That song, "Peter Paul and Mary: Because All Men Are Brothers", reminds me of the new movie "Senn" which we watched last night. Specifically, the PPM lyrics of: "My brother's fears are my fears, yellow white and brown. My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around."
"Senn" is an impressive movie, especially considering it was produced supposedly for only US$15000. That goes to show what modern technology and an internet-connected gift economy can do nowadays.
http://sennition.com/
This is a bit of a spoiler, but the connection is because of a key aspect of the movie's plot relates to humans' feeling each others emotions and how that changes how they behave, especially in a corporate context.
Which also reminds me of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy."
And some people labelled sociopaths or psychopaths may not have much of these feelings or may feel them more selectively.
"Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch"
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
Yet many of our corporate and political leaders at these point may fit that description...
And what do you do with various criminals who often engage in psychopathic behavior? And by whose definitions? Put your "brother" in jail?
And in a big city, given out current economic paradigm, people may also need to learn to switch off or decrease empathy in some way just to survive thousands of interpersonal encounters an hour when walking down the street...
On this plane of existence, there seems to be a complexity of human (and other) life existing in practice at a middle ground between chaos and stasis, competition and cooperation, fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, and so on.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
The Lathe of Heaven (as another spoiler) has a section where the protagonist wishes for "world peace", and it is accomplished by the appearance of an alien invasion of the moon, which unites all humanity in opposition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
So, while we should be careful what we wish for, and things are complex, still, there are so many possible environmental menaces that more cooperation is in order, IMHO. But it is never quite so simple as "all men are brothers". After all, sadly, even "brothers" sometimes fight each other like in the US Civil War.
Still, our culture may shape how competition or aggression is expressed or channeled into more positive directions. Like Mr. Fred Rogers' sings: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" As with Haber, a chemist can figure out a way to feed billions of people with nitrogenous fertilizer, or they can figure out how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, or, in Haber's case, a chemist can even do both. The irony is that Haber's doing the first (to feed people) made doing the second (to kill people) unnecessary -- except that politics has taken a century to catch up with the potential of his (and others') inventions.
Likewise, even now, imagine what we could have had if the USA had invested three trillion US dollars on fusion energy research and better batteries and solar panels and energy efficiency -- instead of incurring that much and more on the Iraq war. Carter had the right idea, but he was not re-elected, even though (or perhaps because) he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem. Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
Instead, the USA chose the wrong path, and the Bush family and friends have made a bunch of money from oil profits in various ways, and many in the USA (and many in other countries) have suffered for decades due to this choice and similar ones year after year. Just like Germany took the wrong path in WWI and WWII, and Haber took the wrong path with creating poison gas then (and he also paid a personal price for it with the loss of his wife). Alternatives are possible. Although in Carter's case, it did not help that some other related policies he suggested were problematical.
Other recent posts by me on those themes:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Haber created a way to feed billions of people via nitrogen fertilizers(*), but then Haber supports a war based in large part on the idea there is not enough to go around and people need to steal each others land...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Sad to read Haber's first wife, who disapproved of Haber's poison gas work, committed suicide right after the first use of her husband's poison gas in war. Guess when something like that happens you either change or you embrace cognitive dissonance and dig in even further... See:
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes...
"Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception -- how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it."
(*) This is ignoring we now know ground-up rock dust and legumes etc. can do that too -- see: http://remineralize.org/ Also, excess nitrogen displaces other vital micronutrients which is why organic farming practices using things like slow-acting rock dust produce healthier plants and probably healthier people. See:
"Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach"
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-...
"This book explains the use of an ecological way of farming, with modern practical applications, to make the fullest use of land resources and the best utilization of available capital and labour. In analyzing the vital relationship between soil, plant, animal and man, the author discusses the best care of land itself, its components, grassland management and the most efficient use of crops to maximize yield, food quality and profitability without the extensive use of chemicals and without damaging the ecology. Widdowson also covers the holistic approach to animal farming, the welfare and health of poultry, cattle, sheep and goats, their nutritional needs through the various stages of their lives, and the best way to balance their diets."
That is why I feel the point in my sig is so essential for everyone to understand it the 21st century (although it has always been important, but gets increasingly important as our technology gets increasingly powerful): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
I guess it depends on how much everyone learns from history or example. Of course, it's been joked that those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it...
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
Those changes to Germany came from the values of a 1930s/1940s USA.
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2...
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
But, sadly, that USA and its values effectively no longer exist 70-80 years later. Today's USA has different values -- some are better (less racism and sexism overall, more respect for the environment), others are worse (less respect for workers, the "two-income trap", policies that promote a greater rich/poor divide, and more meddling in other nation's affairs which may produce profits for some connected few but produces huge costs for the whole USA let along the disrupted countries).
The real issue may be, like Gandhi is claimed to have said when asked by a journalist: "What do you think of Western civilization?", he said, "I think it would be a good idea."
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...
At this point, as US citizen, I'm much more concerned about what the US government does both abroad and at home (including stuff like supporting a repressive Saudi Arabia, other actions abroad that make terrorist blowback more likely, domestic cage-like "free speech zones", domestic rulings saying border patrols can operate in a constitution-ignoring way up to 100 miles inland, etc.) -- than what people in the Middle East cradle of civilization do. And I remain always aware there are large numbers of nuclear weapons still ready to fly on short notice...
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/2...
So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...
A Pete Seeger song, likewise covered by Peter, Paul and Mary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whe...
====
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone for husbands everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
===
See also on the Bob Dylan backstory for "Blowing in the Wind": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://www.npr.org/2000/10/21/...
And for another part of that picture, from a US Major General Smedley Butler :
http://www.ratical.org/ratvill...
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Chemical weapons are ironic because any country capable of producing them like WWI Germany is capable of using chemistry instead of produce material abundance for the world. Instead, it is ironic and tragic when people decide to use such tools of abundance from a scarcity mindset, killing other humans out of fear of competition for material things (and so snuffing out much diverse human imagination which might eventually produce even more abundance). Other paths are possible; look at how much a modern day Germany produces mainly from within its own borders through using innovation and well-compensated laborers.
More on that theme by me: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
As an example, and with its own problems, the Raspberry Pi has proved "good enough" for a lot of embedded companies, who just accept various tradeoffs to code in Python (or whatever) under Linux. In ten years, such hardware will be even cheaper and even better, and may have even better RTOS support:
http://pebblebay.com/raspberry...
Likewise and even more so for the truly free and open source Beagleboard family:
http://beagleboard.org/
What a far cry from the Kim-1 with 1K of memory I bought as a kid (with my father's help) for probably 50X in current dollars what a Rapsberry Pi or Beagleboard costs and supplies about 1GB memory. We even had to build the power supply ourselves.
This is not to disagree with what you are saying right now. I know how hard and important all that work can be. But if better tools eventually let fewer engineers produce more projects in the same time, and cheaper hardware means less constraints, and other standards change expectations so customers know to work within them, than the need for managing such complexity (including the human side) may go down. Granted with a rising increase in an internet of things and robotics, embedded work may well still increase in demand for a decade or two until better standards come to dominate the field and change the nature of so many embedded tasks. So, for anyone already well enmeshed int he embedded field, it may well be a good gig for the next decade or two.
Anyway, for fun, to go through your list (a bit tongue in cheek, so not completely serous answers):
"First of all the robot would have to sit in meetings with the customer understanding what the customer wants, telling him what can't be done and outlining alternative solutions in dumbed down language the customer understands. It should tell the customer if some of his choices will raise the cost (Yes, in theory the hardware can do X but the current drivers can't)."
This can be replaced in part by a web interface where the customer clicks on options and the software tells them if the combination is allowed.
"It would have to write an offer listing everything that the customer wants to have implemented but worded so he can't expect more for his money. It has to be worded so that sales people and management understand enough to agree to the price written at the bottom."
Again, web backend generates this based on web interface choices.
"It needs to understand all documentation provided by the customer and it needs to be able to find more. It also needs to know who it can ask for an undocumented detail. Currently documentation includes data sheets, Doxygen like API descriptions, articles, standards, schematics, forum discussions, RCS commit messages, source code, and books but there will probably be a new form designed to be understood by machines. It is also useful to remember everything the customer said even if it might turn out to be wrong."
This could be mostly replaced by machine-readable standards as you suggest.
"It has to know sources of errors. Documentation can have errors. There can be errors in the design of the hardware. The hardware might be faulty (f.ex. bad solder joints) and you need to know what will destroy the hardware (no you can't configure that GPIO to output a low value). It has to fix simple errors itself (yes, I did have to solder some jumper wires and pull up resistors in the past few years). If it can't fix the error, it has to discuss the problem with someone who can. If the problem won't be fixed (no we won't spin a new SoC revision for you) software workarounds have to be devised and the pros and cons have to be discussed with the customer. To be able to find errors, it has to know about software and hardware debugging techniques (printf debugging, Gdb, Valgrind, JTAG, oscilloscope probing,
Bad hardware becomes so cheap it is discarded. Twenty years ago OTI had embedded Smalltalk development tools that could make such debugging much easier. See:
http://www.slideshare.net/esug...
"It has to write code in a form that can be maintained. It has to merge code (complete components and updates thereof) from suppliers and know what has to be changed to make it work again. Our suppliers often don't know they are supplying to us, so is has to have an eye on their release and security announcements. It has to decide if an update is advised and then has to inform the customers (if they signed a support contract)."
Again, Smalltalk was the answer. It might be yet again someday.
"It has to come up with software tests. Some customers explicitly want unit tests or detailed test reports. It has to do the tests that have been paid for. Of course the minimum testing is determined by what makes you feel confident that it works."
Yeah testing can be hard. But that's what unpaid exploitable interns trying to break into the industry so they won't starve are for.
http://theintern.io/
"It has to write documentation. Test reports, end user documentation, API descriptions."
The new standard is that the need for documentation is an error that needs to be routed around.
"It has to communicate with the customer to ask for things that have to be provided (We need a cable for your special connector on port X. When can we expect the display PCB to be done?), to learn about bugs and to announce releases. Doing so it has to be polite. It must be pleasant for the customer to communicate with the robot."
This is all handled by an Amazon-like web site.
"It has to meet with the customer for an integration workshop (Our first board revision will be assembled on Thursday. Can you come on Friday to make the software work? Yes, we know it did work on the evaluation board.) or to analyze bugs on size (Our factory stops working about a handful of times a day. No we can't send it to you and we won't connect it to the internet for debugging.)."
The web site is always available. The hardware downloads the updates itself wirelessly using some standard protocol.
"There is probably still something I forgot. In my opinion it would be inefficient to split all this between humans an robots. How would a human know what is possible if it doesn't do the coding? Given all that, I think my job is safe until machines are intelligent enough to rule the world."
Better tools will help fewer engineers do more. But I agree embedded engineering is one of the most important jobs in our society right now and the need will grow. However, in the same way engineers rarely solder individual transistors into logic circuits theses days, in the future, engineers may be working with large building blocks and better tools for integrating them. That also could just printing out a perfect (and self-testing) design based on simulation tests using standard building blocks. It is when we push the edges of things that we have the most issues to handle. As hardware and standards improve, the edges may get farther and farther away.
I agree software now is a mess. I program in JavaScript for deployability, but it too is a mess, and much harder to work with than Smalltalk or even Java or Clipper. HyperCard was another great system for its time. Greed harmed several of these languages, Smalltalk and HyperCard especially, but even Java by keeping it proprietary for so long.
Ironically, compared to the article's suggestion, it seems the more code we have, the more programmers we need to keep up with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
As I see it though, we probably have about 99X+ more programmers than we need already, as far as core infrastructure.
Much of what programmers do in practice is (perhaps unintentionally) make work for each other. It may well be worse than the legal profession in that sense (where lawyers make work for each other or create or encourage conflicts). A lot of that comes from the nature of capitalism and competition vs. alternative economic forms based more on cooperation. Programmers typically can't freely share code or specs with others in different businesses, so everyone is always re-inventing the wheel and reverse engineering data structures and data formats and communications protocols, which create a proliferation of slightly different code bases with different edge cases.
For another example, why do we really need so many web browser engines? Also, why could not some web standards body accept Sqlite as the defacto web browser data storage engine because there were not "multiple implementations"? A shared public codebase is often the best standard. Like Alan Kay says, any textual standard of more than five lines is ambiguous. On that Sqlite issue, see:
http://diveintohtml5.info/stor...
"All of which brings us to the following disclaimer, currently residing at the top of the Web SQL Database specification: "This specification has reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. Until another implementor is interested in implementing this spec, the description of the SQL dialect has been left as simply a reference to Sqlite, which isn't acceptable for a standard. ""
Instead of that well engineered Sqlite library, we now get a half-baked "IndexedDB" standard as Firefox refuses to support Web SQL as Sqlite even though Sqlite is already baked into the Firefox browser!
http://programmers.stackexchan...
"Short version: Web SQL was deprecated because standards are really important and turning Web SQL into a proper standard would have been prohibitively difficult.
Mozilla's blog gives more details on their reasoning in particular for not supporting Web SQL; apparently they were one of the major voices in getting Web SQL deprecated.
Should you go with Web SQL now? I don't expect the vendors that currently support it (like Google and Apple) to drop it any time soon, but IE and Firefox won't be adding it, and since it's deprecated, why invest in it? (For example, Ido Green, with Google Developer Relations, doesn't recommend using it.)"
Mozilla helped kill it! So now the web browser struggles to be a real personal development platform with well-defined efficient indexable local data storage (even though such code is already built in to almost all of them).
Still, programmers generally like writing new code. It can be fun. I would no sooner stop people from doing that than I would stop them from composing poetry or writing essays or painting pictures or talking to neighbors or cooking delicious meals or gardening in their backyards. As an example, I feel new experiments like the "Smallest Federated Wiki" are very much worth coding up:
http://fed.wiki.org/trending.h...
But in a business, every line of code in some sense becomes a debt that must be maintained ("technical debt"). The code you wrote yesterday is today's legacy code maintenance problem. Perhaps we need better tools to prioritize what legacy code most needs to be maintained?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Technical debt (also known as design debt[1] or code debt) is a recent metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor system design, software architecture or software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete or proper. If the debt is not repaid, then it will keep on accumulating interest, making it hard to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes at the same time in other parts of the codebase or documentation. The other required, but uncompleted changes, are considered debt that must be paid at some point in the future. Just like financial debt, these uncompleted changes incur interest on top of interest, making it cumbersome to build a project. Although the term is used in software development primarily, it can also be applied to other professions."
And, as a scary thought, some theories of social collapse suggest civilizations fail when the cost of maintaining the growing infrastructure exceeds the returns produced by that infrastructure. Could we be reaching that point with software?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Tainter's position is that social complexity is a recent and comparatively anomalous occurrence requiring constant support. He asserts that collapse is best understood by grasping four axioms. In his own words (p. 194):
human societies are problem-solving organizations;
sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
With these facts in mind, collapse can simply be understood as a loss of the energy needed to maintain social complexity. Collapse is thus the sudden loss of social complexity, stratification, internal and external communication and exchange, and productivity."
I've worked towards simpler tools in a variety of ways (most recently trying to make the most of JavaScript as a defacto standard even with its problems), but of course, in some other ways my additional coding only adds to the problem of more competing "standards" and yet more legacy code...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Pointre...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://xkcd.com/927/
Linked below are some further economic rambles by me on what to do when more people finally realize all this and more, especially if systems including mainstream economics start to collapse in unexpected ways (like as mainstream economics hits divide-by-zero errors due to plummeting costs or wages):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
What motivates people is autonomy, increasing mastery, and a sense of purpose. See Dan Pink's talk:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or look at the writing of Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/punis...
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
" "We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
Progress or "advancement" in what direction is another good question to ask yourself. Is it a good idea to more quickly advance off a cliff? For example, the World Wide Web might have been a much better place and the web browser might have been a much better tool if not for all the effort various groups have put into undermining web standards for private gain (for example, Microsoft in the early years). The problem with a lot of competition is it encourages people to use power (including political power) to private gains while socializing costs, and that can be very costly and unpleasant overall for a community. Once can have *diversity* without explicit *competition*. What it takes is something like a basic income, easy subsistence production, free-or-cheap-to-the-user planned infrastructure, or some other means of ensuring people have the time and resources to create.
If our culture was as aggressive as the Romans, maybe the Earth would be a nuclear wasteland by now? Although, as "I, Claudius" suggests, a lot of Roman aggression was turned in on itself at some point, with political murders including of the leaders who might otherwise have made Rome a better place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"During the prosperous reign of Augustus, he is plagued by personal losses as his favored heirs, Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar, die at varying points. Claudius reveals that these untimely deaths are all the machinations of Augustus' cold wife Livia, who seeks to make her son Tiberius succeed Augustus.
If we did not have weapons based on the tools of abundance like nuclear bombs as a result of harnessing abundant nuclear energy, aggression out-of-control would not be such a big global issue and threat (even if aggression could always be a local issue). Ironically, harnessing nuclear power and other forms of advanced technology that could produce abundance (including abundant destruction) like robots and new materials has removed the reasons for much aggression over material goods, but we still are stuck in our old mindset emphasizing aggression as a way to deal with material scarcity. So, for example, we are ready to use nuclear energy in the form of nuclear weapons delivered by robotic cruise missiles whose batteries were charged by solar panels to fight over oil fields on the other side of the planet from us -- instead of using nuclear energy (or robot-constructed solar panels or whatever) to generate power locally. Image what the 21st century could have been like without two Word Wars if 1910s and 1930s Germany had worked towards breakthroughs in solar power and energy efficiency and agricultural efficiency instead of trying to steal someone else's coal and land. Now Germany focuses inward on innovation and efficiency and is peaceful and the economic powerhouse of the European Union.
I wrote about this broad issue at length here:
"Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)"
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
That's the big issue as I mention in my sig, and it plays out in other ways including with food, media, addiction, and so on as human traits adapted evolutionarily for scarcity cause difficulties when confronted with some sorts of modern abundance.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.nancycarlssonpaige....
http://dianeelevin.com/sosexys...
All that said, cooperation within groups has also been a key trait of human beings.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
But it is true that humans tend to have in group cooperation and out-group competition, something E.O. Wilson has written about. And human mating rituals also often revolve around proving something to stand out from the crowd, like James P. Hogan touches on in "Voyage From Yesteryear" depicting a culture where people compete by demonstrating excellence in some area. So, again, the biggest issue is not aggression or competition itself, but how those impulses are culturally directed. As. Mr. Fred Rogers' sang: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" That is the question.
BTW, bacteria are actually the dominant species on this planet,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Now, if the world's bacteria would just give us a little more help in making self-replicating space habitats that could duplicate themselves form sunlight and asteroidal ore (including helping create the information tools to design them), we could increase their biomass in the solar system by a factor of 1000X or more.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Try this: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/P...
You can enter the below short JavaScript script in the text box, and then push the "View Below" button to create a new div for the window which will pop up the alert as part of displaying itself.
<script>
alert("hello");
</script>
If you enter a Data ID for the text and a User ID for yourself (can be almost anything) and click "Store" you will store that text in the web browser's local storage.
I wrote that about a year ago. It works under Firefox on Mac OS 10.6. It may not work as well elsewhere; for example Firefox under Win7 didn't work for some reasons when I tried it yesterday (but probably a minor error to fix). I do not know how it will perform on most mobile systems, but again, in theory, it should work or otherwise be relatively easy to fix. Here is the source code with more information:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
You can also enter any HTML you want there, like to create buttons or divs or anything you want. Examples can be loaded by imported the text below into the editor using "Import and Merge" and then you can click "List all IDs" and select an item like "polar clock" to view it below (that example is a graphical clock, written by someone else using D3):
https://raw.githubusercontent....
A different approach to doing something like that if you are willing to host a NodeJS server somewhere is this other code I wrote:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
However, if you go that route, there are quite a few web services that support remote coding through the browser on hosted platforms. For example, "Cloud 9":
https://c9.io/
BTW, my own current work on all that, just checked in a new update to a version of the Pointrel System yesterday which I am please with conceptually. I use it here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
But the main repository for that version of the Pointrel System is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
It has ideas in it that could be useful for a Simple Federated Wiki like Ward is working towards and other knowledge sharing tools beyond that. At the core of this version of the system is the idea is document "envelopes" which wrap JSON objects and supply indexed metadata including arbitrary triples and also supply a document ID, where you can post new versions of a document with later timestamps to change the indexing of them or the content. This is just my own twist on a lot of ideas that have been running around for a long time (including in CouchDB, MongoDB, RDF, Wikis, git, and my own previous work). Inspiration often ping-pongs back and forth between people or indirectly across networks.
Anyway, I'd say Ward Cunningham's "Wiki Way" feels somewhat more like Stallman's ideals than O'Reilly's "Open Source" ideals, even if it is different in its own way.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWay
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheWiki...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
However, there are truths to what all of these people have to say from their different perspectives, whether about ideology, practice within pragmatic current politics, or community tools. It can be hard to put them all together.
Hard to imagine so little real discussion on this on Slashdot if this article had been posted ten years ago. So much has changed in some ways. For an alternative view of what happened that blames Tim O'Reilly (perhaps too strongly?), see this long article by Evgeny Morozov, a part of which is below:
"The Meme Hustler: Tim O'Reilly's crazy talk"
http://www.thebaffler.com/arti...
"While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are "disrupting" whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don't mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
However, it's not his politics that makes O'Reilly the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley; a burgeoning enclave of Randian thought, it brims with far nuttier cases. O'Reilly's mastery of public relations, on the other hand, is unrivaled and would put many of Washington's top spin doctors to shame. No one has done more to turn important debates about technology--debates that used to be about rights, ethics, and politics--into kumbaya celebrations of the entrepreneurial spirit while making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject. As O'Reilly discovered a long time ago, memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.The Randian undertones in O'Reilly's thinking are hard to miss, even as he flaunts his liberal credentials. "There's a way in which the O'Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world," he wrote in 2012. But it's not just the hacker as hero that O'Reilly is so keen to celebrate. His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword. Hiding beneath this glossy veneer of disruption-talk is the same old gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism that we associate with Randian characters. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.
It was the growing popularity of "open source software" that turned O'Reilly into a national (and, at least in geek circles, international) figure. "Open source software" was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O'Reilly. This is where he tested all his trademark discursive interventions: hosting a summit to define the concept, penning provocative essays to refine it, producing a host of books and events to popularize it, and cultivating a network of thinkers to proselytize it.
Underpinning Stallman's project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric identification presented no major mysteries.
Stallman is highly idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, and there are many geeks who don't share his agenda. Plenty of developers contributed to "free software" projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software, many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999, while Stallman's manifesto "read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise." Stallman's rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman didn't care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association.
By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet--the Open Source Initiative--and brought in O'Reilly to help them rebrand. The timing was right. Netscape had just marked its capitulation to Microsoft in the so-called Browser Wars and promised both that all future versions of Netscape Communicator would be released free of charge and that its code would also be made publicly available. A few months later, O'Reilly organized a much-publicized summit, where a number of handpicked loyalists--Silicon democracy in action!--voted for "open source" as their preferred label. Stallman was not invited.
Even before the coup, O'Reilly occupied an ambiguous--and commercially pivotal--place in the free software community. On the one hand, he published manuals that helped to train new converts to the cause. On the other hand, those manuals were pricey. They were also of excellent quality, which, as Stallman once complained, discouraged the community from producing inexpensive alternatives. Ultimately, however, the disagreement between Stallman and O'Reilly--and the latter soon became the most visible cheerleader of the open source paradigm--probably had to do with their very different roles and aspirations. Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate. O'Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O'Reilly books and events, especially at a time when some analysts were beginning to worry--and for good reason, as it turned out--that the tech industry was about to collapse.In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda. As Raymond himself put it in 1999, "what we needed to mount was in effect a marketing campaign," one that "would require marketing techniques (spin, image-building, and re-branding) to make it work." This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined. Instead, it put all the emphasis on how it was pursuing those ends--in an extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination. In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component. According to Raymond, "open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It's an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results." O'Reilly concurred. "I don't think it's a religious issue. It's really about how do we actually encourage and spark innovation," he announced a decade later. While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
The coup succeeded. Stallman's project was marginalized. But O'Reilly and his acolytes didn't win with better arguments; they won with better PR. To make his narrative about open source software credible to a public increasingly fascinated by the Internet, O'Reilly produced a highly particularized account of the Internet that subsequently took on a life of its own. In just a few years, that narrative became the standard way to talk about Internet history, giving it the kind of neat intellectual coherence that it never actually had. A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O'Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
All the familiar pathologies of O'Reilly's thinking are on full display in his quest to meme-engineer his way to "Government 2.0." The free software scenario is repeating itself: deeply political reform efforts are no longer seen as "moral crusades," but are reinvented as mere attempts at increasing efficiency and promoting innovation.
By the early 2000s, as O'Reilly and his comrades were celebrating open source as a new revolutionary approach to everything, their discussions wandered into debates about the future of governance. Thus, a term like "open government"--which, until then, had mostly been used as a synonym for "transparent and accountable government"--was reinvented as a shortened version of "open source government." The implication of this subtle linguistic change was that the main cultural attributes of open source software--the availability of the source code for everyone's inspection, the immense contribution it can make to economic growth, the new decentralized production model that relies on contributions from numerous highly distributed participants--were to displace older criteria like "transparency" or "accountability" as the most desirable attributes of open government. The coining of the "open government" buzzwords was meant to produce a very different notion of openness.
I just saw that article today while looking at stuff connected to Ward Cunningham's most recent Simple Federated Wiki work and Ted Nelson's earlier hypertext work of Xanadu and ideas in Computer Lib / Dream Machines.
http://found.tumblr.com/post/4...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
This was surprising by Ward:
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?Wik...
"After twenty years of service I'm pleased to announce a complete rewrite of wiki as a single page application with a distributed database which will last us for at least 20 years, maybe 200. see http://c2.fed.wiki.org/ We've recently endured abuse that has moved our conversion date forward before we were fully prepared. I apologize for this. Expect the new to be well aligned with the capabilities of the modern internet with plenty of opportunity for participation that was not possible before. Thank you all. "
A starting point for the source:
https://github.com/WardCunning...
The first checkins to github are about six months after I posted this to the C2 Wiki talking about a design for a Peer-to-peer distributed Wiki for the Pointrel system I've long been working on:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Pointre...
Although no doubt others have had similar thoughts back to Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Vannevar Bush and so on. Anyway, just trying to end this comment on a more positive note. There may be an ebb and flow of social feelings, and clearly the commercial exchange economy has been ascendent the past few decades, but we may see advanced subsistence production and gift giving via the internet and democratic planning make a comeback to bring things back into balance. I feel we are already seeing those other trends blossom. "Interesting times"...
Very insightful: https://www.quantamagazine.org...
"Carmi Turchick says: February 13, 2015 at 9:30 am
Agree with Ratcliff's last statement. The issue is considerably more complicated in humans than in bacteria, and even in bacteria one needs to consider how hostile the environment is. What is astonishing about most of the PD literature is how it claims to examine evolution but never mentions the environment. A hostile environment, as Dugatkin showed, selects for more cooperation. The free-living bacteria that under drought convictions form a colony that creates a stalk and spores are an example and they point to the next error, which is assuming a reward is always available no matter the actions of the players. This is not how nature works. If too few of the bacteria cooperate, no stalk is made, no spores are released, all of the bacteria have a fitness of zero. Similarly in humans there are many times when obtaining any reward requires N number of individuals to cooperate, and often that number is unknowable. Nine of us might kill that elephant, or it might be one or two or three too few to get it done resulting in nothing for all of us. Even with two partners, if you selfishly fail to cut off the monkey's escape route he gets away and we both go hungry. Think I will go hunting with you again? Which brings up yet another issue; avoiding detection and the cost of being detected. PD assumes that the cost of defecting is limited to a partner picking defect in the next round. Some models allow partners to punish a player at a significant cost to themselves or to move to another partner, but even these fall well short of what we see in human groups. As described by Boehm in "Heirarchy in the Forest," those whose selfish behavior is detected face collective punishment by the group, costing each group member very little, which ranges from social shunning to being murdered by one's own family or abandoned and left alone by the group. The power in a group of cooperators belongs to the cooperators and not the defectors, as cooperators work together to thwart defectors but defectors by definition cannot gang up on cooperators in return. As PD examines interactions with two parties, if the cooperator is paired with a defector or extorter they have no one to cooperate with. But in a group they have plenty of cooperative partners while the selfish stand alone. This imbalance of power means that the opportunities to defect are extremely limited as one must avoid detection, a situation which favors cooperation as the dominant and more numerous strategy. Finally, in group social territorial species having and defending a territory is an all or nothing issue with N number required to keep neighbors from taking your land and killing everyone. Either all of you have land and lives or none of you have land and at the very least few men and children survive. So we see that fairly often the "reward" for defecting is actually not 3 or whatever number is randomly chosen, but instead it is nothing, or loss of social status, or it is death for the individual, or death for the individual and all their relatives."
"By that yardstick, we're post-scarcity now, since the problems with supplying essentials to everybody are basically political, not technical or economic."
Yes, exactly. And it has been that way for some time. And if all that energy spent propping up a social order based on artificial scarcity (e.g the Iraq war) was instead, say, creating fusion energy (US$3 trillion incurred on Iraq would have brought us pretty close...) we'd be able to go way beyond the basics for everyone.
That's the paradigm shift that could happen. It's what James P. Hogan explores in his novel "Voyage from Yesteryear", maybe with some overly rosy glasses about decentralization but still a good read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
"The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, capitalism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict."
As I wrote in this essay, abundance for all essentially comes from multiply technological progress times social progress. So, with social progress, what technology you have can do a lot more, and vice versa.
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
Realizing how fragile our civilization is on this planet (given solar flares, supervolcanos, asteroid strikes, climate change, plagues, and so on including all the things in the original story) is one motivator for people to put more effort into cooperation and less effort into conflict.
BTW, an "endless pool" is (I hear) really great for convenient swimming, and a lot cheaper than most beach front property.
http://www.endlesspools.com/
The thing is, as soon as you state what specific you are trying to accomplish (exercise, sunshine, storage space, time in nature), rather than what specific thing you want (mansion on a beach), there are probably lots of creative paths to obtain that in ways that everyone could also do. As another example, yes, there may be only one original "Mona Lisa" painting (or maybe a few similar ones by the same artist), but if you want a pleasant painting on the wall to look at, or are willing to accept a copy of a well known painting, that is relatively easy to achieve in material terms.
So, even if actual Earthly current beachfront property is scarce relative to the demand at a price of "free" (I have to concede that), opportunities for exercise, being in nature, or having beautiful experiences are readily available to most people (or could be).
One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis
