[ox-en] conceiving the vision of an algorithmic economy combined with social credits
- From: "Franz Nahrada" <f.nahrada reflex.at>
- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:18:48 +0200
from a private conversation with Michel, Marcin and others.
----- Original Message -----
Eric,
great piece. I suppose I may forward this to the Oekonux list because it
is really an eye - opener in respect to the limited imaginations when it
comes to our societal future.
The only thing we should consider is we are not working towards the
replicator on which Bradbury or Star Trek is based. The replicator indeed
would need this only imaginary complete "digitisation" of matter to work.
Thats not the way matter works, nor is it a meaningful contribution to
human development....Humans should be the stewards of the existing web of
life and we are allready in dangerous separation....Rather than that, we
are finding the true generic algorithms that form what we call "life" in
its broadest sense. Christopher Alexander gives an account of this in his
book on the "Nature of Order" - http://www.natureoforder.com. Patterns are
materialized algorithms in a way, structures that reinforce and complement
each other. It is not one universal machine we are looking for but the
multitude of real life transformers according to the processes that are
needed.
The energies and patterns that we discover and co-develop are intelligent
living algorithms and thus they are active producing agents of material
processes. Their discovery and realization means wealth for ever, in the
frameworks that you so aptly described.
That is the main axis of societal change. It can only be reached by
research. Research is the most political and meaningful activity today. We
must learn to devote our lives to this research and understand the vast
dimensions necessary. Probably we must top the research needed to produce
the industrial society by a factor of ten or hundred! We need Millions of
researchers, independent and creative minds, and my suggestion is that
they group around basic ideas like Global Villages as human habitat
embedded in a self maintaining cycle with natural energies and agents. But
of course also others.
Global Villages is one of the patterns I hold valid, and it is the pattern
around which I see a research community emerging.
All the best
I will be offline for some time out of health reasons but I hope for a
vivid discussion. Thanks to Raoul for his wonderful piece on
demonetisation, too.
Franz
Eric Huntin wrote:
What I was referring to was Alvin Toffler's three 'waves' of
civilization, which the title of his book The Third Wave comes from.
They aren't a transition from resource economies to social credit
systems but rather the three larger paradigms of civilization;
agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial. As Toffler defined these,
the agrarian wave was defined by the characteristics of agricultural
technology, human, animal, and wind/animal water-based transportation,
and bulky low-density renewable energy sources like wood, charcoal,
and animal power, and its key cultural ideas included delayed
gratification (work now for benefit in the future), perpetual property
ownership with wealth through land ownership and offspring, filial
piety creating large cohesive family units, larger than nomadic
stationary communities with a claim to large territories and organized
'standing' defense, formalized trade over longer distances and through
stationary markets, myth- based models of nature (even if the
philosophy of the scientific method originated during this wave),
social classes based on caste systems, slavery, divine right and
feudalism, colonialism, and so on.
The industrial wave was characterized by machine production
technologies, mechanized transportation, large systems of automatic
resource distribution (water and energy grids), and water, wind, and
(though machine industry started running on wind and water and steam
technology started running on wood) non-renewable fossil fuel energy
with very high energy density. Its key cultural memes were
enlightenment philosophies and scientific models of nature,
massification (efficiency through standardization and mass production/
processing), complex finance based on uniform abstract labor-indexed
currency including credit and insurance systems enabling uniform mass
taxation, large republican nation-states (enabled by that uniform
currency concept), nuclear families with allegiance to nation-states
rather than extended families and regional communities, state-based
mass social services, Taylorism, Malthusianism, Darwinsim, etc.
The post-industrial wave is characterized by information technologies
and global networking, flexible automation through machine
intelligence, miniaturization and ephemerization of technology, and a
return to renewable energy in more advanced forms. It's dominant meme
is demassification (reclamation of freedom, identity, self-expression,
time, and quality of life through deconstruction of massified systems
and the flattening of hierarchies) resulting in such ideas and trends
as decentralization and personalization of production, global social
networking and multinational peer-to-peer activity, deconstruction of
nation-states and their financial systems, obsolescence of currency in
favor of automated demand-driven resource economics based on global
commons, reinvention of the family in non-traditional forms (gay
marriage, multi-party marriage, non-related non-married family units,
new tribes), reinvention of functional community and the
reestablishment of community-based social support/service systems, etc.
Agrarian wave economics were indeed initially resource based
economics. But when futurists refer to 'resource based economics'
today, in a post-industrial context, they're usually talking about
systems where global resources are managed rather like municipal
utilities and as a result currencies become redundant. No one 'owns'
water. Communities create facilities for its collection and
distribution as a public utility. Imagine that all resources and many
commodities were treated this same way and you have part of the
picture of what a resource based economy means. Such systems are
anticipated to evolve from global digital networked market systems
that become 'commoditized' by the trends in decentralization of
production. In other words, because production is local, markets stop
trading in finished products and labor and start dealing in a broad
spectrum of commodities in increasingly fractionalized unit volumes
evolving toward just the Periodic Table plus energy. Soon they become
so efficient -as commodities markets tend to if left to their own
devices- that they come to 'know' in an algorithmic sense the full
extent of world resources and demand and their respective cycles and
'bandwidth', eliminate currency as a metric of market values by
allowing resource values to be indexed relative to each other, and
eliminate profit and speculation by compelling capitulation (the
tendency of participants in a market to conform collectively to its
trends) and driving the market toward equilibrium. At this point the
system stops being a market for resources and commodities and becomes
an Internet (an open-Internet) for them instead, compelling the
relinquishing of individual control of resources and the management of
their exploitation to the system itself as a world utility driven by
demand. The result is a money-less society where all resources are
free, within reason, and distributed automatically in response to
demand. This is what futurist Jacque Fresco has dubbed Cybernation;
world resources managed as a global societal commons by a demand-
driven computer-based world utility.
The idea of a social credit system may derive from this resource
Internet in the context of how it would deal with the human component
of its creation and maintenance. In essence, the idea of a social
credit economic system is based on people being allowed more bandwidth
of resources relative to the reputation they build in the society as
whole, this reputation digitally tracked life-long, and the public
opinion of a particular activity they are engaged in. It's sort of
like having a system that Googles your name regularly to see how many
people know you on-line and how positive their opinions of you and
then assigns you a credit rating based on that on the premise that
what you do has a certain greater than average value to the society. I
sometimes call this Star Trek Economics because the concept was first
presented in the popular culture in the Star Trek TV series.
In Ray Bradbury's vision of the future we arrive at a moneyless
resource-based economy founded on 'replicator' use; a replicator being
a machine that synthesizes anything it has a computer model for from
pure energy and can recycle it back into energy, with some net loss.
Thus the global resource budget is simplified to an energy budget.
Everyone who lives in the Federation of Planets can use replicators to
make whatever they want when they want it -within reason. You can't
have everyone going Imelda Marcos on this and luckily most people
won't because irrational overconsumption is a product of mental
illness and the culture will treat it as such. (unlike today where we
casually tolerate public displays of insanity by anyone who is rich
enough) The system tracks everyone's replicator use just like Internet
service providers track your personal bandwidth use and if it sees
that it has become aberrant it raises the WTF flag and a psychiatric
'counselor' calls you on your lapel communicator and asks you if you
really did need those five thousand Swarovski crystal-studded pokemon
figurines. But, in fact, sometimes people have rational reasons for
needing more than the usual amount of resources, usually because of a
specific project associated with a vocation; the artist who wants to
build a large public sculpture, the scientist who wants to build a
supercollider, the engineer who want to build a spacecraft, the night
club operator who wants to make a new public party venue. This is
where 'social credit' comes into play. In Star Trek, if you have
distinguished yourself 'professionally' and socially as a member of
the Federation or if the community of your professional peers thinks
your work is worthy then you get assigned a higher personal energy
budget based on the assumption that, by the measure of your
reputation, what you do with this is likely to have value to the whole
society. You may be assigned this higher budget based on reputation in
general or it may be temporary, leant from the budgets of your
personal advocates/supporters, or limited to a specific project. Now,
this doesn't preclude you going out into deep uninhabited space and
setting up your own infrastructure so you can make all the pokemon
figures you want without justifying it to someone else but most people
won't abandon society to do that -which is probably why, in Star Trek,
space -like the Earth's near-wildernesses- tends to be inhabited by a
lot of strange people.
A resource based economic system -a resource Internet- is likely to
produce a social credit system like this by its own need for
altruistic human intervention to build and maintain its
infrastructure. This system would just be a mass of software; an on-
line trading system that evolved into an expert system. It's not like
HAL9000 or Colossus. It can't make people do anything by threat of
punishment or the like. It relies on people 'getting it' and
voluntarily following its requests for facilities here or there on the
premise that they're doing good for the society. In reward for this
aid, it can assign people a slightly higher resource bandwidth than
average. It's not payment. Everyone who links up to this system will
get full access to as much as they could -on average- want with the
system seeking to raise the bar as high as possible to keep it above
the average of people's desires for personal comfort yet within the
limits of environmental sustainability -which is pretty high when you
factor-out all of today's waste and greed. So this bonus is offered on
the assumption that because these people altruistically helped this
system they will likely use whatever extra bandwidth for a similarly
altruistic purpose. From this would come the notion of digitally
tracking reputation and socially beneficial activity as a way of
anticipating the demand for the similar activities such people are
likely to need such extra resources for in the future and assigning
resource credit accordingly. In effect, the system -just like when it
was a commodities exchange market- automatically economically
speculates on your socially progressive behavior! And so we arrive at
a system of social credit economics. This might sound like a kind of
communism but there are no political parties or bureaucratic
institutions or nation-states here. There's just this distributed
networked machine that scientifically knows the planet Earth extremely
well, tries to anticipate and give you everything you ask it for, asks
you for help in doing that from time to time, lets you have extra when
it knows you'll do good things with it, and occasionally may alert
your neighbors to come and question your goofy behavior. Would this be
something open to abuse? Of course! That's what culture and community
exist to control. It's not the Internet's job to anticipate and factor
out every possible kind of rudeness, stupidity, or insanity that
humans may perpetrate with it. That's our job. Besides, we still need
something to craft SciFi plot devices out of.
Eric Hunting
erichunting gmail.com
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de