I'm not going to die because medicine will soon progress to the point where most diseases of aging are cureable.

I'm not going to die because cryonic suspension and resuscitation will be perfected in my lifetime.

I'm not going to die because mind uploading will be made to work in the next few decades.

I'm going to die because people like me won't have access these technologies when they arrive.

THAT's why I'm going to die.

And it's probably why you are going to die, too.

The solution to this problem is not investment in R&D; it's universal health care.

The solution to this problem is not technical; it's political.

Comments –Nato

We are fucked.

Just yesterday, I stopped in my neighborhood to actually feel the flowers and plants. It was a beautiful moment.

I saw a bee doing its pollination jig and wondered: does a bee know that this plant species has evolved with it, to take advantage of its behavior? And if it is ignorant, what are we, then, ignorant of, in terms of species that have adapted to us? We all know about domestication of livestock, cats and dogs, etc. But what kinds of adaptations do we not know about?

Today, I find out that beehives are going fatally haywire because of our own greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, enormous numbers of human food crops won't get properly pollinated.

That was quick.

Comments –Nato

Every so often I hear people talk about the need for a "new" kind of economics geared toward the supposedly oncoming period of superabundance; an economics geared not toward management of scarcity, but of plenty.

The problem I see with this is that economics concerns itself with scarcity as a problem. The pollyannish formulation of "superabundance" boosters continue to tout, however, doesn't seem to be a problem at all. But abundance can, indeed, be a problem.

The opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It's excess; overabundance; glut.

There are plenty of existing examples of this: too much spam email; too much carbon dioxide; too much money; too much garbage and waste.

Comments –Nato

More juicy bits from Reason's Peter Thiel interview:

reason: But you’re betting that in fact there is a Singularity in the human future?

Thiel: By definition, these are one-time, nonrepeatable events. Assigning probabilities to them is not an easy exercise. There’s something about the idea of a Singularity that is kind of unscientific, because you can’t really do an experiment. We can’t say, “What’s the probability this is going to happen?” We can’t assign numbers to this, but falsifiability I think is a bit too strong a criterion.

(Emphasis mine)

Comments –Nato

The problem with the [transhumanist] label is that it suggests that we should run away from being human.

Peter Thiel, venture capitalist and major funder of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Comments –Nato

Recently added to DRM in a Nutshell:

An encryption system is a way to deliver information while keeping it secret from eavesdroppers.
A DRM system is a way to deliver information while keeping it secret from the recipient.

This seems to have turned into a running gag.

Comments –Nato

Last weekend, a friend of mind asked me if I thought humankind was really more powerful than "nature". Nay, he dared me to defend that position.

I said that the entire premise that humankind and nature are separate at all is the result of human hubris. There is no need to adversarialize our mother.

More powerful than nature? We ARE nature. And yes, I do believe that we are its most powerful incarnation, at least in the universe we can see and comprehend (which is a big caveat, I admit).

Everything that we have made is the result of us. That's artifice. But we are not our own products (or at least, not completely, just yet). We are the products of nature, and thus, by extension, all that is artificial, all that is synthetic, that is made by humans, is also made by nature.

Artificial is natural.

And so, by that logic, the dichotomy that mutually excludes artificial and natural things isn't an actually operational concept. We made it up. We created it ourselves. Nature, as a category, is synthetic.

Natural is artificial.

Comments –Nato

Pursuant to my theory of political natural selection:

If Obama were beholden to corporate interests, why would he refuse to take their money?

If Clinton weren't beholden to corporate interests, why would they still offer her their money?

Comments –Nato

[via Jack Saturday]

Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property and corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.
–William Blum

Zingers

Comments –Nato

Sport has turned into such a wonderful substitute for war that we've ended up making war into a substitute for sport.

I think it's notable that the marathon was inspired by an ancient Greek who supposedly ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens in order to announce the results of a battle.

Zingers

Comments –Nato

Technoprogressivism has made me realize something: I don't want to be "enhanced" or "augmented" or "transhuman" or "posthuman" that much.

"Smart drugs"? not really. What's the point of being smarter? What does being "smarter" mean, exactly, anyway? I already am happier just with the drugs I already have some access to. But even as sluggish and primitive as they are, I'm pretty satisfied with them.

Stronger? Nah. More energetic? maybe, but I have diet & exercize methods to exploit if I really wanted that.

More and more, I'm starting to see "enhancements" or "augmentations" as only things that I would really "need" in order to compete in the workplace. This is not something I consider legitimate. I object to that. More than anything, I just want out of the rat race. It simply appears, to me, that dropping out has been and will be more effective than trying to "win" it.

Hell, I don't even really want to get tattoos or piercings, although I've thought about it enough, having many friends with them.

The only thing I can think of as personally desirable modifications are pretty advanced: better access to my own mind and body. I'd love to see digital monitors for bloodstream contents, heartrate, and, eventually, my various nervous systems. But even the ability to play back recorded nerve impulses makes me nervous - so to speak. Do I really want to expose myself to a new vector of attack? See George Dvorsky's piece on "mind hacks".

Given the demonstrable risks of modern IT security, which do not seem to be easily solvable, will uploading or brain computer interfaces ever really be safe? Will human intellectual limits be the only things that insure relative safety?

Will there not always be individual existential risks to confront?

Does it really bother me that I'm going to die? I can always prefer to live longer without being afraid of dying.

Comments –Nato

[Inspired by The Speculist's Fast Forward Radio podcast, via Accelerating Future]

The value of consent - the anti-eugenic idea that people be allowed to refuse modifications as well as take them on - is somewhat obvious and agreeable, both in Humanism and Transhumanism.

But what Dale Carrico adds, and that I hope can be acknowledged further, is that this commitment, in detail, should mean more than a lack of coercion. In labor markets, what often qualifies as "consensual" is pretty weak. Take by way of example California's recent law prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to take RFID implants. If jobs are scarce, and competition among workers necessitates taking on modifications in order to compete effectively, then a form of market-driven distributed duress (Dale's term) accomplishes an effective circumvention of self-determination even where direct coercion may not.

So our commitment to morphological liberty, if it is to be authentic, demands a bit more than simply enjoining direct forms of coercion, but also the creation and maintenance of societies where relinquishment of technological interventions is not only permitted, but actually practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated.

We have to take care of tomorrow's Amish.

Comments –Nato

[via Accelerating Future(with commentary)]

Comments –Nato

So what is it with this crown icon Slashdot uses for the "Government" category? Where do I complain or take exception to this? Haven't Slashdot's editors noticed that monarchy is, if not globally deprecated, clearly on it's way out?

My suspicion is that some form of classic tech geek libertarianism is at work here. Libertarians are always trying to demonize government by separating it from the people whom government is of, by, and for these days, in any even loosely representative form. Libertarians tell us that government is the problem, trying to avoid the rather sensitive issue that WE are the government, or at least, are trying to be.

Putting a crown on it does the trick of disconnecting it from accountability, de-personalizing it into something out of our control. It discourages participation. This is the effect libertarians of most stripes want it to have, insisting that democracy should be nothing more than a fad on the way to some individualistic libertopia that looks suspiciously less egalitarian, and thus more like the authoritarian feudalism we left for democracy to begin with. You won't find many libertarians admitting this, however; those who do tend not to be libertarians of any large degree of faith.

But aside from the rhetorical political subtext, the simpler problem is that it's an anachronism. Monarchies dominated in centuries past - but we don't live there anymore.

Comments –Nato

Birth control is a way to keep us from having to throw out the bathwater with the baby.

Comments –Nato

Lock-in is the rule in modern technology. The industrial revolution took us from agriculture to goods. The last century took us from manufacturing goods into a predominantly services-based economy. But now, with the popularization of the Internet, I'm getting an inkling of what the next major sector of economic activity might look like: the permissions economy. Agriculture, goods, services, permissions.

Copyright-based industries, such as books, music, movies, and software, work on this model. Once the creators of these works have their production costs met, reproduction is so trivial - whether that reproduction is done by publishers or others - the license to have, use, or share that work attains more value than the work itself. At that point, the "service" of granting licenses and collecting fees acquires a kind of trivial feel that doesn't seem worthy of the label.

A popular pasttime for people discussing the impact of AI is to imagine what kinds of jobs will be more or less "future-proof" against encroachment by intelligent machines. At times, I venture guesses of doctors and lawyers, because their jobs have much more to do with offering liability protections and trustworthiness than about skill or labor. But then it dawned on me that "artificial persons" already exist, and they do so for the express purpose of limiting liability. They are encoded, not in software, but in legal code, as corporations.

Politicians can be considered a subset of lawyers. But, in the same way that autonomous AIs would need to be permitted expressly to pass the bar, they'd probably also need to be permitted expressly to be considered citizens, and to be canddiates for public office, regardless of their ability to perform in either role.

That plain, binary permission, then, is what serves as the ultimate basis for a post-services economy, whether it is sought from or granted by individual citizens, aggregated through unions, clubs, families, municipalities, corporations, NPOs, or other associations. Permission is not a service, but a vote. The permissions economy is one which already exists, in the same way that manufacturing and services have always existed prior to their dominant role in the economy.

As automation continues to disrupt labor markets, civic participation in the granting or witholding of permission through law and regulation, will be the only remaining tool most people will hold in common with others to make their way in life. I suggest we learn to start using it now, and to re-assert that power and authority. As labor markets are dominated by capital in the form of productivity-boosting automation, your permission may become more important than your dollars.

Comments –Nato

With apologies to Frank Herbert.

I must not troll.
Trolling is the mind-killer.
Anonymity is the little-death that brings total distraction.
I will ignore my trolls.
I will permit them to post over me and through me.
And when it has gone unreplied, I will turn the inner eye to forget its thread.
Where the troll has posted there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Comments –Nato

via Lessig

Today, Nine Inch Nails relased Ghosts I-IV under a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike license.

Gorgeous, in so many ways.

Update: Here's the complete Ghosts I-IV torrent.

Ironically, a CC license seems to be the ideal solution to the whole problem of slashdotting an artist's website. Early adopters have swamped the email-driven download link system (which allows for some traffic control by itself), but paying customers are still not always getting what they paid for, sometimes because of their own net connections, which are obviously out of the artist's control. So licensing those who have it to share it means every customer can get what they paid for with a lot less fuss and frustration.

Comments –Nato

Steve Ballmer:

'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value

He makes some sense here. This is how markets are supposed to work, when competition exists. The existence of FOSS does happen to provide competition to the "marketplace". Imagine the shitball we'd be rolling in without FOSS competition (or Mac OS, which has been taking pages out of the MS playbook).

But the scope Ballmer and his company operate in (as does Apple) is limited. Software isn't just something that "offers value", to be "traded" in a "marketplace". It's something that works better with collaboration than competition. It's there to serve users. The marketplace can only go so far to produce useful tools, especially when so many people can contribute to their own utility.

Sure, they might "beat" GNU, by their own lights, by "offering value". All they are is a profit-seeking enterprise. But as a user, and not a "consumer", of software, I don't care about that. They can monopolize the entire software "marketplace" for all I care. I'll still be using software that grants user freedom, because, unlike Microsoft "products", it exists outside the marketplace as well as in it. From the narrow parochial market perspective, openly-licensed code is undead. You can take away its marketshare, but you can't kill it.

You can't buy - or sell - freedom, despite its well-established value. You have to demand it; to fight for it. And mere market "value" is no substitute for freedom.

Comments –Nato

An nice addition to DRM in a Nutshell:

Thieves may always want to steal things intended for customers,
But customers will never want to buy things intended for thieves.

Zingers

Comments –Nato