Tag: Technology

Solutions and the Human Sacrifice Lottery

This essay is aimed at people who want solutions more than this guy…

Nature is perpetually in flux. It’s cute but true to say change is the only real constant. Preserving nature is a contradiction in terms. I am not a green. Nature is only green because that’s the color of efficiency with respect to its goal: Leveraging sunlight and water to create sugar from the dirt. We can do it better.

Everything we think of when we think of nature was a previous era’s destroyer. Oxygen, trees, flowering plants, life above water, insects… All of it was destructive and transformative. Humanity is natural. What we do and make is equally natural. Nothing about us violates the laws of stars and stone. We can not escape nature. It will exist, even when time and space do not.

The current arrangement of life forms is transient with or without us. Ultimately even we are transient. And so without a shred of irony or guilt I quite seriously advocate replacing Earth’s ecology (passively or actively) with an anthropocentric one. One not built on perpetual fear, pain, chaos, starvation, and mass murder.

Update: I also advocate body cams and live streaming for all non-classified official, public official, activity. And deception with awareness of or intent to harm, being made a felony akin to fraud, and manslaughter if a single death among believers due to belief can be established.

This will never happen of course.

Fission, open AI, open robotics, basic income, and a wealth cap.

Power, actuation, distribution.

Fission

Because it’s the most efficient today existing way of extracting calories from dirt. Nothing else comes even close at the terrestrial scale. Only a Dyson Swarm is in the same league. And that only counts because it’s simply a vast upscale of known technologies. Fusion would compete if it existed, but it doesn’t yet. But even if it did fission would still be on the list because fission provides more than just electricity and heat. Fission also produces a whole spectrum of special materials ranging from super batteries to cancer cures.

Robots/AI

For all the compulsory labor any society we choose to build needs.

Progressive tax and a basic income I

To insure the production from the new ecology is distributed with human comfort in mind.

For the first time in history, we can make labor voluntary. We can transition humanity into a chemotrophic phase of evolution, as opposed to phototrophic.

We’re already doing this in a sense. We use our technology which consumes electricity to produce more food than we ever could by hand. We eat oil. Literally, qualitatively, and figuratively. So I propose instead we switch the portions of that mechanical metabolism that can handle it over to the vastly more efficient and more abundant food source. Fissile material.

And no we won’t ever run out. Tectonic and volcanic activity is always lifting and stirring material up into the oceans for use to harness. Even uranium specifically is endlessly renewable. The sun will run out of hydrogen before humanity runs out of uranium. And that’s just one easy source of fuel allowing for fission. Thorium is everywhere also.

Other than the qualitatively eternal energy foundation upon which to build a human future, why fission? It seems the chemical limit for energy density without losing excessive energy during manufacture and refinement is similar between food oils and fossil fuels. Gasoline and olive oil have very similar energy density. Nature and the refineries have apparently hit a similar wall.

For some perspective of how much power is in there, just consider that fuel air explosives, which are just air mixed with gasoline, are at least 4 times as powerful as dynamite. Gasoline, and therefore olive oil, are more energy dense than dynamite. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’ll correct this if I am. But regardless, it’s certainly all dwarfed by fission.

Fission, as I’m sure you know from popular culture and atomic weapon fame, is almost magically energy dense. One kilogram of uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal. That is an almost Sci-Fi level of power. “Almost,” only because it’s not science fiction, it’s just science.

All energy can be measured in the same unit we use for food. Calories. (Kcal.) Any task requires calories of energy. This is the great equalizer. Humanity and its technology are one metabolism. Entropy’s arrow. When we eat a plant or animal we are eating a combination of sunlight and fossil fuels. These fuel sources are incredibly weak compared to what’s literally in the dirt.

Robots and human sacrifice.

Applying this entire-picture, wholistic, way of thinking to the human process of completing tasks, you realize that “the robots,” specifically total involuntary-job automation, are morally urgent. Why? Because currently we run our society on a human sacrifice lottery. Literally. (I use this word a lot to clarify that I’m being entirely serious as opposed to hyperbolic or euphemistic.)

Game it out in your head: By us having humans drive the trucks, knowing with absolute certainty that some will fatally crash, and accepting it, we all behaviorally agree that moving stuff around is worth X randomly selected lives. Sidenote: This is another reason why fission. Because life per watt, fission is the safest form of power. Only hydroelectric comes close, and that at the cost of staggering scale surface disruption. (Think the Three Gorges Dam.)

Breaking it down further into hours lost the exchange is immediate. An hour of labor is an hour of life. We buy and sell lives. Our cars might as well run on blood.

The only reason we accept this lethal madness is because we see no alternatives, or we don’t see it at all. Robots are the alternative. See the robots.

Progressive Tax and Basic Income II

That is my beef with both capitalists and most socialists. They both are pro slavery. Socialism worships this lottery in the form of deification of the worker. (An almost ancient Aztec situation when you think about it.) While capitalism on the other hand is like fire. A wonderful tool, if contained. A horrifying disaster if not. Right now 26 people own half the world’s wealth. That is like when a fire reduced the solids volume of a home by orders of magnitude by converting it into ash involuntarily. Currently the best metaphor for the global economy is a planet sized capitalist dumpster fire.

We don’t need to put it out, but we need to contain it. And this is as morally urgent as the human sacrifice situation. Indeed it’s arguably part of the same elephant.

A wealth capping progressive tax is as badly needed as a basic income. A wealth cap isn’t needed to pay for a basic income. Frankly we can just print the money needed for a basic income and the knock on benefits will vastly out weigh any inflation caused, which could be countered by other means if even needed. (Poverty costs trillions per year anyway, that cost instantly vanishes the moment you deploy a UBI. It’s fiscally obvious. Moral urgency satisfaction is only the first benefit.)

A wealth cap is needed to prevent gross concentration, stagnation, and oppression. One person having that much wealth is in this context analogous to one person starting a forest fire. Steps must be taken to prevent this sort of wealth inequality type arson. Our forest sized garden needs firebreaks and sprinklers. It’s that simple.

There is a separate and similarly urgent need for a high basic income. To prevent gross deficiency that gives rise to all the horrors and costs of poverty ranging from petty crime to institutional psychosis. Poverty, is cheaper to deal with up front. Like how it’s cheaper to change the oil than replace a seized engine.

You’re likely familiar with the concept of medicare for all, well I propose additionally Unemployment Insurance for all. Just extend qualification to everyone and expand the system as needed. Though I’m sure specific systems debate could provide a better way than my off the cuff suggestion.

Regardless, in the end, if the flow of money is like the flow of water, we need rain and evaporation, or drought and flooding will destroy everything we ever make.

And that’s it. That’s the core set of changes I think would essentially fix our social problems. The rest are secondary issues. These are the primary colors of human prosperity.

Fission, open AI, open robotics, basic income, and a wealth cap.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why we’ll always need currency.

Where does currency come from? Ultimately it comes from the need to exchange items indirectly. Why indirectly? Because direct exchange is barter and has limitations which create (or are) resistance. Money comes from the needs created by the weaknesses of direct barter. Barter in turn comes from the mammalian strategy of communication and socialization. Organization itself is a step towards diversity because that’s where advantage is found.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood

Organizational life implies interaction. Interaction is always an exchange. Even a hug or a hand shake has a cost. There will always be supply and demand, since not all demands are material there will always be diversity of supply which means a basis for trade, the long term intolerable weaknesses of barter can only be overcome by currency of some sort or by stasis/homogeneity.

Any optimal society has money/currency. A way to render an abstraction as tangible. A way to externalize commitment and desire. A contract for example is a form of barter. Sure you could try to tolerate the weaknesses of barter but you’re only setting yourself up for either universal stagnation (as a result of trying to prevent…) or re-capture by covert capitalists. (What do you think the mafia/yakuza/triads are? They are competing governments.)

Economy is just an abstracted way of saying movement. Typically expressed physically as matter or energy traveling from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration along the path of least resistance.

Creating these paths in advance and waiting for reality to take them according to an imagined superior state, leading to an objective, leading to a plan for accomplishing that objective, is how one controls and shapes reality. Each of these steps can be debated forever. That’s why we have to actually try stuff.

Societies without money have been tried. They were first after all. It only works in conditions of extreme homogeneity, because only at the simplest levels can barter suffice because of a lack of diversity among goods/services/demand. Simple of course need not mean small, or boring. You can have simple and entertaining huge things. There have been massive barter economies. But they were intrinsically disadvantaged and quickly trumped by the greater diversity tolerance/exploitation of competing systems. Systems which developed from within the older systems. Even the church was forced to adapt or die.

History can be seen as a constant war and progression. A war between social inertia and innovation created diversity. A progression of capabilities growing out of growing tolerance for diversity. Progressiveness vs conservatism. Diversity will always win over the long term because it produces new opportunity/ability or exploits previously unexploitable opportunity.

http://swankivy.com/shenanigans/labels/evolve.jpg

But of course one can reject the earth as it is or ever has been as an argument. One can have faith in imagined superior alternatives because being an imaginative construct it is flawless and infinitely malleable.

So instead of going up in scale, let’s go down. To start with, life is activity. And activity is movement. Like movement explained above. A rock is lifeless because no part of it changes or moves “on its own” (whatever that ultimately means philosophically.) I can’t sit on a rock and get it to hatch, I can’t plant a rock and get a tree. If I could, then it wasn’t a rock, it was an egg or a seed.

The moment it sprouted roots or started to hatch it, by definition had to have an economy.

But let’s go a little lower. If it moved/reacted at all it still had an economy, even if it wasn’t alive. Like if it was made of dry ice and I dropped it in water. Now you have a temperature exchange and phase/material/chemical economy. Go lower and everything has an economy, because it’s all moving.

The lack of economy is a perceptual limitation or an illusion. Like when a tree appears to not be growing because it’s not happening fast enough for you to register. Or when pitch appears to be a solid because of its rate of flow.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/18/pitch_drop_experiment_video_science_world_aflutter_after_experiment_pays.html

or lower…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

It can be argued that existence itself is movement, or vibration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Are you hearing me yet? If you eliminate movement at any point you merely create an insulator around which movement must occur. This is the base reason why external discipline is always doomed to fail and why prohibition creates black markets and why it takes more voltage to get around, or through resistance, etc etc etc, including why you can never dispense with economy/movement/money without hideous cost. (Like saying becoming an inert chunk of rock.)

http://www.lifegem.com/ Ironic really, the only way to mostly escape the economy is to become something often used as a form of currency. XD

Even the body has an oxygen economy. How that oxygen is distributed changes based on the needs of the market/organism as a whole.

Sure, you could make an organism that doesn’t need oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria for example, which in turn just have a simpler and far less capable/diverse economy.

The planet’s surface has a water economy, upon which I modeled my economic solution (ubt/cap) because it’s a proven system. It also has a magnetic economy powered by fission, which is great for us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Importance

All of it is running out. This movement appears to be unidirectional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

The entirety of observable reality is the progression or movement from one state to another. The only point at which we can be free of this is the last point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death