My hypothetical H+ Summit presentation :-)
Paul D. Fernhout
this weekend at Harvard University (June 12-13). I'm thinking of going to
because it is within driving distance and it would be nice to meet them
finally in person. :-)
http://hplussummit.com/about.html
http://hplussummit.com/jackson.html
http://hplussummit.com/bishop.html
Thinking about that conference, I made a sketch of a little presentation of
issues I've been thinking about. Not that I expect to give it this year at
this late time with a full schedule already there; it was just something I
was musing over, as in, what of all the things I've written, would I say in
ten minutes if I did? Maybe next year. :-) It has some quotes and then some
related talking points in six slides. Nothing much new here if you've read
much that I've written here and elsewhere. :-) I'm sure I've left out really
important stuff, like the transformation of certain Ivy League Universities
to post-scarcity institutions. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
== Slide #1 -- The irony of tools of abundance wielded by a scarcity mindset
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of
thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If
only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (Albert Einstein)"
* There is a deep irony related to nuclear weapons, military robots,
bioengineered plagues, and even just the typical sophisticated gear of
today's infantry and the sophisticated industrial base it implies.
* The same sorts of technology could produce abundance if designed and
deployed in different ways (e.g. sustainable energy, self-replicating space
habitats, 3D printing, biotech medicines), but instead it may bring ruin for
us all if is designed and deployed from a scarcity mindset.
* Our current mainstream economics is mostly scarcity-based, and in that
sense is defective by design if you want a world of abundance (whether of
material goods or free time).
* Abundances can create a complementary scarcity (an abundance of
information and a scarcity of attention?) but the phase change of our
society to material abundance is still a big fundamental change.
* Security is of course always important; how do we collectively rethink
security in terms of mutual security (Morton Deutsch) instead of unilateral
security? How do we rethink our security in terms of intrinsic security
(Amory Lovins) with infrastructure being designed to be robust and resilient
rather than extrinsic security involving active defense of fragile
infrastructure?
== Slide #2 -- The Tension Between Roots and Wings
"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One
of these is roots, the other, wings. (Henry Ward Beecher)"
"No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can
make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I
help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process,
not a once-and-for-all. (Milton Mayeroff)"
* Issues of identity and transformation. Historically, these are addressed
in great literature and in religion, in documents and stories that go back
thousands of years
* Examples of roots: connections to family, nature, community, spirituality,
sensuality, aesthetics, a desire to preserve some important pattern, humor
* We die of malnutrition and alienation when we lose our roots, and if we
have weak roots the huge tree of our life may be blown over in any of life's
storms.
* But, we are sitting ducks for predators when we lose our wings, given an
ever-changing world where evolutionary processes and competition continue.
* How do we reconcile these two? An age old question... Humans have been
evolving for a long time...
* How can we have a connection between the past and the future, between
ancient literary roots and transhumanist wings?
== Slide #3 -- The tension of Yin and Yang, Meshwork and Hierarchy
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains
and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly
turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and
hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory
alone but demand concrete experimentation. (Manuel De Landa)"
* Competition and cooperation? Yin and Yang?
* Fundamental aspects of this material-seeming universe? Can we transcend
that? Do we want to?
* Can we come up with a new synthesis or at least, minimize suffering and
maximize joy?
* Religious implications related to purpose, assumptions about the afterlife
(even if we are living in a simulation), and so on. Is this all there is? Is
life a test? Are we all one? These are fundamental issues that have puzzled
people for thousands of years, even if with a new computer-aided spin.
== Slide #4 -- Health and Life Extension examples
"Let your food be medicine and your medicine be food. (Hippocrates)"
* Treating vitamin D deficiency (the sunshine vitamin) can probably prolong
your life (e.g. Dr. John Cannell).
* Eating more organic whole foods (e.g. Dr. Joel Fuhrman) can also produce
life extension and better life quality.
* Occasional fasting can prolong your life.
* These three things (sunshine, whole food, fasting) have been practiced for
thousands of years, but their importance have been recently forgotten for a
variety of reasons. Thus, we are now going full circle back to our roots,
but with better information from our winged social networks.
* We already know that the major killers in our industrialized society, like
type-II diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer, can be mostly reversed
and prevented by diet (along with moderate exercise, a positive outlook on
life, functional communities, and the right amount of vitamin D) to give
most people healthy active lives into their nineties and beyond (and with
reduced sick care costs). We know how to build communities with physical and
social infrastructure that foster these healthy things (e.g. Bluezones).
But, that science is not being acted on institutionally yet in a big way
(and is actively resisted by industry regarding excess salt, sugar, bad
fats, and additives), even if this health advice has roots going way back
and lots of scientific evidence backing it up, in part because it is not
very profitable. The private profit motive is also sometimes a motive to
cause confusion.
* How can one balance private motivation and the public good? An age old
question...
== Slide #5 -- Participating in Finite and Infinite Games
"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the
other infinite. The finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an
infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play, ...and bringing as
many persons as possible into the play. Finite players play within
boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. (James P. Carse)
"A people, as a people, has nothing to defend. In the same way, a people
has nothing and no one to attack. One cannot be free by oppressing another.
My freedom does not depend upon your loss of freedom. On the contrary,
since freedom is never freedom from society, but freedom for it, my freedom
inherently affirms yours. A people has no enemies. (James P. Carse)"
* How do we build a future with many citizens engaging in cooperative
endeavors involving science, design, manufacturing, health care, and so on?
* The previously mentioned whole foods and vitamin D example as showing why
we need to develop better social processes if most people in our
industrialized society are to have long, joyful, healthy lives.
* Also, we have a huge oil slick right now in the Gulf of Mexico in part
because selling oil is very profitable (with privatized fiat dollar profits
and socialized environmental costs). Renewable energy like solar-thermal
coupled with energy efficiency has been cheaper than fossil fuels since the
1970s according to Amory Lovins (e.g. Brittle Power), if you considered all
external costs that you pay in your taxes, or on health care bills, or in
terms of risk like environmental disaster as ongoing in the Gulf. Again, our
scarcity-based ideology is leading to problematical infrastructure design.
* We also have an educational system based around schooling children with
others of similar ages and abilities on a tight schedule in factory-like
settings to transform them into obedient workers for 19th century factories
and unquestioning soldiers for a 19th century Prussian military. But this is
the 21st century, and our factories and security needs have changed.
* While there are a lot of great things happening all over the world, there
is also a vast social dysfunction taking place in our core formal
institutions, relative to the social and technological possibilities. Our
informal associations also have issues, since they reflect the scarcity
ideology too.
* What would be likely to happen with nanotech and biotech if it is built
using the same scarcity-based social paradigms? For example, why force
creative people though economic and social rationing to do DIY-Bio genitic
engineering in their kitchen without containment devices when we have enough
physical resources to make thousands of safer fancy labs, perhaps one in
every community for everyone who wants to use them, the same as we have
built schools, churches, post offices, and libraries everywhere?
* How do we create formal (hierarchical) and informal (meshwork) social
processes that reflect the needs for a newly emerging (or re-emerging)
participatory culture with broadly distributed social equity and an
accounting for external costs? One where playing the infinite game (playing
to play) is prioritized?
* This is the age old problem of democracy, or, alternatively, finding a
balance of meshwork and hierarchy in whatever social form makes sense...
* What part of the transformation is technological? What part is social? How
do the two interrelate synergistically?
== Slide #6 -- Course corrections going into the Singularity?
"You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. (Henry
Ward Beecher)"
"The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism
for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume --
now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated
productive system. (The Triple Revolution Memorandum, 1964)"
* Is the Singularity like Harry Potter's "Mirror of Erised"? ("Erised" is
"Desire" spelled backwards.) What would we see in the mirror if we are a
financially successful capitalist (hint, hint)? Does capitalist ideology
dominate "mainstream" singularity thinking? What is the danger of seeing
capitalism and competing over scarce resources as the way to build the
future of abundance? Or could we see cooperation, or at least, balance, as a
better way forward to a world that works for everyone, and where the
capacity to collectively create, monitor, and respond outweighs the
individual or collective ability to destroy and harm?
* What would the next Singularity look like if we put in place things like a
"basic income" (social security and medicaid for all at any age), or a gift
economy, or healthier local communities, or better resource-based planning
*before* moving further into a Singularity?
* Marshall Brain suggested a "Jobless Recovery" is exactly what you would
expect in a technological transformation as we are seeing -- but our social
and economic paradigms are based heavily on distributing income via formal
paid jobs (or, for a few, by the rent from significant capital ownership).
That scarcity-based paradigm will change one way or another. How it will
change is still up in the air.
* Can our path in to the singularity affect our path through it, like a
gravitational slingshot effect of a space probe around a planet? If so, then
is there is a potential for linking the movements for progressive social
change and movements for transhumanism, as dissimilar as they may seem at first?
* Almost all the issues taking up the headlines -- Global Climate Change,
Peak Oil, Social Security and Medicare funding issues, recycling, economic
rationing related to most fiat dollar finance -- are just not very big
issues when you have a lot of robots and a good knowledge of materials. :-)
And many others, like the obesity crisis, have ready solutions that are
known (better diet, breaking out of the "Pleasure Trap"), but not acted on.
Various alternative communities have been talking about parts of this for a
long time.
* Reprise: Our current dominant social paradigms (scarcity-based) are out of
sync with our emerging technological possibilities (material abundance).
People like Buckminster Fuller ("Comprehensive Anticipatory Design
Science"), and Bob Black ("The Abolition of Work") have been saying this for
decades, if not centuries. It just gets truer ever year. At what point do
all the centuries of innovation by ancestors pay off for most people
(whatever their form) in terms of a healthier and longer life with more time
to spend on freely-chosen but seemingly "unprofitable" things like children,
family, community involvement, hobbies, the arts, spirituality, exploration,
self-education, slow food, and communing with nature and the infinite?
===
So, just some notes. I'm not sure this all could fit in ten minutes, anyway.
:-) Especially if I got to rambling. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Paul D. Fernhout
> Thinking about that conference, I made a sketch of a little presentation
> of issues I've been thinking about. Not that I expect to give it this
> year at this late time with a full schedule already there; it was just
> something I was musing over, as in, what of all the things I've written,
> would I say in ten minutes if I did? Maybe next year. :-)
I just realized that some of the points I listed (the ones about how some of
these issues about conservatism and change in relation to identity and
models of the universe/metaverse are age old questions addressed by
literature and some religious philosophizing) overlaps what James Hughes
from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies says his talk will
be about:
http://hplussummit.com/hughes.html
"""
Transhumanism is part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. As such
transhumanism has also inherited the internal tensions and contradictions of
the broad Enlightenment tradition. From the beginning thinkers and movements
have interpreted core Enlightenment values of reason, secularism,
self-determination, progress, universalism and individualism in radically
different ways. It is essential that transhumanists understand how our
internal divisions and arguments are playing these three hundred year old
debates so that we can avoid old mistakes and dead ends.
"""
Great to know someone has that covered. :-)
And I now see another talk that is related:
"Why Uploading Will Not Work - Patrick Hopkins "
http://www.slideshare.net/humanityplus/hopkins
http://hplussummit.com/hopkins.html
"Transhumanists tend to have a commitment to materialism and naturalism but
nonetheless pursue goals traditionally associated with religious ideologies,
such as the quest for immortality. Often, they hope to achieve immortality
through the application of a technology whereby the brain is scanned and the
person "uploaded" to a computer. This process is typically described as
"transferring" one's mind to a computer. I argue that, while the technology
may be feasible, uploading will not succeed because it in fact does not
"transfer" a mind at all and will not preserve personal identity.
Transhumanist hopes for such transfer ironically rely on treating the mind
dualistically-and inconsistently with materialism-as the functional
equivalent of a soul, as is evidenced by a carefully examination of the
language used to describe and defend uploading. In this sense, transhumanist
thought unwittingly contains remnants of dualistic and religious categories."
BTW, I suggested elsewhere (from ecological and evolutionar principles) that
uploaded human minds would likely get eaten alive for runtime by organisms
that have evolved native to the digital environment, perhaps the equivalent
of digital piranha. :-(
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
Anyway, it's great to see the humanities getting involved in interactions
with transhumanist thinking. Here is a fun little essay that is somewhat
related to the general idea of religious ideas showing up in unexpected
places (like Free Market Libertarianism), by a Harvard theologin:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"""
Soon I began to marvel at just how comprehensive the business theology is.
There were even sacraments to convey salvific power to the lost, a calendar
of entrepreneurial saints, and what theologians call an "eschatology" -- a
teaching about the "end of history." My curiosity was piqued. I began
cataloguing these strangely familiar doctrines, and I saw that in fact there
lies embedded in the business pages an entire theology, which is comparable
in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. It
needed only to be systematized for a whole new Summa to take shape.
"""
To be clear, this is not especially to poke fun at serious transhumanism,
although it would be easy to criticize "unexamined" transhumanism as above.
I think the core issues raised by many transhumanist thinkers are very
serious ones, essentially that human identity is in flux, driven in part by
the technosphere we are part of changing along exponential trends following
Moore's Law, as well as other factors. I agree that there are deep
challenges relate to weighing fear vs. joy (on one slide in the Guru
presentation linked below), roots vs. wings, etc. and that we are rapidly
approaching some sort of cultural singularity (or a series of them) as
different technological (and social) trends converge (or, in some cases,
diverge). As my sig suggests, I believe a central issue remains that of my
sig below, the irony of the technologies of abundance used by those thinking
in terms of scarcity. Moving past that irony may not resolve those other
identity crisis, but it might give us a better chance to do that in a
happier and healthier way for most people and the biosphere.
There are slides for some presentations already up:
http://www.slideshare.net/humanityplus/presentations
I've only looked at a few of the posted ones, but I enjoyed this one
especially, and I think it easily relates to talking with the general public
about open manufacturing:
"What Geeks Can Learn From Gurus? - Robert Tercek"
http://www.slideshare.net/humanityplus/tercek
http://hplussummit.com/tercek.html
Hey Bryan, why are you reading this if your slides aren't up yet? :-) I can
hope that you or Joseph has one about a scarcity vs. abundance worldview.
But, when I think about it, I've kind of borrowed that theme myself from
James P. Hogan and "Voyage from Yesteryear". :-) I'm hoping to bring some
copies of that book to hand out for free. :-)
Paul D. Fernhout
> To be clear, this is not especially to poke fun at serious
> transhumanism, although it would be easy to criticize "unexamined"
> transhumanism as above. I think the core issues raised by many
> transhumanist thinkers are very serious ones, essentially that human
> identity is in flux, driven in part by the technosphere we are part of
> changing along exponential trends following Moore's Law, as well as
> other factors.
That reminds me that this same weekend the Humor Project is having their
(usually) annual conference:
http://www.humorproject.com/conference/
I'd highly recommend it as a conference.
I went to the conference they had two years ago (an amazing experience, that
pulled me out of the funk of having written Post-Scarcity Princeton), and
Randy Judkins was one of the speakers, with a topic that might have been
appropriate at the H+ summit: :-)
"Laughing in the Face of Change"
http://www.randyjudkins.com/LaughingFaceChg.htm
"This keynote presentation reveals the elements that allow individuals to
adapt to change and adopt Randy's Top Ten Reasons For More Laughter In Your
Life� which include stress-relief, increased productivity, and a boost to
your immune system. Change in the workplace can feel like a rejection of
past performance. Reactions can include ambiguity, defiance, hurt pride, and
even revolt. One smart strategy is to prepare the staff well in advance and
to honor their input along the way."
Might that be good advice in relation to dealing with society-wide
technological change, too? :-) Or maybe in presenting the change aspects
related to open manufacturing?
I was fortunate enough to take Randy's "Circus Skills for Life and Laughter:
New Vaudeville Tricks of the Trade for the New You" seminar at the conference.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080403015623/www.humorproject.com/conference/program-sun.php
Although I had to skip the session on humor for team building to do that
which I had originally planned to go to (I figured I could listen to that
one later on CD, whereas the circus skills were more hands-on). Which also
reminds me, I should finally listen to that presentation. :-) Maybe during
the drive to Boston? :-)
By the way, I'm glad to see there will be a "Science Comedian" (Brian Malow)
at the summit:
http://hplussummit.com/malow.html
"In a pattern extending back to childhood, he has been laughed at by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the American Chemical
Society, NASA, JPL, the National Association of Science Writers, Apple,
Dell, Microsoft, his younger sibling, and many others."