Product A versus Product B

Wikipedia says “Socialism” is best defined as:

Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. As an economic system, socialism is a system of production based on the direct production of use-values by allocating economic inputs (the means of production) and investments through planning to directly satisfy economic demand. Economic calculation is based on either calculation-in-kind or a direct measure of labour time, output for individual consumption is distributed through markets, and distribution of income is based on individual merit or individual contribution.

And defined like this I’d say – sure, Socialism is not a system that is long term sustainable, because it doesn’t contain a feedback mechanism that corrects for human nature, and as such socialism as an exclusive system is nonviable. But hey.I am just a parrot with no real ideas of my own, right. But on that note let’s look at capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the market rather than by central planning by the government; profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses and companies. There is no consensus on the precise definition of capitalism, nor how the term should be used as an analytical category. There is, however, little controversy that private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit in a market, and prices and wages are elements of capitalism. There are a variety of historical cases to which the designation is applied, varying in time, geography, politics and culture. Some define capitalism as where all the means of production are privately owned, and some define it more loosely where merely “most” are in private hands —while others refer to the latter as a mixed economy biased toward capitalism. More fundamentally, others define capitalism as a system where production is carried out to generate profit, or exchange-value, regardless of legal ownership titles. Private ownership in capitalism implies the right to control property, including determining how it is used, who uses it, whether to sell or rent it, and the right to the revenue generated by the property.

Now if I were to state almost the same about ‘Capitalism’ as I were to state about socialism, I’d get staunch denials from either side. Capitalists being denounced would regard me as a pink-o commie, and if I were to denounce ‘paleolithic Socialism’ then I am suddenly blasted being a vile corporate shill. And sure, it doesn’t add much that I am in fact member of the SP in the Netherlands (The Socialist Party) and either vote for them (for lack of a better alternative) or for Groenlinks.

What I would say is that we are offered two products, as southpark has indicated – we are offered to choose for a Douche or a Turd. It’s Product A or product B. It is Black or White. Changing this would be like climbing the Himalayas, and I’d either have to select a party and become involved – or I’d have to start my own party. Maybe I could lobby a little but it’s clear that for someone in my position anyone making any statement ‘onto’ a political party is held in nothing short of hateful contempt or at best dismissive passive-aggressive impatience.

I’d argue that even in the bastion of personal freedom, politics is locked down and only ass-kissing docile slaves can enter it effectively. Politics in the entire world has become the equivalent to being governed by eunuchs.

I don’t want product A or B. I don’t want a quantum state of having to select either A or B. I want ranges of options. I want slider bars.

But what is more important – I assert that both ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ have failed miserably, and have become overrun by assholes and their entitlements. One can argue that I am also another whining bitch who is entitled in the same manner – after all I am dependent on disability – but the point of the system is that it does three things:

1 – The current political systems makes different ranges of citizens dependent on entitlements,
2 – It then plays the voting citizens against another as to maximize static, unchanging entitlement-centered voting pools,
3 – It then closes the system down from change, and minimizes any chance an alternative might emerge.

All this is gearing up for nothing short of catastrophic collapse of our modern political systems. The end of work, automation, pension entitlements, immigration, outsourcing, insane taxation pressures, foreign wars, oil depletion, climate weirding, racism, populists, assorted tea party movements, resource depletion, immigrant xenophobia, animal species dying going extinct worldwide, slave labour in most of the world continuing and most western world consumers not giving a flying fuck that they are complicit in completely unacceptable exploitation, nuclear proliferation, terrorism – these are all symptoms of a dualistic two party political spectrum that is doing the world indescribable harm.

The best solutions would be to implement far more radical democracy, and implementing a fact based international economic paradigm along the lines of the Venus Project. Personally I favor transhumanist policies, but that is so far outside the mainstream I won’t even begin arguing this.

In the end the only solution to this stalemate is to control or manage societal stupidity. Why I am not advocating ‘”exterminating stupid people’ (with some exceptions) we must constrain competence. The only way to do this is by introducing ways to make yourself more autarchic as a citizen.

In plain facts that means – making education free and expenses for education tax deductible insofar the skills they bestow would generate income independence – giving all citizens free medical care insofar it empowers their health – making investments on financial self-sustainability (houses, house insulation, private sources of income, private means of growing food, energy independency) tax deductible. Also it might mean (and this would be extremelyu politically distasteful right now) we disallow people with no income to have children. The point would be is to implement measures that are both humane, and foster independence. It would also mean that we do not deconstruct things like welfare (because we are human beings with compassion) but we also plan how to make people not need it as soon as possible. We keep welfare, or even improve it, but we implement measures that as soon as possible people have no need for it.

Also we should make having debts an actual bad thing, contrary to how economy now operates.

This will, as soon as it starts working, castrate the power big energy, big corporations and eunuch career politicians have over us. This flies subtly in the face of current political extremes – who like their voters and citizens begging for scrap like trained dogs. But fuck them, these dinosaurs are destined for the slaughter anyway, the sooner we take them out back of the shed and get rid of them, the better.

Final statement? I’d say Revalucion!

Let’s bring back value to our societies.

Plan Nuke

Mind you – I wouldn’t do this. Yet. But others might. However what I ask you – if you read this article, and you disagree (which many will) I will ask you to come up with solutions in the comments that fit my paradigm. Vehement denouncement won’t do anyone any good.

I live in the Netherlands. I (for now) depend on a disability income. The VVD is now in dutch government. The VVD will deconstruct pensions, social wellfare, disability incomes. The argument is very simple and makes sense – these income sources are ‘happiness machines’ and the VVD intend to ‘shut down these happiness machines’.

Modern Western Societies have ‘settled’. That means that everyone who can have a job will have a job, until the situation changes. And it means those that can’t have a job will almost certainly never have any spending power. Wishing it were any different doesn’t make it so.

I think this is a catastrophically counterproductive plan. I assert that for a highly evolved, diversified service economy the above types of welfare are an inescapable reality. In complex economies the system has two choices – (1) kill those who are desperate – or (2) give out some sort of basic income. I think there is not much of a functional middle ground. The US for example tries to do both (and has sent two million people to prison, mostly attributable to desperation of those incarcerated) and I’d argue that because of this oligarchic stratification the US as a society is failing.

I assert that in complex postindustrial societies there simply is not enough work for all people, and this will become much worse in the next decades. I assert that the VVD does not want to recognize this, since recognizing it means that they affirm that a percentage of people are unable to generate a fair income, by a fair and equitable effort. The people from the VVD would blissfuly continue in their fantasy that ‘might makes right’ or ‘that competence bestows rights’. This is a position of nothing less than veiled fascism. People are not equal. Those in power will instinctively find rationalizations to blame those without power, since acknowledging their ‘empathic’ and ‘humane’ instincts would cost them money and personal power. In essence the people from the VVD are racing to the top in terms of not giving a fuck about other human beings. In this regard the VVD looks in admiration to the oligarchic, elitist, and social Darwinist society in the US and other places. The VVD is conspiring to introduce a societal climate of exclusion and ‘perimeterization’. The VVD is simply trying to cordon off those with less competence, and marginalize them.

Trying to get rid of the poor has been tried many times in history and it always ended up in revolutions.

As I said, complex societies cannot handle desperate underclasses. The VVD seems to think that desperation is a tool for compelling the poor towards a better life, ‘by teaching them ambition’. This might be true in the third world, or horrendously inhuman places like China, the US or Singapore. However in those places society simply kills those who can’t compete. This won’t ever happen in the Netherlands, or far too gradually. In the US those who systemically can’t compete either end up in far out of the way places like favellas, ghettoes, trailer parks. If they aren’t cordoned off they are murdered or die from neglect. In most cases they are implicitly euthanized by a saturation politics of deadly narcotics (Cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, crack), which apparently the US has made to fester more or less like spraying fields with DDT to kill. I am saying the US has more or less implicitly evolved means to kill off incompetent underclasses.

I am stating that this stratification of society (no social guarantees, ruthless competition, ghettofication, expanding prisons) is not a sustainable trajectory in western societies.

It doesn’t matter whether or not this article is an opinion piece. You can denounce it all you want. It doesn’t matter. If the poor have the idea in their head that their chances for a bearable life (let alone an actually happy existence) are diminishing sharply they won’t care about the reasons (since they aren’t responsible for the reasons, by and large) and they won’t care about longterm promises ‘it will one day be better’. The poor will at some point realize they get a really shitty deal.

So what can the marginalized do?

I am proposing Plan Nuke. Plan Nuke simply means – the poor start businesses. The poor order stuff and services. The poor rake up so many debts that the debt agencies get completely overloaded. Since the poor have nothing much to lose, and can’t ever pay back, this will completely stagnate the economic system. If enough of the underclasses can rake up sufficient debt companies will refuse to give store credits to anyone. Companies will literally go bankrupt as ‘the poor’ buy things they can never pay back. And I am not proposing the poor keep these products – I propose they order, say, a copy machine and then give it away. Or they damage it in such a manner it become useless and fit for the garbage heap, and then they send it back to the company they ordered it from. If a few tens of thousands of dutch (and this goes for many other countries as well) realize they have pretty much nothing to lose do this, then they can completely wreck the dutch economy. I think everyone in this category can ratchet up many tens of thousands of euro in debt. That means hundreds of millions of euro in irrecoverable economic damage. It would mean tens of thousands of debt collection agencies clogged with work, and thousands of companies going bankrupt in a matter of months.

The thing when doing this is the staunch realization that you as a poor have little left to lose. You can do the above, but you can also go out into places like Wassenaar with a jar of gypsum or frying grease and dump it unceremonially into the nearest sewage drain. Cost for society – tens of thousands of euros. Slash a few car tires every day. Scratch the car hoods of the best looking cars in the richest neighborhoods with the letters ‘plan nuke’. If you use any sense, chance you’ll get caught are close to zero. Buy a pointer laser, go somewhere away from your house and aim the laser pointer to any passing airplanes. I am sure people can think up hundreds of little ‘sabotage’ acts with next to no chance of being caught. I am stating I wouldn’t do these things (and who knows I might be lying) and I would add any disclaimers here that would disavow me from legal consequences.

The point however would be that right now the VVD can implement these measures to their hearts content. They can then proceed to take those people that fall off the wagon one by one and process them into ghettoes, extreme welfare marginalization, cutting them off from much needed psychiatric trauma care, health care to deal with the severe physical damage resulting from the societal marginalization, and slowly let these people either die or become inconsequential.

Summarizing – a complex western society is too vulnerable to have many extremely desperate people around. Cost of living has skyrocketed far too high. You can’t afford living on ‘just’ welfare. However far right parties think they can reduce welfare and ‘gently coax the vulnerable of society’ into complacency, apathy and inconsequentuality. These far right parties are wrong and morally corrupt. However they might still try anyway, and will, and must, face protest of a character that costs them more money they’d save on squeezing out the poor.

Plan Nuke.

So what do I want? – Very simple. Not be poor. If the system can make me able to do non-dehumanizing work, I’ll happily work. But as long as this is unthinkable (and right now it is) I will need cash, in my hands, without me being terrorized and marginalized by the system. I not just demand a humane existence – I would actively advocate causing some damage if I don’t get it. Those in charge would qualify this as criminal – but that’s only because they got to define what is criminal and what is not. I advocate not playing by their rules.

I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization
Indian political and spiritual leader (1869 – 1948)

Links
* http://www.zeitgeistmovingforward.com/
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIuKwwhb8Zs&feature=related
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGf–1poDYY&feature=related
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r6cpJxIi6M&feature=related
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8vcYHzuWOE&NR=1

Technological improvements in Second Life? You bet!

Theatrically reprinted from hot chick Gwynneth Llewellyn

October 28, 2010 – in Homepage, SL Technology by: Gwyneth Llewelyn

When Philip “Linden” Rosedale announced, once again, that he’d be leaving Linden Lab and was actively searching for a new CEO, leaving Bob Komin to replace him temporarily, some of my friends saw this as a clear sign that Linden Lab was shutting down Second Life® — and point to the ToS changes which allow LL to shut SL down without paying residents anything, refund them, or compensate them in any way.

Others immediately thought that Linden Lab would go IPO, or, well, had already been bought, and that the new owners would soon nominate a new CEO. And that the ever-growing list of “bad news” — one or two measures announced every week that will only hurt residents — would just justify the upcoming impending doom.

I personally don’t believe any of those three possibilities, because they make no sense in the light of the under-the-hood work that LL has been doing the past few weeks. In fact, even in spite of many glitches, LL is actively developing the core technology at a pace that we haven’t seen since 2006. And there might be two good reasons for it: they’re trying to match innovation and speed of development of the third-party viewers (a shameful thorn on LL’s innovative stance; innovation has been coming mostly from the TPVs, not from the ‘Lab), and they’re taking the OpenSimulator exodus as more serious than before (there is a lot to be said about this). Former Lindens are now joining the TPV developer community (like Qarl “ex-Linden” Fizz, releasing his amazing prim-alignment tool which will only be available on TPVs), or becoming part of prominent OpenSim grid operators (like Pathfinder, the new Director of Community Development for ReactionGrid, a really logical role for someone who always was very close to the educator community currently migrating to the academic-friendly ReactionGrid, which has Microsoft and IBM as partners).

So, one would expect LL to become more serious about infrastructure stabilisation and innovative new technologies — while trying to make at least a serious effort to minimise some of the more hated features of SL here and there.

And innovation there is. Jack-of-All-Trades Linden announced the new SL 2.3 Beta — just a week after SL 2.2 became the official SL viewer — and which has a lot of niftiness, as well as some more polemic features. Gone is the “jumping screen” every time you clicked to open the sidebar. And, of course, this was the pretext to launch Display Names on the main grid too: here goes the picture that I had always wanted to do, cloning and impersonating my own self:

xx

Fun besides (I’ve already addressed the issues why this is not such a good idea), there are a lot of under-the-hood developments. For starters, one thing that always frustrated me with Viewer 2 is that “Sort by most recent” (e.g. the old “sort by date”) was always broken since the very first release of SL 2.0 (where it worked). 2.3 Beta finally deals with this issue, and I’m surprised that it wasn’t fixed before — allegedly, it only affected some Mac users, including yours truly, so it wasn’t deemed to be important enough.

But the most fantastic change for me was fixing, once and for all, the many issues about Alpha Textures. Some preliminary work has been popping up in the latest betas and “development versions” (I have now five LL viewers installed on my disk!). This time, they got it right. The trick seems to be enabling an option on the Develop Menu, under Rendering, where it says “Automatic Alpha Masks (non-deferred)”.

Excited, I went to the sim with the most intense alpha texture issues that I know: Neufreistadt. The city is built at the cloud level, so SL has to deal with a lot of alpha textures: fog and clouds, which are constantly in motion across buildings — low-prim buildings with windows made by alpha textures. Add a bit of glow to make things even worse, and you get pretty much this:

xx

This is how Neufreistadt has always looked like for us, at least since October 2004. No TPV renders it right, either (except Kirstens Viewer, which is based on the new alpha rendering pipeline).

Here is how it looks now:

xx

I mean, this is just… wow! At a flick of a checkbox, all problems were suddenly solved. Even “legacy fog” looks nice for a change! Nobody has ever seen this sim looking so good As a nice side effect, invisiprims on shoes also render correctly on top of alpha’ed shoes. So, LL, whatever magic you’re doing, you’ve finally hit gold!

Also, for the first time in a long time, SL 2.3 Beta beats Imprudence in raw performance (that is, FPS) using the same settings (or as closely possible to the same settings, since the 1.X settings are different than the 2.X ones). There is a lot of trickery going under-the-hood. I haven’t tried out Phoenix yet, which is supposed to be far faster than Imprudence or any other TPV, but… still, LL did some homework. Things are getting better. It still takes some time to get used to the 2.X UI, of course, but for the casual user (I’m not a builder!), 2.3 Beta is much closer to what 2.X ought to have been since its release.

Alas, the improvements don’t stop at the viewer level. For the past few months, most people have missed an important change on the way LL now releases server code to the grid. I wish I had found the announcement that explains this in detail, but, currently, the main grid is split into three “channels”. According to my understanding, this means that Linden Lab can effectively deploy three “prototype” simulation servers, on the main grid (besides the ones on the Preview Grid), and have them all “live” simultaneously, with real data and real avatars. Each “channel” prototype is deployed on about 10% of the grid (meaning that 70% run the “main” release, and 10% each a prototype release). This is why it has become increasingly common to get that message saying “The sim you teleported to has a different simulator version”. Most residents don’t even bother, and have no clue that they’re actually helping to test out three different prototypes, one of which will become the “main” release after a while (that is, the one that gets deployed across most — but not all — sims).

Each “protptype” addresses different things in isolation (a released version tends to affect a lot of different areas of SL simultanoeusly, e.g. physics, avatar tracking, server-client communication, and so forth), thus allowing LL to measure the impact of each bug fix/improvement/feature without interfering with the rest of the code, and also to establish a benchmark in contrast to the “main” version. It’s a very clever way to deploy new code, new features, improvements, radical new changes, and have them all “live” for people to try out. For instance, although officially Display Names are supposed only to be available in January, you can use the Viewer 2.3 Beta and log in to the 10% of the sims that already have that option turned on, and watch Display Names in action (that was, in fact, how I took the first picture: it’s on the main grid, not the preview grid!).

And LL has been busy. Take a look at the Wiki pages for the three channels, and look at the calendar for deployments on http://status.secondlifegrid.net/. Every few days, there is a new deployment of at least one of the new channel prototypes, but sometimes all get deployed at the same time. Estate Owners can even select a channel to subscribe to — so they will be able, if they wish, to test out a prototype version instead of the regular one.

If anything, the pace of development is increasing — not slackening down. Of course we all expect development to be even faster and faster, but there are limits to how much LL can do. Nevertheless, they’re not idly waiting until “something” happens — The End of Second Life As We Know It, an IPO, a buy-out, or anything dramatic like that.

Obviously, if you’re paranoid, you’d say that this is exactly the behaviour to be expected from a company wishing to improve their image in order to go public or be sold. I have my doubts. This past year has shown how terrible LL can be with PR — we never got so many “bad news for residents” in such a little time. If they wished to express a good corporate image, based on excellent relationships with their customers, they couldn’t have failed more. Their communications have been amateurish and devastated by the media. Every single bit of “bad news” could have been presented in a different way, handled with more care, showing that LL doesn’t, after all, hate their residents by harming them. I find it very hard to believe that this is a strategy to “get sold” or “go public”; and if they’re planning to shut down anyway, what’s the point of improving the viewer, the simulators, and the overall infrastructure if they don’t plan to be around for long? It doesn’t make any sense.

Granted, LL is not famous for making sense, but I still maintain that all the above shows that LL is really taking notice of what the competition is doing — and the competition are TPVs and OpenSim, not IMVU or Blue Mars, while Unity3D-based VWs might start to become the primary choice for education/business in a few years, if LL doesn’t do anything to stop that from happening (meshes are the first good step; a viewer on a Web browser is the next). But Philip, before he left, clearly pointed out that the focus is going to be on the residential market.

A NeoProgressive Political Movement

In short – I think we live in a world of increasing constraints, triggered by a perfect storm of resource depletion (yes, this includes peak oil), income stratification, ‘end-game’ superpower resource consolidation, sickening overpopulation, increasing automation and robotization ‘creep’, environmental and biodiversity collapse, unsustainable complexity, massive widespread corruption, a xenophobia revolution, insurmountable political stupidity and incompetence and many other things besides. The world we live in is a total mess and set to get much worse.

Worse, I think that the current leftfag versus wingonad- debate is a great contributor to the fucking mess we are in. These days you can’t fart and it is dissected, partitioned, demonized, ideologized, misinterpreted and the outcome is more or less stagnated. No wonder the current system is bloated with hot air entitlements. I’d go as far as saying that the current western world is close to “an equivalent to” late 1980s USSR moment of systemic collapse.

In the old days the fuckhead sons of bitches in charge (pardon my jiddish) uses these states of unsustainability as a pretext to kill off some excess populations against each other and thereby outsource some of established rights and entitlements right into some mass graves. That used to work till mechanized warfare, but especially after the onset of atomic weapons that’s no longer an option. It isn’t odd the populations have ballooned into the grotesque.

So give me a list of problems and ‘the other side’ will rush into denounce them. Take any of the above concerns – Peak Oil? You have literal lobbies to denounce it as nonsense. Climate change ? Whole industries. Overpopulation? I’d be relegated to a category of being a nazi.

I therefore propose to say ‘fuck you’ to established left-right political divides and start a new people’s alliance – Transhumanists, Technocrats, Zeitgeist, Cyberprogressives, Technoprogressives, Raellians, Alternative sexual radicals, ANON – who gives a damn, as long as it works – anyone who thinks sound engineering can solve many of the worlds problems – let’s get all together and give established monolithical power structures a big fat finger.

They used to call it -’upwingers’. Anyone has better suggestions?

Transvision 2011

Organizing it in or near Amsterdam, in a somewhat ‘different’ format than 2010?

IDEAS
* Creating a synergy with maybe other related or unrelated events? – a wider interpretation of the term ‘trans-vision?’ ?
* (venus project, transgendered conference, raellians, euro-technocrats, technoprogressives, humanists, cryonics, life extension, 3D printing, GogBot, VR enthusiasts etc. ?)
* stay away from big hotels, facilitate more constructive socializing, organize gathered events and fun, less formal ?
* A very strong emphasis on Virtual Technologies, Teleplace, Blue Mars, Second Life, etc. ?

Automation Insurance: Robots Are Replacing Middle Class Jobs

link

Andrew Price, October 13, 2010 * 2:00 pm PDT

Every three months, GOOD releases our quarterly magazine, which examines a given theme through our unique lens. Recent editions have covered topics like the impending global water crisis, the future of transportation, and the amazing rebuilding of New Orleans. This quarter’s issue is about work, and we’ll be rolling out a variety of stories all month.

middle class job automation
The middle class is disappearing and the problem is deeper than politics. How will we understand work in the coming age of robotics?

Last April, the MIT economist David Autor published a report that looked at the shifting employment landscape in America. He came to this scary conclusion: Our workforce is splitting in two. The number of high-skill, high-income jobs (think lawyers or research scientists or managers) is growing. So is the number of low-skill, low-income jobs (think food preparation or security guards). Those jobs in the middle? They’re disappearing. Autor calls it “the polarization of job opportunities.”

These days, all of us, from President Obama on down, are thinking about jobs. The unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent, we’ve watched the ground disappear from under Detroit and Wall Street, and there’s a pervading sense that other industries might be next.

It’s not that the issue isn’t getting attention. The Princeton economist Paul Krugman is out there telling Congress to spend more money to create jobs. The former secretary of labor Robert Reich is arguing for tax breaks for the bottom brackets so people can buy stuff again. Here’s the thing, though: The erosion of the middle class is a phenomenon that’s bigger than the Great Recession. Middle-range jobs have been getting scarcer since the late 1970s, and wages for the ones that are still around have remained stagnant.

In his report, Autor says that a leading explanation for the disappearance of the middle class is “ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled ‘routine’ tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree).” Routine tasks, he explains, are ones that “can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country.”

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth-and you don’t see it addressed in news reports-is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.

People say America doesn’t make anything anymore, but that’s not true. With the exception of a few short lapses, manufacturing output has been on the rise since the 1980s. What is true is that industrial robots have been carrying ever more of the manufacturing burden on their steely shoulders since they appeared in the 1950s. Today, a Japanese company called Fanuc, Ltd., has industrial robots making other industrial robots in a “lights out” factory. (That’s the somewhat unsettling term for a fully automated production facility where you don’t need lights because you don’t need humans.) That’s where we’re headed.

It’s not just manufacturing, either. Automated call centers are replacing customer-service agents. Automated checkout stations are replacing grocery-store clerks. When the science of computer vision advances sufficiently, we’ll have algorithms, not humans, evaluating X-rays at airport security checkpoints and screening user-generated content for sites like Facebook.

Robots have been carrying ever more of the manufacturing burden on their steely shoulders.

Meanwhile, personal robotics, the kind we’ve been promised by science fiction, are getting closer to reality. Researchers at a Silicon Valley-based company called Willow Garage have been teaching their PR2 robot to fold laundry, play pool, and fetch beers for its engineers (you can see it in action on YouTube). The PR2 isn’t ready for the commercial market, but it’s closer than you think. Willow Garage has made the code for the PR2′s operating system entirely open, which means scientists and hobbyists all over the world can contribute to its development, and it recently started selling PR2 models for $400,000 each.

Keenan Wyrobek, a codirector of the Personal Robotics Program at Willow Garage, told me that the company’s robots might soon be able to help our aging population stay independent for a few extra years by doing simple tasks around the house. That would be great, but it would reduce the number of nurses and assisted-living attendants we would otherwise need.

Economists will remind you that new technologies create new jobs as they destroy old ones. That’s true. When you have robots, you need robotics engineers. But those aren’t going to be mid-range jobs.

On the low end of the spectrum, we have physical jobs that we can’t automate yet (yard work, for example). On the high end of the spectrum, we have creative and cognitive jobs that we can’t automate yet (law and management, for example). But as technology advances, and it certainly will, more people are going to be elbowed out of the workforce.

We may be heading toward a future with plentiful high-end jobs and plentiful low-end jobs, and not much in the middle. What if only doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers can live a decent life, buy a house or apartment, and pay for their children to get specialized degrees? What if a liberal-arts degree on its own prepares you for little more than work as a security guard? What if the skills that prepare one for a job with decent pay get increasingly hard to attain?

Addressing this challenge requires a response more profound than tweaking the tax code or extending unemployment benefits. But it also provides us with an exciting opportunity.

If this polarization continues, a whole cohort of people who expected to be middle class-or at least financially stable-might find themselves living a very different reality. Then they might start asking questions about why they are in that position. If it gets increasingly hard to pretend that the average liberal-arts degree prepares a student for a decent job, there may be broader support for a sober assessment of our education system, and the reforms it needs. If the skills and talents that are truly financially rewarding become harder and harder to acquire, people who would never consider themselves students of Marx might start questioning whether, given the circumstances, it still makes sense to pay people based solely on the demand for their skills in a marketplace that would be demanding very few skills.

If market forces and increased automation leave the average person without any prospects for a decent job, we may have the chance-or perhaps even the moral obligation-to recast the opportunity to do meaningful work not merely as a privilege, but as something everyone deserves.

Links:
* The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin
* Lights in the Tunnel, Martin Ford
* Robotic Nation, Marshall Brain
* Robots in 2015, Marshall Brain
* Manna, Marshall Brain
* Basic Income Guarantee
* Basic Income for All

Morality: Don't be afraid – science can make us better

We should embrace rather than fear the knowledge science brings as it unravels morality’s muddles, says Fiery Cushman

A LUCID dream has three phases. First you experience the dream as reality. Then you recognise it as a product of your mind. Finally, you gain the power of control.

Morality is proceeding along similar lines. We have long thought of moral laws as fixed points of reality, self-evident truths rooted in divine command or in some Platonic realm of absolute rights and wrongs. But new research is offering an alternative, explaining moral attitudes in the context of evolution, culture and the neural architecture of our brains. This apparent reduction of morality to a scientific specimen can seem threatening, but it needn’t. Rather, by unmasking our minds as the authors of morality, we may be better able to bend its narrative arc towards a happy end.

One way to do this is to recognise the ways in which evolution has shaped morality. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt asked students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to imagine a brother and sister engaging in secret, consensual, protected sex. Would that be wrong, he asked? Most thought so. But when asked why, the students floundered. Protection meant no threat of disabled children, and secrecy brought no possibility of embarrassment. The pair had no regrets – it was consensual. So how is it wrong? Perhaps incest is simply an arbitrary taboo, passed on through religion, law, parents and peers.

But another possibility is that humans have an evolved aversion to incest because such unions tend to produce less-fit offspring.

Debra Lieberman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Miami in Florida, tested these rival hypotheses with an ingenious experiment (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, vol 270, p 819). She considered the ways in which evolution could have built in a “sibling detector”. For older siblings, it is easy: just watch who your mother gives birth to and raises. For younger siblings a subtler strategy is needed: note how many years you live in the same household as other children.

Lieberman asked over 1000 people how much the thought of incest disgusted them, and the results were clear as day: older siblings were uniformly disgusted by the thought, while younger siblings’ disgust was a linear function of years of cohabitation. Then Lieberman showed that unrelated children reared together in Israeli kibbutzim develop sexual aversions according to the same factors, even though there is no cultural taboo against relationships between them. Finally, she showed that people’s moral outrage when contemplating others engaging in incest was predicted by the level of aversion they would feel towards intercourse with their own siblings, again based on those two factors. In short, it seems that the moral injunction against incest is a product of a specifically evolved mechanism to prevent sibling sex.

Theories about the biological evolution of morality have been around for some time, but a very recent area of research is into the cultural evolution of morality. Just as we inherit genes from our parents, we inherit values from cultural sources. And just as genes adapt to environments, values evolve to match the structure of social life.

In a striking study, a team led by anthropologist Joseph Henrich at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, used simple economic games to probe moral norms in 15 societies, from the Amazon to Siberia. A game might ask, if I loan you $10 so that you can convert it into $30, how much of the profit will you return to me? The team found large differences in levels of giving, trust and reciprocity among different societies, and these social norms correlate with their economic practices. Cultures that exhibit strong bonds of mutual trust between individuals and enforce them with punishment for non-compliance also practice division of labour and the exchange of goods in open markets, ultimately leading to economic wealth (Science, vol 327, p 1480).

Both biological and cultural evolution attempt to explain morality in terms of adaptive design principles, but another line of research illustrates how sophisticated moral principles can rest on accidents of cognitive architecture. Consider the distinction between actions and omissions. Most people think it is worse to actively harm than to passively allow a harm to occur.

For instance, the US Supreme Court and the American Medical Association prohibit active euthanasia, such as administering morphine, but allow passive euthanasia, such as terminating dialysis. But the patient is just as dead either way, so why make this distinction?

Surprisingly, it may have less to do with morality per se than with how we understand causation. People generally think that actions cause outcomes in a direct way that omissions do not. If I roll a bowling ball past your feet and you don’t stop it, it seems more appropriate to say that I caused the pins to fall rather than you. If we replace the pins with a person’s ankle, it seems appropriate to say that I caused the injury – even though you could have prevented it. Because judgements of moral responsibility often begin with a determination of causal responsibility, I receive greater blame.

When I and a team of neuroscientists used fMRI to investigate such judgements, we found that a large network of brain regions exhibits greater activity when judging omissions than when judging actions. Many of these regions are associated with deliberate, effortful, logical thinking. The more activity a person exhibited in these regions, the more likely they were to say that harm by omission is morally wrong. In short, it looks like judging a harmful action is relatively easy, while judging a harmful omission is hard work. This may reflect the fact that causal responsibility is much more obvious in the active cases – a feature of the brain’s design with major consequences for law and policy.

All the studies I have described share a common view: moral rules are born in human minds. For many, this is deeply threatening. Moral rules must be immutable and eternal, they say, like the speed of light or the mass of a proton. Otherwise, why should we obey them?

These studies all suggest that moral rules are born in human minds. For many, this is deeply threatening
As we come to a scientific understanding of morality, society is not going to descend into anarchy. Instead, we may be able to shape our moral thinking towards nobler ends. Which norms of fairness foster economic prosperity? What are the appropriate limits on assisting a patient’s end-of-life decisions? By recognising morality as a property of the mind, we gain a magical power of control over its future.

Fiery Cushman is a moral psychologist at Harvard University

Morality: Don’t be afraid – science can make us better

We should embrace rather than fear the knowledge science brings as it unravels morality’s muddles, says Fiery Cushman

A LUCID dream has three phases. First you experience the dream as reality. Then you recognise it as a product of your mind. Finally, you gain the power of control.

Morality is proceeding along similar lines. We have long thought of moral laws as fixed points of reality, self-evident truths rooted in divine command or in some Platonic realm of absolute rights and wrongs. But new research is offering an alternative, explaining moral attitudes in the context of evolution, culture and the neural architecture of our brains. This apparent reduction of morality to a scientific specimen can seem threatening, but it needn’t. Rather, by unmasking our minds as the authors of morality, we may be better able to bend its narrative arc towards a happy end.

One way to do this is to recognise the ways in which evolution has shaped morality. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt asked students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to imagine a brother and sister engaging in secret, consensual, protected sex. Would that be wrong, he asked? Most thought so. But when asked why, the students floundered. Protection meant no threat of disabled children, and secrecy brought no possibility of embarrassment. The pair had no regrets – it was consensual. So how is it wrong? Perhaps incest is simply an arbitrary taboo, passed on through religion, law, parents and peers.

But another possibility is that humans have an evolved aversion to incest because such unions tend to produce less-fit offspring.

Debra Lieberman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Miami in Florida, tested these rival hypotheses with an ingenious experiment (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, vol 270, p 819). She considered the ways in which evolution could have built in a “sibling detector”. For older siblings, it is easy: just watch who your mother gives birth to and raises. For younger siblings a subtler strategy is needed: note how many years you live in the same household as other children.

Lieberman asked over 1000 people how much the thought of incest disgusted them, and the results were clear as day: older siblings were uniformly disgusted by the thought, while younger siblings’ disgust was a linear function of years of cohabitation. Then Lieberman showed that unrelated children reared together in Israeli kibbutzim develop sexual aversions according to the same factors, even though there is no cultural taboo against relationships between them. Finally, she showed that people’s moral outrage when contemplating others engaging in incest was predicted by the level of aversion they would feel towards intercourse with their own siblings, again based on those two factors. In short, it seems that the moral injunction against incest is a product of a specifically evolved mechanism to prevent sibling sex.

Theories about the biological evolution of morality have been around for some time, but a very recent area of research is into the cultural evolution of morality. Just as we inherit genes from our parents, we inherit values from cultural sources. And just as genes adapt to environments, values evolve to match the structure of social life.

In a striking study, a team led by anthropologist Joseph Henrich at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, used simple economic games to probe moral norms in 15 societies, from the Amazon to Siberia. A game might ask, if I loan you $10 so that you can convert it into $30, how much of the profit will you return to me? The team found large differences in levels of giving, trust and reciprocity among different societies, and these social norms correlate with their economic practices. Cultures that exhibit strong bonds of mutual trust between individuals and enforce them with punishment for non-compliance also practice division of labour and the exchange of goods in open markets, ultimately leading to economic wealth (Science, vol 327, p 1480).

Both biological and cultural evolution attempt to explain morality in terms of adaptive design principles, but another line of research illustrates how sophisticated moral principles can rest on accidents of cognitive architecture. Consider the distinction between actions and omissions. Most people think it is worse to actively harm than to passively allow a harm to occur.

For instance, the US Supreme Court and the American Medical Association prohibit active euthanasia, such as administering morphine, but allow passive euthanasia, such as terminating dialysis. But the patient is just as dead either way, so why make this distinction?

Surprisingly, it may have less to do with morality per se than with how we understand causation. People generally think that actions cause outcomes in a direct way that omissions do not. If I roll a bowling ball past your feet and you don’t stop it, it seems more appropriate to say that I caused the pins to fall rather than you. If we replace the pins with a person’s ankle, it seems appropriate to say that I caused the injury – even though you could have prevented it. Because judgements of moral responsibility often begin with a determination of causal responsibility, I receive greater blame.

When I and a team of neuroscientists used fMRI to investigate such judgements, we found that a large network of brain regions exhibits greater activity when judging omissions than when judging actions. Many of these regions are associated with deliberate, effortful, logical thinking. The more activity a person exhibited in these regions, the more likely they were to say that harm by omission is morally wrong. In short, it looks like judging a harmful action is relatively easy, while judging a harmful omission is hard work. This may reflect the fact that causal responsibility is much more obvious in the active cases – a feature of the brain’s design with major consequences for law and policy.

All the studies I have described share a common view: moral rules are born in human minds. For many, this is deeply threatening. Moral rules must be immutable and eternal, they say, like the speed of light or the mass of a proton. Otherwise, why should we obey them?

These studies all suggest that moral rules are born in human minds. For many, this is deeply threatening
As we come to a scientific understanding of morality, society is not going to descend into anarchy. Instead, we may be able to shape our moral thinking towards nobler ends. Which norms of fairness foster economic prosperity? What are the appropriate limits on assisting a patient’s end-of-life decisions? By recognising morality as a property of the mind, we gain a magical power of control over its future.

Fiery Cushman is a moral psychologist at Harvard University

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