| (continued from previous reply -- see the one below first) I proposed making a more resilient infrastructure (with little success) in the 1980s in my Princeton OR&CivE graduate studies: http://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html And here are some related ideas I developed around 1999 with "OSCOMAK": http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ And yes, cooperative technology could help with that as I explained in 2001: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.h... And many other people have worked on such ideas earlier (E.F. Schumacher, John and Mary Todd, Amory and Hunter Lovins, and many more). But cooperative technology will only help if our heart (and related mythology) is in the right place. Examples of discussion of economic mythologies:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/essays/essays-on-economics-and...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mar... But, instead of a system designed to be resilient what we got over the decades was increasing centralization and fragility and precarity because it maximized short-term profits for ever fewer people (e.g. the 2008 great recession). And those fragile results were in part from the short-term thinking praising financial obesity implicitly promoted (or at least not discouraged) by the same Operations Research department at Princeton and similar groups. But they are unfortunately in good company across the USA with so many people who ignore or dispute a key point made in the 1964 Triple Revolution Memorandum that: "An adequate distribution of the potential abundance of goods and services will be achieved only when it is understood that the major economic problem is not how to increase production but how to distribute the abundance that is the great potential of cybernation." But now graduates of such groups like at Princeton seem to be doing it again but even bigger as discussed in "The Artificial Intelligentsia": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840438 "The clever boys (there were no women) were the engineers, most of them recent graduates of Princeton University’s program in operations research, responsible for designing the company’s tech “platform”". That article is about a proprietary platform designed to predict and shape the future -- most likely essentially for the uber-wealthy to get uber-wealthier. (Even as the article's author questions the whole premise as far as whether the system will work as intended.) I took a public policy class with Frank von Hippel when I was a PU grad student (a class I was strongly advised not to take by the then OR department director of graduate studies). Professor von Hippel made an important point that in cost-benefit analysis, what is often ignored is who pays the costs and who gets the benefits. (To be clear, there were several caring faculty in that department in the 1980s -- they were just enmeshed in the US academic/economic/military complex which limited what they could do or how they could do it -- and I myself made many mistakes back then.) Call it "principles" or "compassion" or "enlightened self-interest" or "wisdom" or "heart", but that is something we greatly need in our society. And we need it now more than ever because our safety margins get increasingly small given ever more powerful technology and (relatively) an ever shrinking Earth's capacity to absorb human folly. While intelligence can help with coming up with good ends, we also need a heart which often comes from our community and the genuine health-promoting stories in it. As Einstein also wrote: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly." William Catton ("Overshoot") may have been deeply wrong about what defined the Earth's carrying capacity or what the risks were to it (like believing civilization would end with peak oil). But Catton was right in general in the notion that systems have a certain ability to absorb human activity (or folly) given a certain culture and certain technological level. Doug had many of the same fears about Peak Oil as Catton, which I tried to help his UnRevII Colloquium move beyond, to mixed results. Example: https://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/00... But at least one can see that the process of his UnRevII colloquium -- presentation and response and dialog using computers (I attended the Stanford colloquium remotely from the East Coast) -- was a tribute to Doug's vision of collaborative problem solving (and I'd add, collaborative problem identification). A deeper problem for Doug (as for many others) was that, when he was not ignored, he was funded directly and indirectly by a military-industrial complex in the USA that was increasingly being shaped by very misguided security principles and misguided economic principle (misguided relative to creating a healthy happy resilient society that works for almost everyone). He did as good a job as anyone could under the circumstances, but it was a complex dance which no-doubt constrained everything he did. It's a huge irony that at the same time the USA has been spending on the order of a trillion dollars a year for "defense" and "security", much of that money has unfortunately increased our insecurity (e.g. Iraq II) and also ignored essentially the basics of creating a resilient US civil defense for unforeseen threats. For example of an alternative, here is an idea I proposed in 2010 towards US security to "Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA":
https://web.archive.org/web/20100809061159/https://pcast.ide...
"Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all." Here is a poem I wrote about the general situation: On Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom, Virtue, and Effectiveness
Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not intelligence,
Intelligence is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not virtue, and
Virtue is not effectiveness.
So, to have is not to organize,
To organize is not to embody,
To embody is not to value,
To value is not to act, and
To act (especially in ignorance)
is not necessarily to succeed.
One big problem of our age is a confusion between intelligence (the head) and wisdom (the heart). Of course, in reality all these things are interconnected. Ill-informed compassion has cause harm, as has uncompassionate intellect. And if we don't act effectively on our knowledge and wisdom, then what good is it?Your strawman summary misses the point about all these interconnections. If we emphasize one of these aspects to the exclusion of the other the result is likely to be problematical. We need a better balance of all these things in our society -- and in the people and eventually human-like AI who comprise our society -- if we are to prosper together. |