Contemplating Civilization: its rise, fall, rebuilding... and future

Go read one of the most important books in the past twenty years, Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny: "...you can capture history's basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interactions" and "social structures evolve that realize this rich potential -- that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and depth."

 Our entire Enlightenment Experiment has been about positive sum games. Open-competitive Economic Markets, Science, Democracy… these are all examples of systems set up to harness competition and produce positive sum results for all.

See my article, The Unlikeliness of a Zero Sum Society.

Alas, there are forces in human nature that always trend toward ruination of such systems. Winners tend not to want to compete as hard, next time, so they use their wealth and power to cheat! It is called oligarchy; the very thing that wrecked markets and democracy and science in all past cultures. Every single last one of them.

Except ours... but not without a struggle in every generation. Today, capitalism isn’t the enemy; it is the #1 victim of an ongoing attempted coup by oligarchs - who are only doing what humans are programmed to do, when tempted by feudal privilege.

 If liberals would only read the "First Liberal" -- Adam Smith -- and realize this, they might drop both the left and right and stand up for the balanced market that emphasizes small business, startups and brash-competitive creativity, instead of monopoly, corporatism, state-paternalism and aristocracy.

Heck, if our ancestors could stand up and save the Enlightenment during their crises… so can we.

Then take a look at Niall Ferguson's new book Civilization: The West and the Rest.  Ferguson appraises some of the reasons that civilizations fail, a topic that Jared Diamond surveyed (with a bit too obsessive a focus only on environmental causes) in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed... and that I take a Big Perspective on, in my next novel, Existence.

In his article, Western Civilization:Decline or Fall?, Ferguson describes how he sees our way out of a "decline of the west:"

"What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anti-competitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic."

In other words, break free of the hobbling/crippling, oversimplifying metaphors like "left-vs-right" - a curse bequeathed on all thinking, by the French Revolution - and get back to acting like intrepid grownups again.

==Rebuilding Civilization==

Open Source Ecology: Following the DIY "maker" trend, one ad-hoc group is producing open source modular plans to the 50 different industrial machines necessary to build a civilization -- or at least provide a self-sustaining village with basic comforts. The basic fifty include: backhoe, bulldozer, baler, wind turbine, cement mixer, electric motor, steam engine, dairy milker, baker oven, aluminum extractor from clay, and bioplastic extruder, among others. The more complicated ones build upon the simpler ones. In northern Missouri, they have used their compressed brick press and tractor to build a manufacturing facility to construct more models.

The founder, Marchin Jabukowski (TED Senior Fellow) is a Physics Ph.D., who dropped out to work on this project. His orientation is post-scarcity society rather than disaster, but if one were wanting to create a generalized resiliency rather than prepare for specific movie scenario plots, it would be a good place to start. See his TED talk: Open Sourced Blueprints for Civilization.

See the WaterWheel, a stunningly simple innovation that could improve lives in the developing world --  particularly for rural women who may spend hours trekking and carrying water in jugs back to their villages. This is an invention that deserves funding to spread. See the website, Wello.

And now, Open Source Ecology is teaming with WikiSpeed to build an open source, modular, configurable electric car with high fuel efficiency that meets U.S. safety standards.

==Rebuild Everything==

Seems related to a TV series I was pitching for some years, to start with contestants wearing loin cloths in the desert, challenge them to make stone tools, then leather, and eventually smelt metal, etc.  The show?  REBUILD EVERYTHING!  Picture "Survivor" meets "The 1900 House" meets "Junkyard Wars"... then throw in lots of fascinating Discovery Channel riffs... along with a dash of "The Flintstones". Include some tasty inter-tribal rivalry, and add a sensation that viewers are actually learning something of value, becoming a little more capable and knowing about their own culture.

In the ultimate challenge, competitive teams race each other, starting from scratch to rebuild civilization! Instead of just surviving, they must chip flint, make spears and arrows and traps, stitch clothing from hides (no animals will be killed directly by the show). Once the Stone Age has been conquered, contestants move on to re-invent pottery, weaving and agriculture -- then mining and smithing copper ore, then bronze, iron and so on. Each next step must be taken by using technologies achieved at the previous level.

Once they succeed at a task, it is assumed that their “civilization” (their team) has that technology from then on. They will be provided any tools they require from that level, in order to attempt the next.

Envision season four ending with them chugging up-river on a built-from scratch steamboat, prospecting for ores to make the first TV....

==Threats to Civilization==

In EXISTENCE I portray the rich buying up small island nations that are doomed by rising tides, then building stilt cities on those nations, who already have legal international sovereignty.  Now see the beginnings: leaders of the Pacific archipelago Kiribati are considering moving the entire population to Fiji, as their islands are threatened by rising ocean levels. When you see stilts rising over there, know that I told you first.

We have overseen the largest wealth re-allocation in history: The US has transferred 7 TRILLION dollars to Middle Eastern nations in exchange for oil.  Ponder that. And the bosom pals of middle-eastern potentates who ran the US for many years, undermining all efforts to get off of the oil teat.

Now T. Boone Pickens is back touting natural gas... of which North America apparently has a vast supply... as a way to break that habit.  Sure it is still fossil/carbon fuel (though better and cleaner than oil).  But it might serve as our “bridge” in order to both do better and keep some of our money, to invest in the true solution technologies of the future.  Pickens will stand to make big bucks if we go along with his plan.

But at least we’d know what we are buying - a deal that makes sense, unlike the total sellout of our children that happened in the first decade of this century.

==See more articles on Enlightenment Civilization: Looking Forward not Back

Scarcity Economics: Value and Non-Zero Sum Games

It seems that “theories of value” have been hot, lately. I posted a rumination on “the ultimate refutation of Karl Marx” just a few days ago, that seems highly relevant: Blackmail Reminders: and the ultimate refutation of Karl Marx

Phil Cubeta wonders about “value” and I agree that there are many non economic ways to view it. And some mystical ways that pretended to be about economics, such as Marx’s Labor Theory of Value.

And yet... always contrarian... On another site. It was pondered whether the attention economy... if all other human needs are satisfied (say by nanofactories) ... might that bring about a surprising result? If all other scarcities vanish, except that of scarce human attention, then human TIME becomes the highly valued desideratum. In that case, might the quaint notion of Karl Marx's labor theory of value come true, after all?

Tell you what. I’m going to attach below a posting made by Chris Phoenix recently on another (Predictions Markets) group. A guest screed that I think sets things in very useful perspective. He uses the notion of Zero-Sum and Positive Sum games, which Robert Wright expresses very well in NONZERO: The Logic of Human Destiny. It seems a powerful insight to help explain why some valuable entities are best protected by a hierarchical “guardian” like the state... while others will be hampered or destroyed if they are valued in that way.

Interstingly, I have found that negative, zero and positive sum games are also very useful in appraising human personalities! Negative sum people would harm themselves if only to get at their enemy. Zero sum types see life as a series of win-lose wars. (And such people dominate ALL political wings, because of their zeal and intensity.)

Cynical zero sum people simply cannot comprehend the infinite problem-solving enthusiasm of those who are wired for positive-sum thinking, and vice versa.

Want an excellent litmus for quickly diagnosing which “sum” dominates another person’s personality? Try Asking: What would you wish for, knowing that your worst enemy would get twice as much of whatever you got?”

One negative-sum person immediately answered “I’d ask to go blind in one eye.”

One guy gave an answer which was maybe zero... or positive sum... or just clever. ”I’d ask for a mate who was all the woman a guy could possibly handle.” (*snort*)

Here is that riff by Chris Phoenix:

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CP: Follow-up to the type-of-economy and scarcity issues that were discussed a few days ago, and the intriguing phrase "scarcity economics":

A trusted friend is house-sitting for you. When you get back from vacation, your friend tells you, "I borrowed your kitchen table, but it fell off my truck and got smashed. How much do I owe you?" You shake your head and name a figure.

A second friend says, "I picked up your father's funeral urn, and dropped it. How much do I owe you? There's no good answer--there's something wrong with the question.

A third friend says, "I watched two of your DVDs while I was here. How much do I owe you?" The answer of course is "Nothing--what are you talking about?"

The discussion on what kinds of economy are most suitable for what kinds of resource has been focused too small. Some resources are monetizable, and can participate naturally in an economy. But some resources are not easily monetizable, and those are of two different kinds. Each kind of resource needs a different kind of handling. If one kind of resource is handled as though it were another kind, bad things happen.

Some resources, though in theory monetizable, in practice will not change hands without coercion. A nation's territory is an example of this. Such resources are guarded by systems that promote stasis. Interestingly, the guardian systems are also useful for enforcing property rights, preventing involuntary (win-lose) transactions of priced goods. Win-lose transactions are usually an overall loss, as when a stolen car goes a chop shop, so should be minimized.

Win-win transactions should be optimized and maximized (unless they have hidden costs). The commercial system--very different from the guardian system--has evolved to promote such transactions. Since many possible transactions are not mutually beneficial, the commercial system promotes honesty. Since the general welfare improves with each good transaction, the system promotes inventivness. Since resources can make more resources, the system promotes thriftiness. (Readers may recognize Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival here. But she didn't talk about the third system.)

The trouble with Communism was that it applied a zero-sum Guardian administration to tradeable goods, precluding any positive-sum outcome. In fact, it actively destroyed positive-sum opportunities.

The third kind of resource can be used without consuming it, and copied without scarcity. Obviously there are incidental costs to any activity, but if those are sufficiently small, and the value created is large and unrelated to the costs, it seems fair to call the transaction "unlimited sum." Many instances of information fall in this category, especially since the development of networked digital computers. The Free Software and Open Source movements rely on the insignificant cost of copying text, and the high value of that text. Note that creation of significant value is likely to create incidental benefits all around; if the incidental benefits to me from an "unlimited-sum" transaction are likely to outweigh my incidental costs, then it is in my best interest to encourage as many transactions as possible without trying to meter or monitor them.

For more on the "Three Systems," see THREE SYSTEMS OF ETHICS FOR DIVERSE APPLICATIONS, by Chris Phoenix

Now, about scarcity:

Information-type "unlimited sum" resources are not naturally scarce. They may be made artificially scarce, as by intellectual property law. (Some IP law is stimulatory, some is protectionistic. The US software industry did better without software patents, but software copyright was probably a good thing.) In this information-rich age, it's easy to think that everything should be non-scarce. A little thought will show that that's impossible.

There's another type of non-scarcity that I'll call non-shortage until an economist tells me the real name for it. That's when there's enough of a thing available that the cost is driven down to a level just high enough to prevent profligate waste--in normal circumstances, for typical uses, a person in a Western nation never has to think about the cost of a glass of tap water. As manufacturing and material handling improve, more and more things can be placed in that category.

It is tempting to think that non-shortage implies that a thing should be free. Humans like free lunches. But if a material good were actually free, it would be wasted until it became scarce. If food (and janitorial services) on the Star Ship Enterprise were truly free, people would fill each other's rooms with vanilla pudding as a prank. That doesn't mean that in real life, a food dispenser would need a coin slot to prevent waste. The limit might be imposed by social mores or by programming in each food dispenser rather than by direct monetary transaction. But the limit would be there.

Conversely, it is tempting to think that goods should never move into non-shortage status. What would happen if people had all the ___ they needed, without having to pay for it? Wouldn't that be an immoral free lunch? Well, scratch the surface of that, and you'd find that a major part of the resistance comes from the "lost" revenue to the companies that have provided the expensive good. Another aspect of the resistance comes from simple fear of change. I don't have much use for either of those motivations--let the creative destruction roll!

Will there always be some things that are scarce? Yes. Will they always be the same things? No. Are there some things that should never be scarce? Yes.

So can we have a society without "scarcity economics"? No. Can we have a society without shortages of basic resources? Yes. Can we have a society that makes profligate use of every resource? No. Can we have a society that continually improves, sustainably? Yes. Can people rationally give things away without calculating their reward? Yes, but only the "unlimited sum" class of things.

Can we have a society in which all people are satisfied and productive, and rarely if ever conscious of scarcity? That depends on human psychology, but I think so: Develop the economy until all basic needs are in the non-shortage category, and focus human activity on the unlimited-sum categories. Will the weakening of profit and capitalism cause economic instability and regression? I don't know--there's probably a balance to be struck. Can such a society be created through redistribution and ideology, as the Communists tried to do? NO! That approach is corrosive at every turn.

-- Chris Phoenix cphoenix@CRNano.org Director of Research Center for Responsible Nanotechnology

Manifestos of Optimism... plus science goodies.

My article “Prediction as Faith, Prediction as a Tool: Peering into Tomorrow's World” appeared in Futures Research Quarterly, vol.22 no.2 (2006) - the flagship publication of the World Future Society. It has caused a bit of stir...

But nothing like the what impresario/agent John Brockman manages to foment every year or so, when he gathers fifty or so intellectual luminaries for one of those unique, eclectic, annual group-think sessions on his mental Brahmin site “Edge.” This year’s “big question” topic is all about something we’ve been discussing here. The perils of lethargy-inducing cynicism in an era that demands vigorous attention to problem-solving.

See: Causes for Optimism -- The Edge Annual Question: What are you optimistic about? Why?

Only, before you go wading, be warned that it’s a wide, capacious pool... and sometimes even deep. Of course, most of the ideas expressed are kind of ho-hum and even shallow, in a been-there sense. Still, with sparkling minds like Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, William Calvin and many others aboard, you are bound to come across some real nuggets of surprise, insight and wisdom.

Here’s one sample. Chris Anderson, one of the curators of the TED Conference, offered this refreshing reminder that humans are far better tuned to perceive bad news than good:

“The publication last year of a carefully researched Human Security Report received little attention. Despite the fact that it had concluded that the numbers of armed conflicts in the world had fallen 40% in little over a decade. And that the number of fatalities per conflict had also fallen. Think about that. The entire news agenda for a decade, received as endless tales of wars, massacres and bombings, actually missed the key point. Things are getting better. 

“If you believe Robert Wright and his NonZero hypothesis, this is part of a very long-term and admittedly volatile trend in which cooperation eventually trumps conflict. Percentage of males estimated to have died in violence in hunter gatherer societies? Approximately 30%. Percentage of males who died in violence in the 20th century complete with two world wars and a couple of nukes? Approximately 1%. Trends for violent deaths so far in the 21st century? Falling. Sharply.

“In fact, most meta-level reporting of trends show a world that is getting better. We live longer, in cleaner environments, are healthier, and have access to goods and experiences that kings of old could never have dreamed of. If that doesn't make us happier, we really have no one to blame except ourselves. Oh, and the media lackeys who continue to feed us the litany of woes that we subconsciously crave.”

I’ll offer a few more riffs on optimism at the EDGE site, during some ensuing postings. But of course, that’s a poor substitute for having a look for yourself... and pondering whether Brockman’s site is achieving its true potential.


----OTHER ITEMS IN THE NEWS----

And this predictive hit: NASA scientists are developing a speech recognition system that can understand and relay words that haven't been said out loud.

The human body produces a natural painkiller several times more potent than morphine. When given to rats, the chemical, called opiorphin, was able to curb pain at much lower concentration than the powerful painkiller morphine.

If you enhance your workout with the new Nike+ iPod Sport Kit, you may be making yourself a surveillance target. A report from four University of Washington researchers reveals that security flaws in the new RFID-powered device from Nike and Apple make it easy for tech-savvy stalkers, thieves and corporations to track your movements. With just a few hundred dollars and a little know-how, someone could even plot your running routes on a Google map without your knowledge.

While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.

An ambitious teenager in Rochester Hills, Mich., is ranked as the 18th amateur to create nuclear fusion - combining atoms to create energy. 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale.

After decades of intensive effort by both experimental and theoretical physicists worldwide, a tiny particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond, dubbed the "axion," has now been detected by the University at Buffalo physicist who first suggested its existence in a little-read paper as early as 1974. This is amazing. The axion has been mythical for so long, this is truly tremendous news.

The axion has behttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifen seen as critical to the Standard Model of Physics and is believed to be a component of much of the dark matter in the universe. "These results show that we have detected axions, part of a family of particles that likely also includes the very heavy Higgs-Boson particle, which at present is being sought after at different laboratories,"

Boeing-Spectrolab has managed to create a solar cell with 40.7 percent sunlight-to-energy conversion efficiency.

Josh Duberman supplied this one.

"Businessman Joao Pedro Wettlauser was in Cologne, Germany, on Sunday when he received an alert on his phone informing him that someone had entered his vacation house in Guaruja, 54 miles south of Sao Paulo, police said.He quickly turned on his laptop and, thanks to security cameras connected to the Internet, was able to see a tattooed man stuffing goods into trash bags…"

Which is, of course, our future, when the cost of global bandwidth drops low enough, and the value of what's to be protected is high enough, to make it cost effective to engage eyes anywhere. In this case it was pretty simple, with a traditional alarm piping its alert over the phone network; he could have just had the alarm call in the police, though having one's own eyes on the situation avoids paying for false alarms, etc. But imagine when cheap bandwidth means that anyone with some spare time can be drafted into a "hey, watch my stuff, 'k?" network. Some Kalihari bushman's day job will be checking in on Beemers in parking garages in Manhattan.

Alas, the only thing missing was “as forecast long ago by...”

That’s it for now. These things have been accumulating so I have a large store of them... plus a sure-to-be controversial posting, soon, about the biggest danger to the incoming U.S. Congressional majority... anon...