A Celebration Society

Author: Jonathan

  • Politics, and Enrollment Across the Gulf

    One of the greatest challenges of our age is the gulf between “left” and “right”; however one defines those terms.

    It’s worth noting that many American conservatives regard today’s Republican party not as conservative but rather authoritarian. In other democratic nations, the word conservative connotes political positions that are, if anything, toward the center or even the “left” of the US Democrats.

    On the other hand, the “conservatism” of Putin’s Russia appeals to a significant swath of American Republicans; an inversion from the party’s historic alliances. (Below, I will share a new theory as to why this may be so.)

    Further, “right wing” parties have emerged in other democratic nations which seem to share much with MAGA Republicans.

    The whole left-right divide has long struck me as, at best, a convenient artifice for whomever propounds it. It certainly doesn’t work at the far edges: a communist “left” government has a lot more in common with a fascist “right” government than either does with anything else on the so-called continuum.

    Some propose resolving this with a circle, but that strikes me as an intellectual absurdity.

    The libertarians call themselves neither right nor left. They argue that all political positions should be viewed as existing not on a left-right line but instead on an x:y grid. Specifically, the X axis would be degrees of social freedom and the Y axis would be degrees of economic freedom.

    Others point out that this model presumes that freedom is defined as “freedom of”, while some prefer to define it as “freedom from”.

    As I was writing ACS, I realized that the libertarian grid could become a lot more interesting and potentially useful if laid flat and a third dimension added. This third dimension would be degrees of abundance. With abundance added, even the most extreme form of dictatorship (e.g. Orwellian) could deliver what, to many, would be a good life.

    Still, I’ve long suspected that something other than the apparent basis for political chasm was at work. Now a scientific theory, which divides “left” from “right” in terms of looseness and tightness, offers a more robust explanation. There is a New York Times article explaining this.

    In essence, tightness and looseness are determined through a set of variables. The pattern of these reduces to a number. States which Trump won in 2016 tend to be tight; states which Clinton won tend to be loose.

    What I find most interesting about the article is how it proposes that arguments can be framed to persuade people. Research is finding that, by first identifying and then appealing to the proper set of values (loose or tight), people become more receptive to the argument; whatever it is.

    This seems to have important implications for enrollment into ACS.

  • The Question of Psychopaths

    So-called “high-functioning” psychopaths are, perhaps, the most destructive people on Earth. Lacking in empathy, they learn to mimic human caring and empathy very well, while using others as normal people use objects.

    Generally speaking, the best book I’ve found on this subject is The Psychopath Next Door by Harvard Prof. Martha Stout. Stout has devoted her career to this field of study. She advises the avoidance of such persons whenever possible, and offers a few admittedly imperfect guides to their identification.

    That said, we all make mistakes. Even someone of her stature can miss a thing or two. It turns out that, when high-functioning psychopaths AREN’T abused as children (either intentionally or unintentionally), they can become highly respected members of society. Prof. James Fallon, a neuroscientist, is a prime example.

    The fact that abuse can turn psychopaths into ticking human time bombs is, perhaps, the strongest argument for a societal prohibition against corporal punishment (“Spare the rod and spoil the child” was the invention of a medieval Christian clergyman), and against other forms of child abuse.

    To prevent the emergence of an overly intrusive “nanny state”, most of this can be accomplished through fostering a strong sense of community, with clearly defined societal principles/values from which everything else emanates. This would include frequent and systematic nudges instead of regulations, for most things, in consensually desired directions.

    Given that pychopaths lack empathy and therefore find no joy in relationships, their only purpose in life (as confirmed by Stout) is the playing and winning of games. In our present Scarcity Game paradigm, most available games are win/lose. The psychopath happily crushes others, as they would were the person a chair or other object. 

    But in an ACS, winning will be clearly defined as recognition, and so by combining that fact with the universal bimodal surveillance which we regard as both necessary and inevitable, the psychopath will quickly find a more harmonious way of living. (Aside: An intriguing possibility for managing psychopathy was explored in S2 E5 of the television series New Amsterdam, which had a medical advisor but may or may not have been accurate in this particular.) 

    Finally, we can establish fMRI testing for all residents and visitors. It appears to offer a foolproof way to identify psychopaths based on the immediate response of their brainwaves to specific types of images, a response which cannot be controlled. Psychopaths could then be subject to special monitoring in advance of crimes being committed, if the society deemed such to be appropriate.

    In contemplating this, it’s important to recall that every adult will enter such a society voluntarily, and be free to leave unless under arrest. Therefore, if such measures are thought to be unreasonable, one need not live in that society.

    That said, in my personal view, such measures should be adopted universally, as quickly as feasible. They could avert much terrorism.

  • What is the best example of a post-scarcity society?

    None yet exist, at least as we define it.

    My allies and I regard our model as the best example, because of the following attributes:

    1) Non-utopian. We are well aware of our own limitations. Perfection is an aspiration, not an attainment.

    2) Evolutionary. Given that there are and ever will be mistakes and possible improvements, it is designed to evolve.

    3) Variety. Supports many different societies coexisting with a common scaffolding. It is not a blueprint.

    4) Evidence-based, favoring experimentation in service to quality of life metrics, which are chosen because they support a set of shared principles.

    5) A Charter (the shared, consensually chosen principles), from which everything else in the society emanates.

    6) Based on systems of sustainable technological abundance, meeting the necessities and an increasing proportion of luxuries. These derive from the Three Pillars of Abundance, those being effectively unlimited clean energy, effectively unlimited raw materials, and organizing intelligence (increasingly, software). The basis for all three is at hand in the decades ahead.

    That’s what comes to mind at the moment. I may be forgetting something, but it’s a good start at differentiating us from alternative proposals!

  • My Second Great Dream

    As I’ve written elsewhere, my life has been inspired and guided by a vivid and detailed dream I had at age 14, over half a century ago. While many people have such dreams, this was the only one in my experience that was confirmed by empirical evidence. Five years after my dream, I discovered another person’s dream that was identical to my own in every detail, excepting one.

    When I wrote A Celebration Society, my wife and I had two objectives. First, we wanted to attract a cadre of world-class experts who would lend their competencies and enthusiasm to this project. Second, we wanted a mass movement.

    I have been gratified by the number of such experts who have stepped forward, either privately (such as the Chair of a renowned university economics department) or publicly, as evidenced by the endorsements we’ve been blessed to receive. More keep coming.

    However, I was dismayed by our complete failure to materialize a movement. I had started with high hopes: after all, decades after its introduction, Star Trek has tens of millions of fans and devotees; quite a few of whom sincerely wish to live in a world of sustainable technological abundance and human decency.

    Several years ago, in a moment of extreme frustration, I closed my eyes and basically said to Divinity: “The dream you gave me as a child, supported by many subsequent events, led us to this place. I believe you want a Celebration Society to manifest. However, I can’t see a way for it to do so without a mass movement, and I clearly lack the skills to launch one. Either show me a way forward, or bring me a person with those skills.” Then I surrendered the whole thing. I felt a sense of peace; I had done what I could. I forgot about the prayer.

    Several months later, I found myself on the production set of a television series. It had incredible characters and some applications of technology which were entirely new to me. (Because I spend so much time following technology trends, that’s quite rare.)

    I was completely enthralled. I couldn’t wait to see the first finished episode, and I was convinced that this series could change the world.

    Then I woke up. The disappointment was profound. My thoughts were, “That should exist.” “Someone should do that”… and then: maybe WE should do that.

    This last caused trepidation because, while I am something of an idea factory, my wife’s formidable combination of pragmatism, logic, and storytelling skills means that she unerringly homes in on the structural flaw in most of my ideas. I REALLY didn’t want this one added to that ash heap.

    To my delight, she agreed that we should write it, together. This takes me to an interesting synchronicity. While I had of course known that my wife is a national reader’s choice award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, writing for television (or movies) is a whole different skill set. Few people have both.

    I learned that day that many of her friends and colleagues who are well-known SF authors have been telling her for years that she should write for television or movies!

    What followed were many hundreds of hours of us writing what’s called the “series bible” (essentially, all of the Do’s and Don’ts; rules and character descriptions, that will allow other writers to collaborate with us in developing this world of storytelling with integrity.)

    I also had to learn how to write a screenplay. It’s a far different thing than writing books or articles. I wasn’t very good at it. Fortunately (again!), all of my weaknesses were complemented by my wife’s strengths.

    After dozens of rewrites, and critiques by credentialed scientists and engineers to assure that the show is plausible in all respects (this is “hard” science fiction, like The Martian), we submitted it to contests to get further feedback and see where it might go.

    It was a national finalist in a contest last year. This year, we’ve been preoccupied with some health-related matters. However, one of my startup seed investments is going public next year, and being hailed as “The Apple Computer of quantum computing”. With some of the money from that and a few close allies, we should be able to produce the series.

    Also, I was later given a second dream about it. This dream included specific guidance on the business of production, even showing me details of who our agent will be, the studio head, and the contract we should expect to sign.

    It is called Shadowking. To this day, I have no idea why that was the name given, but my wife and I have figured out a reasonable explanation for it and for the other important names given, our theory being that we should hew as closely as possible to the first dream, in order to support the integrity of the vision.

    Of course, we won’t know whether Shadowking will lead to a mass movement until it is well into production, which we estimate to be circa 2025. What we do know is that a marketing guru and ally, who pulls no punches and critically reviewed the pilot script, told us that this has has enthralling characters and an incredibly rich world, with the potential to be a Star Trek or Star Wars for this generation.

    Today, there are an estimated 10 million Trekkies and Trekkers. It’s further estimated that half of them really want to live in that kind of world. (The fact that Star Trek includes elements that physics today considers impossible doesn’t stop them.)

    Shadowking is set in the early 23rd century. It’s focused on three rotating, nuclear-powered starship-worlds, traveling from our Sol system to the distant, mysterious, planet known as Haven. Shadowking is the Celebrationist world. Accompanying it are Queen of the Skies, a Democratic world, and Uprising Humanity, a Tianshang (“soft Orwellian”) world. Each is perhaps the last of its kind, following a system-wide cataclysm. The logline for the series is, “Traveling to the stars, this remnant of shattered humanity will face inhuman threats and all-too-human crises. Hard SF.”

    By being scrupulous with the science and technology, we will assure that–however fantastical and wondrous it may be–Shadowking will remain plausible. We’ve started assembling an expert advisory panel, including Caltech and Stanford PhD’s and an actual rocket scientist. Further, we’ll have just a few absolutely inviolate contractual points: it will never be permitted to stray from plausibility, and we will own a section of the website called, The Road to Shadowking, which will be all about forging that mass movement.

    We’ll see…it should be exciting!

    Let us know if you have any expertise or connections that may help.

  • Workable UBI: A Vital Bridge

    The most substantive criticism of a Celebration Society is that such societies will take too long compared to how fast accelerating automation will eliminate jobs. It has long troubled me. If major think tanks like Brookings, Nomura, and others are right, we’ll start seeing massive displacement of workers in the 2020s, reaching permanent Great Depression levels in the 2030s.

    When I first heard of universal basic income (UBI), I was intrigued yet skeptical. It might buy humanity vital time. I studied the various proposals, and was left saddened. None of them looked both viable and sustainable. Here is my assessment: Guaranteed Mirage Income?

    After publishing that essay, I was approached by leading Australian executive Michael Haines. He asked if I would consider his MOUBI, or Market Oriented Universal Basic Income. I looked at it, and realized that MOUBI successfully addressed all of the criticisms in my article:

    * Requires no politically fraught redistribution of income or assets;
    * Does not rely upon an underlying asset with shifting value;
    * Can be implemented at any time, by any sovereign government with its own currency;
    * Can be implemented gradually, so any unforeseen side effects can be corrected quickly;
    * Does not propose to tax “robots” to pay for itself, avoiding a quicksand of litigation;
    * Includes a simple brake on inflation, available if needed without delay;
    * Requires no new intrusive or expensive bureaucracy or infrastructure.

    To appreciate MOUBI, one must look at evidence that contradicts certain conventional beliefs. For instance, I had long believed that an increase in the money supply coupled with unchanging velocity of money had to cause inflation. The US experience in the first two decades of the 21st century undermines this belief: inflation has remained low despite two unfunded wars costing $3 trillion. Thus, it’s possible to “print money from nothing” without necessarily causing inflation.

    I also have come to believe that the continuing dematerialization of production, with expensive inputs being replaced by inexpensive inputs, is generating a prevalent condition of technological deflation. If this understanding is correct, than MOUBI can be viewed as an ideal way to share the bounty of that price deflation; stabilizing prices while giving progressively more of that growing bounty to each adult citizen.

    I have become an advocate for MOUBI on Quora and elsewhere. I thank Michael for this important contribution to humanity.

  • Cassandras and What to Do About Them

    Cassandras and What to Do About Them

    In their recent book Warnings, former US national security advisors Richard Clarke and R.P. Reddy take an evidence-based approach to identifying persons they call Cassandras. Cassandras are credible forecasters, with solid track records in their fields, who warn of coming existential threats, based on irrefutable data. The book combines case histories of previous Cassandras who were ignored, and current Cassandra scenarios.

    A Celebration Society treats many such threats as real and needful of action. Clarke and Reddy argue that governments should spend many additional billions of dollars addressing these threats. However, in today’s world, their proposal may prove sadly unrealistic. If so, what’s to be done?

    Fortunately, in at least some cases, the threats can be reframed from cost sinks to profit centers. There is perhaps no better example than that of climatologist James Hansen. Hansen was the original cassandra who warned us of climate change when most were oblivious to the threat. His warnings have generally proven accurate.

    Now, Hansen is warning us that present forecasts of 21st century sea level rise are far too conservative. His models show an estimated 5+ meter sea level rise, which would devastate low-lying nations. Considering that even among other nations, most population and industrial centers are coastal, this is truly a threat of global proportions.

    The widely hailed Paris Accords have a huge flaw. They lack an enforcement mechanism. Given the budgetary pressures under which nearly all governments operate, it is unlikely that they will spend the money necessary to avert Hansen’s dire forecast, until the threat is literally lapping at their shores.

    By then it may be too late. The cost of curing the problem will be far higher than that of preventing it. Is there another way; one that makes mitigation possible without having unrealistic expectations of governments?

    Yes! We can turn CO2 mitigation from a cost sinkhole into a profit center. We only need one viable way to do so, and then it can proliferate until CO2 levels actually start to fall.

    One such approach is called “Diamonds from the Sky” (or DFTS). According to the American Chemical Society (See: http://bit.ly/2uiVCAw, the process can be deployed worldwide. Says lead researcher Prof. Stuart Licht of George Washington University, ““We calculate that with a physical area less than 10 percent the size of the Sahara Desert, our process could remove enough CO2 to decrease atmospheric levels to those of the pre-industrial revolution within 10 years”.

    To my knowledge, no one has disputed the technical viability of DFTS. Some environmentalists have criticized its “moral hazard”. In their view, by suggesting that a technological fix is possible, we grant license to polluters to continue their ways. I consider such criticism foolish.

    The CO2 problem is getting worse, not better. Decades of cajoling governments, industry, and the public have failed to stop the rise. When the building is on fire, people should do whatever is necessary to put out the fire. Later, there will be time to explore better safety standards.

    Unlike large-scale “geoengineering solutions” such as seeding the oceans with iron particles, this solution carries no side effects except the proliferation of small collector units and increased supplies of carbon fibers. If atmospheric CO2 levels ever drop too precipitously (imagine that!), these units can be dialed down, as required.
    While the researchers speak of covering 1/10 of the Sahara Desert in these collectors, that’s probably not the practical way to implement this. Instead, imagine a successor to the Paris Accords, in which each nation agrees to use DFTS or equivalent technology to fulfill its treaty promises. Units could be deployed on rooftops, the sides of buildings, and alongside roads. Again, these would be profit centers. Many new jobs would be created for fiber collectors, at least until it is automated.

    Carbon-based fuels will stop being burned when the economics no longer justify their burning. That is already starting to happen. (See: “Oil Can’t Compete With Renewables, Says National Bank of Abu Dhabi” http://bit.ly/2sBMh4X)

    DFTS offers a promising and potentially viable way to arrest the damage before countless additional species go extinct. As the world shifts from its present scarcity-based mindset and practices to sustainable abundance, most of the scarcity-based problems will disappear. This should take decades, not centuries. Those who think otherwise fail to appreciate the exponential rate of change now governing almost everything of note on the planet.

    Clarke and Reddy have ingeniously started a $10,000 annual prize to identify Cassandras and create awareness of their envisioned threats. That’s half the challenge. The other half is to identify viable technologies to address those threats. This is a key part of A Celebration Society. The book documents existing solutions to multiple seemingly intractable problems.

  • The Celebration Economy

    A recent misstatement of this book’s title in a public forum got me thinking. Could there be such a thing as a “celebration economy”?

    In a sense, it already exists. Tourism is the 6th largest industry worldwide, and tourism is often interwoven with celebration. From that standpoint, a case can be made.

    On the other hand, as I’ve argued in the book, economics is a system that exists to allocate scarcity. As scarcity goes away, the utility of economics also diminishes.

    We called the book A Celebration Society because, in our view, Celebrationism–a system that extols and exalts celebration as a core focus of society–must have two aspects. Those aspects are production and government.

    Celebration is not itself the system of production, nor is it the system of government. Instead, we have used best available evidence, coupled to ongoing process improvement and distributed production to enable automatic production of the necessities. In our view, only such a condition of sustainable, technological opulence–as imagined by Adam Smith when he wrote his Wealth of Nations–can practicably elevate human life to a permanently higher level on Maslow’s Pyramid.

    People whose needs for income have essentially been met still have a need for meaning. Superstars in diverse fields, from business to science to medicine to sport, all have been quoted as saying that they continue to excel “for the love of the game”. In one form or another, the ongoing desire for recognition motivates most such people. In a Celebration Society, people will continue to win recognition for all manner of activities that inspire and uplift others. Such will be the focus of frequent, regular celebrations; from the local to the national.

    We could have called it the Recognition Economy. But, somehow, A Celebration Society sounds more fun.

  • Call for Guest Blogs

    Call for Guest Blogs

    A Celebration Society has always been about encouraging discussion. I don’t want to limit this to my point of view, and so we are now opening the blog for others to contribute. Good topics might include:

    • How to start a movement
    • What will enable a Celebration Society to manifest
    • Technologies that are especially relevant or enabling
    • … and whatever other aspects catch your fancy!

    Blogs should ideally be 400 – 1000 words in length.

  • Robotic Evolution, Accelerating Automation, and Job Loss

    Robotic Evolution, Accelerating Automation, and Job Loss

    Researchers have recently figured out how to impart hive learning capabilities to robots. It’s particularly applicable to the kinds of complex tasks that require observation, trial, error, learning and further trials. This will enable them to collectively learn, in weeks, tasks that would have individually taken the robots years.

    Essentially, a group of identical robots are presented with the same learning challenge. They make various individual attempts to understand and master the task at hand. They compare notes, metaphorically speaking, learning from each others’ mistakes so there is no need for repetition. View here.

    It’s limited to motor skills at the moment, but I see no reason in principle why similar collaboration couldn’t be extended to mental tasks as well. (Robots are simply boxes with sensors and actuators, that afford AIs means to take actions in the physical world.)

    I’ve been criticized in some quarters for an overly aggressive view of how fast accelerating automation can rise to displace human workers. Even today, in the face of AI creativity across many fronts–from invention to musical composition to investment management to scientific discovery–pundits persist in maintaining that there are major domains of creativity and work that will remain uniquely human.

    They may be right, but the trends in AI and robotics certainly don’t support their confidence. Further, with such powerful evidence happening within a technological tidal wave of exponential progress, this confidence is not only unjustified but dangerous.

    Even though Ray Kurzweil’s work has recently transformed belief in the exponential acceleration of technology from heretical to orthodox, most of us nevertheless persist in projecting in a non-exponential way. Stop for a moment, and consider: the vegetation in a pond is doubling every day. The day before it fills the pond, the pond is half full of vegetation. Now comes the shocking part: all of the previous growth is matched by the last doubling, even if it had been growing for years. And that’s true of every previous doubling as well!

    This isn’t hypothetical. Computer power is driving most of the change on the planet. It’s been doubling roughly every two years, and the process has actually been speeding up. Now it’s closer to 18 months. It’s what’s driving automation, and the suddenly much-enhanced capabilities of AIs and robots.

    If massive numbers of jobs and indeed whole professions start to rapidly disappear in the 2020s, leaving multitudes of workers high and dry, I am certain that pundits who today deny the threat will not be the ones dealing with those displaced people, who may form angry mobs.

    The disconnect between the thinking about the technological aspects of accelerating automation, which tends to be deep and insightful, and the thinking about the social aspects of accelerating automation, which tends to be nonexistent or superficial, continues to greatly concern me.

    I agree with the Techno-utopians about the potential of accelerating automation and other technological advances to make society far better. Where we part ways is their nearly universal presumption that such advances are inevitable, and that rationality will govern society in the face of such extreme change.

    I can well understand uninformed people making such fundamental errors. I have a much harder time understanding such errors by the Techno-utopians, who tend to be among the best-educated and best-informed people in their countries.

    In many such countries, including some of the most technologically and economically advanced, large portions of the electorate have recently supported positions and persons inimical to reasoned progress. Consider the rising popularity of nationalist and demagogic parties in democracies across the globe, all offering simplistic messages of hope, uncoupled from evidence, wrapped in jingoism and demonizing “the other.”

    Even those techno-utopians who believe that accelerating automation will generate more jobs than it destroys should appreciate the fact that such jobs tend to be highly skilled, often requiring both training and numeracy beyond the abilities of most workers.

    Do they expect the displaced to go back to school, and learn newly necessary skills? Very well; that could happen, for some—though by no means all. And what if those newly skilled jobs start to become automated as well? How many times do they expect the displaced to retrain?

    Or, do they expect the displaced to gracefully become homeless, camping out on street corners and begging?

    More likely, they expect the displaced to become recipients of a universal basic income (UBI), as is being tested by Y Combinator in a new experiment. While I applaud that experiment, and indeed consider it one of the few conventional experiments capable of fostering wider adoption of such programs, the challenges remain far more daunting than most yet realize. (I explore those challenges here. OTOH, a paper introducing a new approach that appears to address all of those challenges is coming in early 2018.)

    I truly don’t understand how Techno-utopians, in particular, can dismiss these warning signs. All of this has happened in recent years, and we have only experienced the first waters of technological unemployment lapping at the shores. The tsunami is yet to come.

  • Shock therapy, coming soon to your country

    Shock therapy, coming soon to your country

    Shock therapy is a concept proposed by some economists before the Soviet union collapsed. Essentially, it’s the idea that a command and control economy should be immediately dismantled, to be replaced by market mechanisms.

    Adam Smith cautioned against this, and it was a disaster in Russia. People who lack a culture of individual responsibility will not suddenly rise to personal and civic responsibility simply because there is a power vacuum. It takes time for culture to change. This is one of the reasons why I expect that retrofitting a Celebration Society to existing governments will be far more complex than simply starting fresh on uninhabited land.

    What no one seems to have considered is this: the coming tsunami of accelerating automation and technological unemployment will, for all intents and purposes, BE shock therapy for those affected. When the basic social contract breaks, so too does the society begin to break.

    The existing social contract has been that if one is willing and able to work, a job will be available sufficient to support a family. That has already been damaged, in large part by outsourcing. As AIs and the robots they control will be the ultimate form of outsourcing, the creaky social edifice will start to have major ruptures.

    In Russia, shock therapy led to the oligarchy/dictatorship of Putin. There is no reason to think that any other country will be different. Those who somehow thought American exceptionalism extended beyond Jackson Turner’s five factors will have a rude awakening. (They really should have had it this year.)

    I hope that we do not need to experience shock therapy on a widespread basis to awaken to the need for an Abundance Game. Oligarchs and autocrats generally don’t leave their countries in better shape than before. Often, the outcome is much worse.

    I expect that, in this case, with rapidly advancing technological capabilities and in particular AIs, we would see the emergence of an enduring oligarchy similar to Orwell’s 1984, but far more advanced and pervasive. Recently developed technology allows emotions to be monitored non-invasively at a distance.

    Soon, if nanotechnologists are correct, we will have microscopic nanite robots able to cascade through our bodies repairing damage and improving our capabilities. They could as well be used to assure total control of the individual; possibly even at the level of thought.

    The history of humanity should make clear that if such capabilities exist, ruthless parties will seek to control them and thereby control everyone else. I fear that such may become our default reality if we have great social instability in the 2020s and strongmen arise to restore order. Those strongmen may be much harder to displace than previous ones.

    Indeed, they might become immortal and never be displaced.
    Now is the time for us to develop and demonstrate a more humane, sustainable alternative. Will we do it?