construction kit. One of the reasons for it was to reduce the start up cost of making a village, and make such a thing open source and available to the global community. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/622508883/global-village-constructio... More info http://opensourceecology.org/ http://opensourceecology.org/wiki So as you can see, there is some work being done in the department of post-scarcity.
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Wait a minute here. A post-scarcity economy would *encourage* waste and inefficiency, since there would be no penalty for it. Merely reducing waste does not produce a post-scarcity economy, you need the innovations that make resources extremely easy to get. A world of perfect recycling is not post-scarcity, since every single object is tracked and accounted for, and you will be made aware where it is needed: it is in a psychological sense a scarcity economy even if there is plenty.
I think that too. I don't think a post-scarcity economy would do so well without some mechanism to force people to behave (which might get in the way of transitioning to an even better economy at some later date). I fear that some people will react to a post-scarcity economy in the same way a bunch of teenagers might react to being given a lot of alcohol. They would want to have one hell of a party. Of course, they would keep wanting to make a bigger and better party. *I fear* that such behavior would put a considerable strain on a post-scarcity economy as it would pit seemingly limitless demand against a seemingly limitless supply. I'm fairly sure that the odds would be against the post-scarcity economy if it didn't have some means to enforce control.
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Sat, 2012-07-21 19:08
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
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I think this is an example of something that wouldn't work even if *all* ruling elites agreed and tried. It is simply too unstable.
Based on what evidence do you make this assertion? Seeing as how no planet that we know of has ever tried it, and whatever models people make are clearly going to be based on current assumptions, I don't see how you can make this claim. Plainly put, it's never been seriously tried before.
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So even if you could magic things so everybody starts out in RBA, you will likely get defections that undermine the whole thing.
What would be the motivation for defection? What would there be to gain? With no ability to make a profit or hoard at the expense of others the only option for a defector would be some kind of military coup. When you have a global population that is experiencing a standard of living higher than anyone has now, why would anyone want to defect?
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No. Sorry, but this is handwavey (beyond the first sentence tautology). We do not have *a* current system but quite a lot of different ones, each with different effects.
This seems too naive for you. We do have a current system...it is called central banking and fractional reserve lending, and it is THE dominant system on the planet right now. Whatever you think of the political systems, they are wholly subservient to the almighty dolla. As Nathan Rosthchild famously quoted: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply." Which is often misqoted as "Give me the power to control a nation;s money supply and I care not who makes it's laws." Given that the British Empire was THE most powerful empire in the world at the time he said it it is easy to see.
And they are going to change no matter what anyway. /quote] Yes, the changes that have been happening are that the elite becomes ever more powerful and entrenched while the technology to control a population and deal with subversives has grown ever greater. [quote wrote:
Wait a minute here. A post-scarcity economy would *encourage* waste and inefficiency, since there would be no penalty for it.
Um...you clearly don't know what you are talking about here. A RBE is all about designing things that are as durable, resource efficient and sustainable as possible. A RBE is about reducing waste to zero...we really should make landfills obsolete. It's not that there would be no penalty for it...it just would not exist.
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A world of perfect recycling is not post-scarcity, since every single object is tracked and accounted for, and you will be made aware where it is needed: it is in a psychological sense a scarcity economy even if there is plenty.
Again it seems to me like you are talking out of your arse here. How do you know this? I would argue we would be living in psychological abundance greater than anything we have now. Everyone would have access to everything they need or want. That is why our engineered scarcity is so troublesome...we assume that someone must go without and therefore we have wars, not realizing that there really IS enough to go around...if only we got super efficient, did more with less (as per Bucky) and analyzed our actual needs and wants intelligently. I suspect that deep down you wouldn't want this kind of system to work out because you prefer to be an elite while the have-nots suffer.
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Maximizing efficiency also requires you to define what goals are being optimized for.
Goal 1: everyone has plenty of nutritious food, clean air and water, shelter, and access to medicine, education, and opportunity to apply themselves to whatever fields of inquiry they desire. Goal 2: That in the pursuit of the above, we do not cause any harm to our environment, upon which we depend for our resources and rejuvenation. Seriously...this is the worst kind of deflection. If we start with the assumption that any system that does not provide all of the above is NOT acceptable, we will be off to a good start.
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The beauty of markets is that they can handle new and emergent goals: if I want to collect beetles I can buy them and send price signals that more beetles are needed, but this works very badly in centrally controlled systems (submit a form to the Economat computer or Gosplan to get my hobby approved?) In particular, there are goals that are not consciously known, and often innovations introduce new goals.
Market theory is bullshit. If markets were the be all end all solution they would have solved our problems right now. I think people who put their faith in the markets as we now have them is in denial. The market system we have are responsible for every problem we have, as they are motivated purely by profit, divorced from social and environmental responsibility. That is exactly what happened in the Gulf of Mexico...the company knew there was a problem, but didn't want to fork out their profits to fix it. I have ZERO faith in markets or politics to solve our problems...the systems in place have CREATED our problems.
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Personally I think the solution lies in freer markets, with stronger transparency and reputation systems. Get rid of a lot of the big state structures we do not need, construct lightweight government and transnational APIs that make it easier to do coordination. But then again, see my signature-bar...
I agree in order to have a truly free market you have to essentially get rid of intellectual property...in order for it to work everyone has to have equal access to all information, and equal means to pursue production, otherwise you just end up with more monopolies and controlling oligarchies. We could also do with lean, lightweight government, where corporations are not treated like citizens, where money has been wholly removed from politics, and agencies like the EPA are given SERIOUS teeth to go after environmental offenders. Where all the money we spend on military ventures instead goes to infrastructure, technology, and ESPECIALLY universal high level education. Did you see the link I posted showing the proportion of annual military expenditures that it would take to solve all of the world's major issues? I really can't say it better than that. In a way the first step is to abolish war entirely, but for that to work you have to abolish inequality, and that means all of the things I've been talking about.
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I think that too. I don't think a post-scarcity economy would do so well without some mechanism to force people to behave (which might get in the way of transitioning to an even better economy at some later date). I fear that some people will react to a post-scarcity economy in the same way a bunch of teenagers might react to being given a lot of alcohol. They would want to have one hell of a party. Of course, they would keep wanting to make a bigger and better party. *I fear* that such behavior would put a considerable strain on a post-scarcity economy as it would pit seemingly limitless demand against a seemingly limitless supply. I'm fairly sure that the odds would be against the post-scarcity economy if it didn't have some means to enforce control.
What's wrong with a party? Seriously, this world could use a damn party...an orgy even, with how repressed we have been by the powers that be. Your argument is valid, in that in the wake of such repression, people tend to swing the pendulum the other way when the corset finally comes off. The ridiculous thing is that even while "austerity measures" are beginning to be enacted upon the people in response to the worsening global economic crisis, the wealthy elite are living it up more than ever before, getting richer and richer. This kind of systemic inequality HAS to stop. It is at best unenlightened and irresponsible, and at worst criminal and evil.
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Sat, 2012-07-21 19:50
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
Well, I certainly agree that the transitionary phase is the most difficult aspect and is the crux of my concern and thoughts. I don't think it is impossible though...consider the power of the media. The trouble is, the media is almost wholly controlled by the ruling financial elite.
One inherent problem with this mindset is that even if we assumed that the ruling elite controlled all media (they don't), that doesn't change the fact that the media is just as fragmented as human society is. At least it is with regards to American media. What you are asking for is a unified message and unified conversion for the entire populace. You can't even get the entire populace to agree on what many people believe to be fundamental concepts; whether women should be equal to men, whether races should have equal rights, whether religion should have a hand in politics, which religion should have a hand in politics… these are all things that the human race disagrees about on a very broad scale. If we can't even get humanity to agree that smoking is bad, what makes you think we can get them to agree that this new government structure is best for our world?
TekHed wrote:
There are enough people more or less awake, and enough people hungry for change, that if the nations of the world all put forward a campaign to make a global change, and fed it with the right kinds of media messages and really delivered on the goods, people would cooperate in droves to make the shift happen relatively painlessly.
I thought the same thing with the Occupy movement. Here we are, two months from the anniversary, and while they have changed the political landscape, they did not bring the massive sweeping changes one might have thought they would. And it isn't even the first time. Before them came the Tea Party. Before that a dozen other movements. Many of them get change done, but never on the scale you desire.
TekHed wrote:
Otherwise...I fear it is going to take hyperinflation, perhaps plague, civil unrest, and worse to jar people into an awakening..and the trouble there is we are just as likely to end up in some form of post-apocalyptic scenario or a totalitarian state as we are the promised land.
Between "unrealistic worldwide revolution" and "totalitarian apocalypse" lies "gradual social shift that humanity has tended to do since the dawn of civilization". I'm thinking that's the more likely scenario.
TekHed wrote:
This country was founded on violent revolution...too bad the current powers that be are not of Jefferson's ilk.
Jefferson and his ilk weren't perfect men, and the "more perfect union" they created was anything but. The founding fathers of the United States were just as faulted as we (if not more so… the average American today has access to infinitely more education than the average American in Jefferson's time). But never has even violent revolution sparked a utopian society. Even our country dehumanized portions of the populace and only made citizens of white male landowners and their male children. We actually live in a far more free society than they ever built. Take that for what it's worth
TekHed wrote:
I think, if we are going to expend energy in conversation then: a.) Can we all agree that our current system of inequality is NOT working for everyone, that it is destroying the health of our environment and ourselves.? That it MUST change?
Sure. But is there ever a system that works for everyone? How can you even be sure that RBE would work for everyone? Because the designer says it will?
TekHed wrote:
b.) If we can all agree on a.), then it makes less sense to keep talking about "how it will never work" and more sense to talk about how it might work, how it could work? For those who are convinced a RBE will just never work...how about putting forward your better ideas then?
I have put forward plenty of ideas in this and the previous thread. None on the scope of RBE, but that's kind of the point; I don't think you could make a massive-scale shift of the entirety of human society. It's just not possible. Can we change portions of it? Sure. If I had the money and resources, I would love to buy a plot of land and try to build a small experimental society, just to test out new currency theories and social structures. I'm sure we'd come up with a solution on a local level, which could over time be implemented on a larger scale over time. But there will never be a quick solution to major problems.
TekHed wrote:
The core concept of a RBE is to maximize efficiency. The reason we experience scarcity is because we are MASSIVELY wasteful. A post-scarcity economy means that waste and inefficiency must be designed out of the system...so how would you do that, if not a computer controlled resource management system? Do you think we could do it with legislation and enforcement alone in our existing system? Can we have post-scarcity, at the same time as a central bank controlled fractional reserve debt-based system? I would argue no.
Incorrect as hell. Post-scarcity systems are extremely wasteful, to the point that it's almost ludicrous. When everything becomes near-valueless, people tend to treat it as such. Look at the efficacy of the internet, a place where digital data is now post-scarcity; how many redundant copies of files exist in various parts of the web? How inefficient is the file structure of the internet? The answers are "too many" and "too much". That's the reality of post-scarcity. With new changes come new problems.
TekHed wrote:
Seriously...if you're just going to nay-say, you're defending the status quo and you're being part of the problem.
Here is the problem right here, almost perfectly surmised. Here you are showcasing a false dichotomy, and the tribalistic attitudes that humanity has had its entire existence. You have compartmentalized the whole of humanity into an "us or them" structure. This is the tribal mentality I said is the problem. If even people that know it's a problem can tend to fall into using it, how can we expect to convince the whole of humanity to just throw it away overnight?
TekHed wrote:
Can we focus on discussing possible solutions, and how they might be implemented? That is where the juice lies, not in pessimistic resignation.
How are me or Arenamontanus being pessimistic? I actually tend to be an optimistic realist. The problem with RBE is that it isn't realistic. It's the only reason I shoot it down. Besides, if you want to talk about pessimism, what about you? A few paragraphs up you tell us that either RBE has to happen or we will live in a post-apocalyptic landscape. But [i]we're[/i] the pessimists? I'm plenty willing to throw out suggestions. I have plenty, including on how to start the creation of a new social order (hint: it starts with creating prototype villages). We can discuss them plenty.
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Sat, 2012-07-21 20:35
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
Based on what evidence do you make this assertion? Seeing as how no planet that we know of has ever tried it, and whatever models people make are clearly going to be based on current assumptions, I don't see how you can make this claim. Plainly put, it's never been seriously tried before.
The Catholic Orthodoxy controlled the entirety of Western media for over a millennia. The protestant revolution still occurred. So yes it has been tried. Total media domination did not keep the Catholic Church in complete control of Europe. Because people will eventually think for themselves. No matter how much media influence you have, you simply cannot stop the human tendency to rebel.
TekHed wrote:
What would be the motivation for defection? What would there be to gain? With no ability to make a profit or hoard at the expense of others the only option for a defector would be some kind of military coup. When you have a global population that is experiencing a standard of living higher than anyone has now, why would anyone want to defect?
For the same reason that a protestor can hold up a sign that says "Keep your government hands of my Medicare". Everybody has their own opinion about how the world is suppose to work, and even if it works great, they will resist if it doesn't do it their way. Such is human nature. Why do you think we ceased to be in a surplus? Because we took something that worked and decided "I can make this better". Even though we apparently couldn't.
TekHed wrote:
This seems too naive for you. We do have a current system...it is called central banking and fractional reserve lending, and it is THE dominant system on the planet right now. Whatever you think of the political systems, they are wholly subservient to the almighty dolla. As Nathan Rosthchild famously quoted: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply." Which is often misqoted as "Give me the power to control a nation;s money supply and I care not who makes it's laws." Given that the British Empire was THE most powerful empire in the world at the time he said it it is easy to see.
Incorrect. Many countries do not have a central bank, the first of which to come to mind is China. Second being the Philippines. But only because I know those two off-hand. There are plenty of African countries that do not have a central bank. Brazil does not have a central bank. The list is actually quite big. In simplest terms, central banks are a western concept, largely dominating the US and Europe.
TekHed wrote:
Yes, the changes that have been happening are that the elite becomes ever more powerful and entrenched while the technology to control a population and deal with subversives has grown ever greater.
I disagree. The ability to control the population has shrank as of late. The internet has opened up new avenues for people to question authority. If anything, the internet has been the biggest weapon against populace control and media domination. It puts control over information back in the hands of the people, in the broadest way.
TekHed wrote:
Um...you clearly don't know what you are talking about here. A RBE is all about designing things that are as durable, resource efficient and sustainable as possible. A RBE is about reducing waste to zero...we really should make landfills obsolete. It's not that there would be no penalty for it...it just would not exist.
Except people will still waste. If I can get an iPod for free, then what's to stop me from throwing that iPod on the ground when it stops working right? Hell, I know plenty of people that, if given unlimited access to material goods, would probably use the opportunity to light it on fire for funsies. Every society needs to take into account human nature, or it is destined to fail.
TekHed wrote:
Again it seems to me like you are talking out of your arse here. How do you know this? I would argue we would be living in psychological abundance greater than anything we have now. Everyone would have access to everything they need or want. That is why our engineered scarcity is so troublesome...we assume that someone must go without and therefore we have wars, not realizing that there really IS enough to go around...if only we got super efficient, did more with less (as per Bucky) and analyzed our actual needs and wants intelligently.
Again, this is the crux of the issue. A super-efficient government is great, but without laws to enforce efficiency among the populace, they'll have no incentive to be anything but wasteful.
TekHed wrote:
I suspect that deep down you wouldn't want this kind of system to work out because you prefer to be an elite while the have-nots suffer.
That sounds like an ad-hominem attack. There's no point in telling someone who disagrees with you that they are an "elitist". Considering that many of the people here may even be anarchists (or anarcho-communists), it comes off more ironic than anything.
TekHed wrote:
Goal 1: everyone has plenty of nutritious food, clean air and water, shelter, and access to medicine, education, and opportunity to apply themselves to whatever fields of inquiry they desire. Goal 2: That in the pursuit of the above, we do not cause any harm to our environment, upon which we depend for our resources and rejuvenation. Seriously...this is the worst kind of deflection. If we start with the assumption that any system that does not provide all of the above is NOT acceptable, we will be off to a good start.
But that is one of the fundamental dilemmas when it comes to resource management. What if we should find the cure to every disease on Earth, but it has major environmental ramifications (which it would; there has to be repercussions to destroying the micro-flora in the world in order to prevent illness)? What if we should find a means to repair the environment, but it could be detrimental to human beings (another possibility; our current path has been about modifying the world to suit our needs, so reversing that might have dire consequences for us)? These are things that have to be pondered. Not every solution is going to be all positive and no negatives.
TekHed wrote:
Market theory is bullshit. If markets were the be all end all solution they would have solved our problems right now. I think people who put their faith in the markets as we now have them is in denial. The market system we have are responsible for every problem we have, as they are motivated purely by profit, divorced from social and environmental responsibility. That is exactly what happened in the Gulf of Mexico...the company knew there was a problem, but didn't want to fork out their profits to fix it. I have ZERO faith in markets or politics to solve our problems...the systems in place have CREATED our problems.
Systems don't inherently cause problems. People that game systems is what cause problems. A market works if used as intended. The problem is that people use loopholes and flaws in the system to gain an advantage. But there's no system that will ever stop that. Even with RBE, you're bound to have people that will find a way to game the resource distribution structure that is in place. You might think that an advanced computer would be capable of preventing that, but advanced computers have been gamed before. If you build a better system, than the human race will build a better asshole to take advantage of it.
TekHed wrote:
I agree in order to have a truly free market you have to essentially get rid of intellectual property...in order for it to work everyone has to have equal access to all information, and equal means to pursue production, otherwise you just end up with more monopolies and controlling oligarchies. We could also do with lean, lightweight government, where corporations are not treated like citizens, where money has been wholly removed from politics, and agencies like the EPA are given SERIOUS teeth to go after environmental offenders. Where all the money we spend on military ventures instead goes to infrastructure, technology, and ESPECIALLY universal high level education.
Now we get to stuff that we can agree on. I too believe that intellectual property (at least as it currently exists) is a terrible thing. If copyright worked in a similar manner to open licenses and the Creative Commons, it would probably be an acceptable form of intellectual control. But as it stands, copyrights and patents hold back, not encourage, the advancement of society. I also agree with the rest of what you say. These are much more realistic changes that should be done as soon as possible. Thought we can't completely eliminate military expenditures, the age of the army is long gone. Today, a smaller surgical team is a far more effective weapon against our enemies. Armies are best relegated to homefront security, where they will cost us less in the long term.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sun, 2012-07-22 10:27
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
TekHed wrote:
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I think this is an example of something that wouldn't work even if *all* ruling elites agreed and tried. It is simply too unstable.
Based on what evidence do you make this assertion?
The ESS argument. Which is a very strong one. That something has not been tried does not mean we cannot rule out certain possibilities based on general principles.
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So even if you could magic things so everybody starts out in RBA, you will likely get defections that undermine the whole thing.
What would be the motivation for defection? What would there be to gain? With no ability to make a profit or hoard at the expense of others the only option for a defector would be some kind of military coup. When you have a global population that is experiencing a standard of living higher than anyone has now, why would anyone want to defect?
If the system says I cannot have something I want, I will be motivated to get it by cheating the system. This is why black markets exist, and there are many products people desire strongly - unhealthy food, drugs, sex, art, weapons. Yes, many of these desires might be irrational, but that will not stop them from desiring. Another motivation for defection is because people are strongly motivated by social signalling behaviours, which often lead to escalating races to gain status or reduce status of other groups (since status is a zero sum game): resources would be used for these games. And many people have strong preferences for identity that are incompatible with the preferences of other groups. As an example, how will RBA allocate the land of Israel between Jews, Palestinians and everybody else?
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And they are going to change no matter what anyway. /quote] Yes, the changes that have been happening are that the elite becomes ever more powerful and entrenched while the technology to control a population and deal with subversives has grown ever greater.?
Have you checked the shifts in Gini coefficient in different societies over the past century? It is all over the place. The *way* economies work has profoundly shifted - banking is just a small part of it. Not to mention that control has also changed, but not in a simple way. That said, we are indeed in a period of opportunity before certain technologies enable some particularly nasty forms of stable governance: by my calculations 24-7 surveillance of whole populations will start to become practical in the West around 2020 and in the poorest nations sometime just after 2030. We better get governments *no matter their economic model* to behave, or we will see some extremely sticky totalitarian systems. But one way of preventing totalitarian systems is of course to ensure the economy is not centrally run...
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Wait a minute here. A post-scarcity economy would *encourage* waste and inefficiency, since there would be no penalty for it.
Um...you clearly don't know what you are talking about here. A RBE is all about designing things that are as durable, resource efficient and sustainable as possible. A RBE is about reducing waste to zero...we really should make landfills obsolete. It's not that there would be no penalty for it...it just would not exist.
OK, I am finished with my Taj Mahal copy and set fire to it, going away to have a new one built on the other side of the continent. What happens with the resources? How are they recycled? What are the incentives for somebody to come and pick them up? If there is no cost to me to set fire to palaces every week, a lot of resources are literally going to be turned into carbon dioxide.
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A world of perfect recycling is not post-scarcity, since every single object is tracked and accounted for, and you will be made aware where it is needed: it is in a psychological sense a scarcity economy even if there is plenty.
Again it seems to me like you are talking out of your arse here. How do you know this? I would argue we would be living in psychological abundance greater than anything we have now. Everyone would have access to everything they need or want. That is why our engineered scarcity is so troublesome...we assume that someone must go without and therefore we have wars, not realizing that there really IS enough to go around...if only we got super efficient, did more with less (as per Bucky) and analyzed our actual needs and wants intelligently.?
You seem to assume that if there was no scarcity people would immediately have reasonable desires (and not torch palaces). But even reasonable desires can be very expensive: I would fully support physicists to build enormous particle accelerators, and of course we need a *big* space program (to reduce xrisk, see what is out there and to spread life). Meanwhile religious people will want to build nice monuments to their faith. Are these reasonable desires? How do you effectively judge it? Price mechanisms are important because they balance desires. Scarcity in a price system means prices go up and people get motivated to recycle or find new resources. Scarcity in a non-price system means just that people can't get what they want or need. Non-scarcity leads to waste, but in price systems this can be handled by putting a cost on externalities (you get fined for littering or polluting, say). Non-price systems cannot handle waste without enforcing behaviour compliance: somebody has to stop you. I get the impression that the RBA people assume this will just naturally happen due to psychological changes, but as demonstrated in planned economies there was no evidence this occured over 70 years (instead economical pathologies such as feeding livestock bread - which was overproduced in a non-scarcity way while grains were often hard to get - persisted).
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I suspect that deep down you wouldn't want this kind of system to work out because you prefer to be an elite while the have-nots suffer.
Ah, and you are an envious communist who want to steal our white women, right? :-) Leaving the stupidity of ad hominems aside, I think this is an example of the fundamental paranoia problem with most all-or-nothing utopias. The ideas cannot be wrong, so critics must have ulterior motives for arguing against them.
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Maximizing efficiency also requires you to define what goals are being optimized for.
Goal 1: everyone has plenty of nutritious food, clean air and water, shelter, and access to medicine, education, and opportunity to apply themselves to whatever fields of inquiry they desire. Goal 2: That in the pursuit of the above, we do not cause any harm to our environment, upon which we depend for our resources and rejuvenation.
Sounds nice. But notice that there are legions of devils in the details. I think Goal 2 can be achieved at least partially by using various GMOs, while lot of people think that would be a kind of harm - even if the harm was just "spiritual". If we look at what economies and societies have been best at achieving these goals so far, the answer seem to be liberal democracy market economies. Planned economies often failed at both goals disastrously.
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Market theory is bullshit. If markets were the be all end all solution they would have solved our problems right now.
I'm not sure what you mean by market theory. Economics? Free markets? Capitalism? Libertarianism? Also, something doesn't have to be a perfect solution to be a useful solution one can build on.
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Extropian
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Sun, 2012-07-22 13:19
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
Arenamontanus wrote:
OK, I am finished with my Taj Mahal copy and set fire to it, going away to have a new one built on the other side of the continent. What happens with the resources? How are they recycled? What are the incentives for somebody to come and pick them up? If there is no cost to me to set fire to palaces every week, a lot of resources are literally going to be turned into carbon dioxide.
When the post-scarcity society comes about and I get arrested for flagrantly building palaces simply to burn them to the ground, I'm going to implicate you as an accessory, because you came up with the plan. I just wanted to let you know this.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sun, 2012-07-22 17:57
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
Re: Post-Scarcity and the Real World
I would try not to mire myself in finding other people mistakes/flawed logic by explaining/quoting them. My take is, as people indicated, that while RBE has good ideals they are just that: ideals. For them to function society/individuals would have to actively work against abuse/loopholes and that seems to be to much for humans (if we believe it is the truth it certainly will be the truth). Let's leave it at that. I want more minds working on solutions that would help all of us: I don't give a fuck if I or someone said/appeared/was made stupid/wrong by other guy making him smart/right/better. What I would really like to do is harness all this ego induced energy and 'award' person with best idea that can solve problems with 'laurels' and 'you are right speech' (sorry, but you are all too far for free drink ;)... we should do something about this. First when I heard about RBE my first reaction was: this is not going to work. Than: this NEEDS to works, but how!? And very quickly: small self sufficient communities could work but you can not separate yourself from the influence of rest of the world/powerful interests on Earth... Then I realized that space program was effectively ended in the 60s (not counting communication satellites) killing idea of independent, self-sufficient, highly educated colonies/habitats. Naaah, that is just my paranoia speaking: there is perfectly logical explanation of not going in to space. I like the idea of social experiments in small but what is troubling me is if we find good one will it be forgotten/ignored. E.g. how many of you have heard of Masdar City? I'd really like for accelerated financial/political crisis not to induce stronger militarization, inevitable wars, totalitarian regimes and generally bad end but believing everything will be all right is only good for my ulcer :D My thinking is that while some can have good lives unaffected by global FUBAR, majority of us should at least try to help each other and throwing ideas now seems really easy.
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Tue, 2012-07-24 00:06
Decivre Decivre's picture
Anarhista wrote:I would try
Anarhista wrote:
I would try not to mire myself in finding other people mistakes/flawed logic by explaining/quoting them. My take is, as people indicated, that while RBE has good ideals they are just that: ideals. For them to function society/individuals would have to actively work against abuse/loopholes and that seems to be to much for humans (if we believe it is the truth it certainly will be the truth). Let's leave it at that.
Within the context of smaller groups, humans tend to work excellently. A person rarely ever steals from family, or hurts close friends. The dangers of aggressive human nature only begin to express themselves when groups get bigger, and the odds of a person coming into contact with someone that isn't friend or family gets higher. You're more likely to grieve over the death of your best friend than a hundred dead in a country you've never been to. That's just the way people are. This extrapolates to many other elements of society. Theft and violence are most likely to occur between people who don't know one another. Why? Because we have less qualms harming those who we don't empathize with. Either we have to set the unrealistic goal of trying to make every person care about every single other human being with near equal levels of empathy, or we need to create a social structure that takes into account this tendency.
Anarhista wrote:
I want more minds working on solutions that would help all of us: I don't give a fuck if I or someone said/appeared/was made stupid/wrong by other guy making him smart/right/better. What I would really like to do is harness all this ego induced energy and 'award' person with best idea that can solve problems with 'laurels' and 'you are right speech' (sorry, but you are all too far for free drink ;)... we should do something about this. First when I heard about RBE my first reaction was: this is not going to work. Than: this NEEDS to works, but how!? And very quickly: small self sufficient communities could work but you can not separate yourself from the influence of rest of the world/powerful interests on Earth... Then I realized that space program was effectively ended in the 60s (not counting communication satellites) killing idea of independent, self-sufficient, highly educated colonies/habitats. Naaah, that is just my paranoia speaking: there is perfectly logical explanation of not going in to space.
Actually, there is, and I highlighted it in a much earlier post. Most businesses, and economic entities in general, work on a short-term schedule. What matters most is the annual, or even quarterly, assets and liabilities. Space programs are a long-term investment, and one that does not necessarily see anything of real value for a long time (the Apollo program, for instance, did not reach the moon for 8 full years). Modern research programs are often built around short-term gains, and applicable assets in the here and now. The one exception to this is in military research, where ironically we spend the longest periods of research and development, often on technology that is built more for cost-effectiveness than efficiency.
Anarhista wrote:
I like the idea of social experiments in small but what is troubling me is if we find good one will it be forgotten/ignored. E.g. how many of you have heard of Masdar City?
Masdar is large-scale. If we want to test out these concepts, we need to start smaller. I'm talking get a small group of like-minded people, some funds, some tools, and just build a tiny community where they can test things out. Test out a new economic model (those get tested everywhere already), test out a new governmental structure, test out some new infrastructure protocols. Do something that requires only about 120 or less people to get going. That's where we get the ball rolling.
Anarhista wrote:
I'd really like for accelerated financial/political crisis not to induce stronger militarization, inevitable wars, totalitarian regimes and generally bad end but believing everything will be all right is only good for my ulcer :D My thinking is that while some can have good lives unaffected by global FUBAR, majority of us should at least try to help each other and throwing ideas now seems really easy.
In an ironic twist considering how often I shot down concepts from RBE, I will now show you my optimistic side. Humanity is actually on an upswing right now. Things might seem bad with the social strife and issues that have cropped up lately, but let's take those into perspective: [list][*]While famine and disease run rampant through Africa, note that it is only taking less than a percent of the population annually. The population is still growing there, despite the problems that run rampant. This is in stark contrast to the plagues and famines that humanity suffered in ages past, which often caused dramatic population dips. We don't see those anymore, thanks to modern medicine. [*]While we talk about how much of a shame it is that there is so much ignorance in the world, know this: the average person today gets exponentially more information than the average person [i]during the renaissance[/i]. Is much of it propaganda? Sure, but that was the case then as well. We are living in the most education-rich time of human history. 80% of the human population today is literate, in comparison to the estimated hundred thousand or so people worldwide that were literate in the 1600s. [*]While we talk about corporations and governments robbing us of our rights, think about this: we are in many ways living in the most free time period of human history. The very idea of a woman not being the property of either her father or her husband was invented just in the last century. There are now dozens of democratic nations, most of which are the most wealthy nation-states the world over.[/list] With all that in mind, modern issues aren't particularly terrible in context. Even global warming, despite being rather devastating to our environment, is an issue that we have only [i]started[/i] to notice and understand. The fact that we haven't done much to solve it likely has more to do with the fact that we've only begun to acknowledge it within the past 20 years. The solution-building aspect is still in its infancy. And the same is true in context of government. Corporations have only been defined as people for the last century and a half, despite existing for 3 centuries prior to that. Within the long scope of human history, it's only been in existence for a rather short time… shorter than the institution of Western slavery, shorter than the the crusades, shorter than the renaissance. These all existed and came to pass. This too shall pass. So cheer up, man. The human race always gets its shit together. It just takes us some time to do it.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Tue, 2012-07-24 18:16
TekHed TekHed's picture
I've been away for a minute
I've been away for a minute and will be away again starting after this post (preparing to speak at a 5 day conference). It sounds like the real issue we need to solve is fundamentally what many of you have called human nature. The truth is we already have much of the tech we need to go post scarcity, and what we don't have has already been conceived and isn't far away. The real issue it seems is human nature. To me it seems ridiculous that people would be wasteful and burn palaces...I honestly think this sort of jack ass behavior comes from people who are ignorant, uneducated, or have otherwise been repressed or abused so as to make them irrational and spiteful...the ones who will want to burn things of value because they can...clearly this is not the intent or practice of a society that is actually invested in a RBE. For defectors who want weapons...what happens when there is no need to fight and kill? Unhealthy foods...what happens when this is simply not an option because all of the food we eat is healthy and we value health? Bucky (who also supported an RBE model, though he may not have used the word), commented that he never wanted to change people's minds because it was futile, but rather that he focused on coming up with tech solutions so that when the problem arose the solution would have been at hand. The trouble is, as he put it in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that say in the event of an emergency where New York is out of water...yet is on the sea....we can't build a desalinization plant in the time before everyone dies of dehydration. We HAVE to start thinking long term. For example if we really thought long term, nuclear energy would not even be considered an option. "Oh but its supposed to be safe!" Yeah...until the time it isn;t and now Fukushima is polluting my air and water across the globe... Nuclear energy was also sold to the American public as providing so much energy as to be "too cheap to meter"...and yet it is the most expensive source of energy we have when you include all the related costs and especially waste storage. Our nuclear infrastructure was built with public taxpayer money...and then promptly sold out to private for profit corporations. It's a sham, and this is but one example. We have NO excuse to not have a 100% clean, sustainable, renewable, non-polluting energy infrastructure. Except that oil companies want profits, and politicians don't want to invest in infrastructure because it is expensive and will take a longer term than their election cycle. So it seems the consensus is, for us to make a better world, we have to figure out how to enlighten people. How to educate them to think long term, to think of all of humanity and not just their close tribe, as family. To tear down ideological barriers so we can cooperate. Most especially, how to CARE, and take our existence seriously and show some god damned respect. The same arseholes who would burn a palace are probably the same folks I see flicking their cig butts on the ground, or whom I recently saw drop trash out of their car window. It pisses me off, because that is my ground too they are littering on. It seems like the real disease here is apathy. In order for any better world to happen, people need to take some freaking pride in themselves and humanity. If we could get that core issue solved, people would naturally make healthier choices about food, in relationships, etc...
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Tue, 2012-07-24 21:33
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
TekHed wrote:The real issue
TekHed wrote:
The real issue it seems is human nature. To me it seems ridiculous that people would be wasteful and burn palaces...I honestly think this sort of jack ass behavior comes from people who are ignorant, uneducated, or have otherwise been repressed or abused so as to make them irrational and spiteful...the ones who will want to burn things of value because they can...clearly this is not the intent or practice of a society that is actually invested in a RBE.
I drive at 65 mph because I have to pay for my fuel. I take my car in for oil changes because if I trash my car, I need to work to buy another one. When gas was $1/gallon I drove like a crazy person, because it was so cheap as to be free. And indeed, we see now with gas pushing $4/gallon, people are buying smaller cars, and hybrids especially, which were just a novelty six or eight years ago. Was I a jackass for driving 80mph in a station wagon by myself when gas was cheap? Sure, I guess. But I don't think I was ignorant, uneducated, repressed, etc. I put a premium on my time (and RBE can never make time post-scarcity), and I like to drive fast. But under RBE, the only solution is to restrict fuel consumption by law, and enforce it with police and technical measures. And to take it a step forward, addressing your final point, your car almost certainly gets the best mileage around 55mph. If you are usually driving at 65 mph, that puts you in the category of people who are putting themselves above the environment. My intent isn't to point fingers. Like I said, I normally drive at 65-70. I guess my point is, I don't know anyone who takes due diligence, or more especially, who is willing to sacrifice his or her ability to make a living. Even among liberals. The majority still drive at 65. They don't know the energy cost of recycling paper vs. making it from scratch (recycling is almost always a loser there), etc. I guess I don't know what point to pull from that, except that if the people who are SUPPOSED to be responsible and educated also aren't, that maybe expecting an entire planet's population to be such is a bit unreasonable.
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Unhealthy foods...what happens when this is simply not an option because all of the food we eat is healthy and we value health?
So RBE means the food police will ban doritos and soda?
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For example if we really thought long term, nuclear energy would not even be considered an option.
I don't think we need to go down this tangent too far, but I think you need to reexamine the data. Check out the pollution caused by coal or oil plants, and the number of deaths resulting and compare to the amount of pollution and deaths caused by nuclear power (even including Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl). And before you tie onto renewable energy, realize that we do not have the technology to power a major city off of renewable energy, and renewable energy such as wind or tidal farms DO have a significant environmental impact of their own. But this comes back to the original problem. I'm pretty educated on energy concerns. I assume you are as well. But we disagree. Under RBE, I guess the computer decides, which means the guys who program the computer have the biggest hand in it. And one of us will not have his choice selected, and he'll think the computer is wrong, and campaign about how RBE is a corrupted system feeding special interests. So in the end, we're in a very similar spot, but instead of blaming Obama, we blame friend computer.
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Wed, 2012-07-25 01:11
TekHed TekHed's picture
Well yeah oil and coal are
Well yeah oil and coal are awful (and really it's been said that we all we can make out of oil, it is far to be valuable to be wasted by burning it), but I'm not talking about that...I'm talking about clean energy. Sure maybe we don't have the infrastructure to power a city installed...but the tech is there. If for example, every window, every roof tile, every surface area was photovoltaic that would be some energy. Then we combine the energy grids of the planet across the Beiring Strait (as per the GENI project) so the half of the world in darkness is being powered by the half that is in the light. Mind you such photovoltaics exist and look like normal roof tiles, or siding, or clear windows... On top of that you have super efficient wind turbines in key offshore areas where the wind is always blowing. These turbines don't look like the typical fan blades you've seen and can pick up even traces of wind coming from any direction. Then you take the most rugged and unaccessible areas of coastline and create tidal plants. Add on top of that geothermal power (which by itself could more than power everything...I mean the real irony to me is that for all our vaunted achievements of splitting atoms...we derive electricity from it by...heating water. wow.). So we have all of these clean energy sources integrated and working together. Take a fraction of that power, or use photoelectrochemical cells to extract hydrogen from water in the presence of light to power hydrogen fuel cells. Make every car a fuel cell vehicle...consider how much of a car's lifespan is spent being parked somewhere, while you are working, shopping, home, etc. As per the Rocky Mountain Institute's Hypercar designs, when you park, your parking space is tied into the grid...your car now has become a generator that powers your workstation, or adds to your home, or the grid. So a portion of the energy it took to extract the hydrogen (which by itself is a medium not a power source...but it is clean!) gets put back into the system. Can you see how by using ALL of our tech and knowledge in an integrated way it is possible to create a very feasible clean energy infrastructure? Freeways become automated and computer controlled, allowing faster speeds and reduced travel time with zero accidents, and greatly reduced congestion, or perils such as drunk driving or plain bad driving. Airplanes are replaced by transonic maglev trains in sealed vacuum tubes that can reach 4000 mph...at a fraction of the energy cost of flying, with zero pollution, greater safety and waaay faster travel time. All in all super efficient over our outdated systems. Am I making sense here? I was going to be an ecological designer at one point and became aware of how much knowledge and tech we aren't using. And yeah...waste and inefficiency need to be punished in whatever system we have, because they are just not tolerable on a finite planet if we want to support our population levels. Also, regarding dorritos and soda...yeah, I'm a health nut and I know the kind of awful poisonous crap the FDA allows into our food and environment. There is absolutely no reason for such toxic crap to be in our environments. Same goes for all the crazy crap that is in many of our products such as bedding, paints, upholstery etc. There is just no reason for it, save profit, when non toxic solutions exist...
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Wed, 2012-07-25 05:30
Decivre Decivre's picture
TekHed wrote:I've been away
TekHed wrote:
I've been away for a minute and will be away again starting after this post (preparing to speak at a 5 day conference). It sounds like the real issue we need to solve is fundamentally what many of you have called human nature.
Yes. Our natural human instincts are the core issue that utopian societies have a problem dealing with. Should we willingly replace ourselves with computers and volunteer for biological extinction, we might not need to deal with the issue. Until that's an option (that we're willing to go through with), we need to figure out how to solve the problem.
TekHed wrote:
The truth is we already have much of the tech we need to go post scarcity, and what we don't have has already been conceived and isn't far away. The real issue it seems is human nature. To me it seems ridiculous that people would be wasteful and burn palaces...I honestly think this sort of jack ass behavior comes from people who are ignorant, uneducated, or have otherwise been repressed or abused so as to make them irrational and spiteful...the ones who will want to burn things of value because they can...clearly this is not the intent or practice of a society that is actually invested in a RBE.
Do you like 4th of July Fireworks? How about the show Mythbusters? The former is an extremely wasteful display of pyrotechnics, which is viewed and enjoyed by the largest majority of the American population. The latter is a very popular show among nerds, yet often involves the wasteful destruction of goods, for no real reason beyond entertainment. So no. Destruction is loved by the intelligent and unintelligent alike.
TekHed wrote:
For defectors who want weapons...what happens when there is no need to fight and kill? Unhealthy foods...what happens when this is simply not an option because all of the food we eat is healthy and we value health?
You are working under the presumption that there will never again be a reason to fight once a utopia is achieved. This purely assumes 2 things that I think are false: [list][*]That this utopia will never need to interact with any other governmental entity, especially one that might be hostile to it. [*]That this utopia will be accepted by 100% of the populace, and no one will ever resist it.[/list] Assuming both of these will always be accurate is rather nuts to me. There has never been a social concept that has been accepted by every human, nor has there ever been a government entity that did not need to interact with any other entity, either by merit of other ones volunteering to maintain its isolation or by it being the only existent entity.
TekHed wrote:
Bucky (who also supported an RBE model, though he may not have used the word), commented that he never wanted to change people's minds because it was futile, but rather that he focused on coming up with tech solutions so that when the problem arose the solution would have been at hand. The trouble is, as he put it in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that say in the event of an emergency where New York is out of water...yet is on the sea....we can't build a desalinization plant in the time before everyone dies of dehydration. We HAVE to start thinking long term. For example if we really thought long term, nuclear energy would not even be considered an option. "Oh but its supposed to be safe!" Yeah...until the time it isn;t and now Fukushima is polluting my air and water across the globe... Nuclear energy was also sold to the American public as providing so much energy as to be "too cheap to meter"...and yet it is the most expensive source of energy we have when you include all the related costs and especially waste storage. Our nuclear infrastructure was built with public taxpayer money...and then promptly sold out to private for profit corporations. It's a sham, and this is but one example. We have NO excuse to not have a 100% clean, sustainable, renewable, non-polluting energy infrastructure. Except that oil companies want profits, and politicians don't want to invest in infrastructure because it is expensive and will take a longer term than their election cycle.
Long-term thinking doesn't come naturally to humans. We often think in short term concepts. It's the root reason for many of the fallacies that humans fall into (apophenia, the gamblers' fallacy, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, among others). It's hard to break what is inherently programmed into our brain structure. At least without modifying our brain structure, which might be feasible soon enough.
TekHed wrote:
So it seems the consensus is, for us to make a better world, we have to figure out how to enlighten people. How to educate them to think long term, to think of all of humanity and not just their close tribe, as family. To tear down ideological barriers so we can cooperate. Most especially, how to CARE, and take our existence seriously and show some god damned respect. The same arseholes who would burn a palace are probably the same folks I see flicking their cig butts on the ground, or whom I recently saw drop trash out of their car window. It pisses me off, because that is my ground too they are littering on. It seems like the real disease here is apathy. In order for any better world to happen, people need to take some freaking pride in themselves and humanity. If we could get that core issue solved, people would naturally make healthier choices about food, in relationships, etc...
I wouldn't say apathy. The problem to me is more about defeatism than anything. I hear plenty of people that say there's no point in voting because their vote won't matter, or that recycling or eating healthier doesn't matter because it will do little to make things better or it won't add many years to their lifespan (I say as I eat terribly and recycle very little…). The fact is that we have to find a way to convince people that defeatism is a terrible mindset; the if change doesn't start at an individual level, it'll never happen on a global level. That's the problem. Most people are already convinced that there's a problem. No one is convinced that their contribution will help to fix it. But with everyone thinking that, no solution forms. Ever.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Wed, 2012-07-25 05:33
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
TekHed, your basic assumption
TekHed, your basic assumption is that if there were no constraints, *then* people would start behaving sensibly. Yet we have been giving you loads of arguments and examples of how this is not true. Your only solution is either banning bad behaviour or trying to engineer it way. But again we have lots of historical evidence that banning things rarely makes them disappear (and often makes the problem more pernicious; e.g. prohibition, the war on drugs or black markets), and engineering things away requires a huge effort that manages to hit the right spot perfectly - a very hard problem that historically we know we rarely succeed with, and often come with surprising side effects. Consider the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Here you have people in a fairly modern industrialised country, decent education and plenty of opportunity (at least by historical standards). Yet they engaged in internecine terrorism and conflict. Same thing in a lot of other trouble-spots: without resource scarcity some motivations for conflict go away, but there are unfortunately plenty left. In the end the solution to the Troubles turned out to be a social and political solution, not an economical or technological one.
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Wed, 2012-07-25 07:39
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
I could say that we are like
I could say that we are like children refusing to grow up by firmly clinging to life so far. Take this from another perspective: habitat resident from future might have dim view of our standpoint. "You people had clean air in unlimited supply, drinking water for everybody and then some, technology to maintain this paradise while living life I can only dream and you blew it because you wanted to have more then your neighbor, thought only for yourself to the point of ecocide and couldn't agree that everybody want and deserves healthy and dignified life... For example: I had to constantly watch for possibilities of pressure leaks, maintain delicate ecosystem within habitat that generate air, food, recycle water and lives of my fellow citizens depend on this. So when I hear 'I want more food, more energy, more stuff' best answer is: there's the airlock, find some society that allows hoarding and good luck to you." I'm not saying RBE is perfect, far from it, but it cuts deviant behavioral by 90%. The problem is that I assume stable post scarcity society will balance this 10% with social pressure (and we know how powerful tool that is) and that majority of people will behave maturely (not to mention problem: how to get there in the first place). What RBE needs is social structure that would interact with, well... everything and maintain this equalitarian society. I have some ideas but none of the are good enough for the task at hand. On the other hand many insurmountable problems were solved by technical breakthroughs: e.g. horse manure in New York during 19 century dictated many things like house architecture, city elections were won or lost because of this problem (million horses produce a lot of sh...) and not one legislation or action solved problems until cars arrived and replaced horses. I would really like some constructive ideas toward better future (I don't believe path on which we are now will magically correct it self) and it is time to start behaving responsibly. It doesn't have to be RBE, as far as I'm concerned it can be dictatorship (I exaggerate, that would be bad ;) but we need something better (If Extropian society is much stable I all for it). P.S. I opened 38 year old whiskey with my family and it really kicks like a mule. Cheers!
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Wed, 2012-07-25 09:22
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Anarhista wrote:I'm not
Anarhista wrote:
I'm not saying RBE is perfect, far from it, but it cuts deviant behavioral by 90%.
Show me the data.
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Extropian
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Wed, 2012-07-25 11:30
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
Since we haven't made
Since we haven't made transition to RBE no one can give these data. What we can do is guess (as I did with my, surely, inaccurate statement) and try to extrapolate from known facts/theories. I have based my statement on ground that with scarcity gone huge part of crimes will be obsolete in post-scarcity society. What this create, after couple of generation, is that in every childhood there won't be stressed out parents who don’t have time for their children and with more time on their hands, not to mention security so they don’t need to think if they are going to successfully ‘feed’ their family, parents can give love, security, generally right environment in which child won’t be suspicious of other people ulterior motives so that these children can create community where people can trust each other. What’s even more important is that most violent crimes come from extremely abusive families (survivors of near death incident, as victim or spectator) where this behavior is caused by inability to have life as ‘those rich white bastards’ (and long vicious circle of violent heritage ‘helps’ a lot). Other cause in violent offenders is their need for respect which they didn’t get when needed (childhood) the most. If their parents didn’t need to work demeaning jobs for minimum wage (which can be lost in seconds by hordes of unemployed masses) swallowing their pride, common sense in case of too many bosses, constantly prodded in greater efficacy by people whose only job is to make you more miserable, they may have, a tad more, time for their children needs… Since we adapt to environment even before we are born I think that given right stimulus (which I hope we’ll achieve in post-scarcity) any child can be raised into healthy, happy and productive member of humanity. My ramblings are based on work of these gentlemen: Dr. James Gilligan Former Director: Center for Study of Violence, Harvard Medical School Richard Wilkinson Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham Dr. Gabor Mate Dr. Robert Sapolsky Professor of Neurological Sciences, Stanford university.
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
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Wed, 2012-07-25 14:38
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Anarhista wrote:Since we
Anarhista wrote:
Since we haven't made transition to RBE no one can give these data. What we can do is guess (as I did with my, surely, inaccurate statement) and try to extrapolate from known facts/theories.
Sure. But you claimed far more certainty than there is support for. You would not let me get away with claiming that in an anarcho-capitalist society there would be a 90% reduction of crime, right? You have various arguments, but given what we know of predictions in the social sciences one cannot make any confident predictions from them. At most we can agree that a materially secure society would be without some stressors which currently produce maladaptive behaviours. That the transition to such a society would only cause beneficial changes and no new maladaptive behaviours seems implausible given past experience.
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Extropian
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Wed, 2012-07-25 16:59
TekHed TekHed's picture
Re: Ireland...I agree that to
Re: Ireland...I agree that to really evolve our species we will have to let religion and other forms of superstition and "faith" go away. Religion is one of the most pernicious and destructive forms of superstition, as its proponents will defy all evidence to the contrary to maintain their belief structure.
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Wed, 2012-07-25 19:39
Anarhista Anarhista's picture
@ Arenamontanus
@ Arenamontanus I think you misunderstood me: I want you to give me all benefits of non-utopian society closer to our own and prove my rebuttal wrong! To me (if we/I found) good social platform for much needed changes is much more important then who's right and who's wrong. Prove me wrong (so I can follow/accept your statement) and I'll wear chicken suit parading the square saying 'I, wrong, I, wrong!' :D I accept that all these beneficial changes aren't enough for healthy, stable society aaaaand RBE is "kind of" hard to shift to so, again, I ask for any good idea for this or alternate solution. P.S. TekHed, I gather that this is wrong post/thread? Not that you are off-topic ;)
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Thu, 2012-07-26 00:36
Decivre Decivre's picture
TekHed wrote:Re: Ireland...I
TekHed wrote:
Re: Ireland...I agree that to really evolve our species we will have to let religion and other forms of superstition and "faith" go away. Religion is one of the most pernicious and destructive forms of superstition, as its proponents will defy all evidence to the contrary to maintain their belief structure.
It can be, but there are advantages that underlie it, ones that I wish secular societies could gain in some way. The most obvious one is unity; religion unites populations with a high degree of gusto. You rarely ever see united secular organizations, at least ones that act with as much brutal efficiency as dogmatized churches can. This is most apparent in American politics. The religious right tends to have an extremely unified message that most of its members promote in unison. The secular portions of society tend to disagree a lot, and acknowledge a need for compromise. The former mindset has a bigger tendency to get things done… many of the world's greatest monuments were not built with vast monetary resources, but via religious fervor. Granted, there are pluses to this minus. You'll probably never see horrific events like the Crusades or the Inquisition propelled by an organization that does not have some form of dogma. And since secular communities don't tend to form dogmatic social entities, we aren't likely to see as many of those sorts of atrocities as time goes on. However, even without religion, there is always the possibility for things like this to happen. Maoist Cambodia and the USSR did not have a religion per se, but they had dogmatic non-religious strictures that had tendencies just as destructive as any powerful religious organization. So even if religion was wiped clean from the Earth, that would not rid us of the possibility of future destructive social unities. At best, we simply eliminate one common justification for atrocities. There are plenty more that will continue to exist.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Thu, 2012-07-26 12:51
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
I can agree that 90% of our
I can agree that 90% of our current social ills have ties to resource allocation. However, post-scarcity gives rise to a new set of problems that, if not dealt with (and I've seen nothing in RBE even addressing them), will quickly rise to fill in that gap. Regarding renewable energy: The problem is that the technology ISN'T there. And today's technology just isn't efficient enough. If you converted all of the Earth's rare minerals solely towards renewable energy, how many cities could you power? Ten? A hundred? But not them all. This tech is just too resource-intensive. It's like promising a car for every family in China; there's not enough iron in the Earth to meet that demand. And ultimately, that's a failing we keep coming around to. RBE says "post-scarcity", but it's not true; it's just algorithmically-based distribution to minimize scarcity. RBE does not make there be more gold in the planet. We still can't give everyone a golden throne. So ultimately, it comes down to a choice of you get your golden throne (or space project or whatever), OR I get mine. Capitalism says this is decided by availability of the item, contrasted with each of our productiveness in the system, tempered by what value we put into it. RBE lets a computer decide, based on mystery algorithms. Capitalism is stable enough to survive and resist defectors, though. RBE is not. If a surprisingly trivial number people are upset with RBE because they're not getting what THEY think is most important, the entire system fails. And with almost 8 Billion people on this globe with competing wants and desires, there will be a LOT of people with competing goals and desires.
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