14 ms·

We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow (2006)

180 points by tete 12y ago

danielrm26 12y ago
Great analysis. Reminds me of an updated, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", by Bill Joy.
dsirijus 12y ago
There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future. I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell? If so, how do you cope?
- Ygg2 12y ago
  Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago. And same can be generally said of things 50,100,500 or 2000 years ago. Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant. At first empathy was reserved only for members of one family and tribe. Then empathy expanded towards people of same nationality and religion. As long of circle of empathy expands to encompass more and more things, we'll be fine. I won't say there haven't been some really dark blemishes on history, but in spite of all that humanity as a whole moved on. Humans make mistakes. A lot of mistakes. It comes with the turf. As for coping, try reading some Terry Pratchet and embrace the ancient philosophy of Discworld - Things happen, what the heck.
  - dsirijus 12y ago
    I resent your "working brain" allusion and, while I do have plenty of counter-arguments to your statements, I'll just walk away. <- That's how I cope.
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      It's there to filter people that keep clamoring for return of 'good old ages' (as in ancient Aztecs times). I hate that.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Then you could have been specific. Now you are essentially saying that it is not possible to disagree with you because that would imply someone does not have a working brain. I'm not sure what that particular rhetorical trick is called but it isn't a nice one. As anyone with a working brain can surely see.
        Ygg2 12y ago
        > Now you are essentially saying that it is not possible to disagree with No, just that anyone that denies that things that weren't worse 50,100, 2000 years ago isn't thinking.
        polymatter 12y ago
        Consider just saying you are not open to discuss the idea, or that you hold it self-evidently true that things are better now. The way you phrase it you are preemptively insulting people who hold different views (or more likely different ideas of 'worse'). To be clear, suggesting someone "isn't thinking" or doesn't have a brain, is still an insult. This can lower the whole tone of the conversation. In real life, I have to do something similar to certain people on religious topics, people who I can't call mindless idiots to their faces without immediate repercussions. I find its a great way of letting people know politely, that I will not discus the topic.
        Ygg2 12y ago
        I admit, I'm bit of a bad mood lately. I'll try to keep the snark in check and avoid preemptively removing people from discussion. Thanks for feedback.
  - robertfw 12y ago
    > Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago. And same can be generally said of things 50,100,500 or 2000 years ago. While I desperately want to believe that - after all, there are so many indicators that show how far we have come - I fear that our future will not be dictated by a linear progression of our past. Golden eras do end.
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      Things can take a turn for the worse, but it world will recover for it. Sooner or later. I think climate change is our biggest threat, bigger than NSA, Russia dick waving and War on * combined. The longer we ignore it or pretend its not our fault the longer will it take for us/world to recover. EDIT: By us I don't necessarily think humanity, but the environment overall. I hope humanity will survive, but I'm not deluding myself.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    "Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant." Part of me desperately wants to agree with that, but then I remember that the world probably looked a pretty decent place in 1913 and look how downright awful and risky the next ~75 years turned out to be. There is no fundamental law of civilization that guarantees that things will only get better. Having said that, I think that on balance things will keep getting better - but only because a lot of people fight for those improvements based upon observations of where our societies are going wrong and putting up a fight to bring them back on course.
    - oofabz 12y ago
      In 1913, the US was just wrapping up fifteen years of bloody guerilla warfare in the Phillippines after starting the Spanish-American war and the Phillippine-American war. First the government got the masses worked up with a propaganda campaign, and then went to war to annex new lands and seize booty. That's what healthy, vigorous countries did, and we had recently run out of Native Americans to pillage. We killed millions in Cuba and the Phillippines and demolished their industry, economy, and infrastructure - a major reason they are poor countries today. Our Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, personally led men into battle, killed people defending their homelands, and made millions off the war. So we elected him President. The world was a rough place 100 years ago.
      - arethuza 12y ago
        Of course, there was an implicit "from here in the UK and from a very comfortable middle class home" in my statement there... [NB Anyway I stole the point from the start of Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money]
    - lostlogin 12y ago
      Steven Pinker wrote quite the tome on this subject. Its worth the read. "I argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. This calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible." http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
  - jimbokun 12y ago
    "Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago." 50 is pretty debatable, if you live in the U.S. Some argue real wage growth stopped in the 1970s. http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/04/04/the-end-of-prosperity/ http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/04/04/the-end-of-prospe... "The post-1978 stagnation of real wages for both less skilled and for typical workers is a big part of the explanation of why economic inequality has been growing in the United States since the 1970s." That's 36 years ago. Going back another 14 years to 1964, wages were still growing, and prosperity was much more broadly shared than today. As a society, we are all much fatter now, probably exercise much less on average, and growth in life expectancy seems to have leveled off. We probably work more hours, especially on a per family basis. A lot of technological progress has been devoted towards entertainment, and it's debatable how much happier that has actually made us. I'm sure there are some things that have improved, it's just not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
- w0utert 12y ago
  I wouldn't call myself a cynic (I prefer realist), but yeah, in the medium-to-long term I think society as we know it is going to pretty much disintegrate, and it won't be pretty. Not because of technological progress by the way, but despite it. There's enough other forces that will ensure rough times in the future: scarcity of resources, (further) concentration of power, collapse of monetary systems, destruction of the middle class in developed economies, environmental pressure and rising inequality in upcoming economies, the list goes on and on. We've had a pretty good run, but looking at the history of mankind over the last few thousand years one would have to be colossally naive to assume this time is different, and everything will only get better for everyone. Especially when this assumption is based on the belief that technology will save us all. How do you cope? That's easy: you just don't bother too much about it, in the larger context there's not much (if anything) you can do about it anyway, so you might just as well enjoy it while it lasts and make the best out of it. I prefer a nihilistic attitude: on the scale of the universe me, or mankind in general, are pretty much a blip on the radar anyway, and there will be a moment we're done for as a species sooner or later no matter what. No need to get depressed about it, I just take it as a fact.
  - digitalengineer 12y ago
    I suppose you don't have any kids? Simple things start to matter rather quickly if you do.
    - w0utert 12y ago
      I'm not sure if I'm following you. What does having kids change about the future of society as we know it, and how does worrying about this future more because you have kids make your (or their) life better or easier? As a thought experiment, try to imagine you are not living in a modern, safe and developed country, but somewhere in dark africa or some deserted sandbox somewhere. Do you think people there have the same ideas about 'progress', 'technology', and do you think they feel the same about the importance of simple things when they have kids?
      - digitalengineer 12y ago
- iopq 12y ago
  The cynics want to decrease government power and influence over everything until it's small enough to be tolerated.
- na85 12y ago
  >I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell? That's me. I hold little hope for the future. >If so, how do you cope? Escapism.
- chipsy 12y ago
  I am an optimist at heart but am also thoroughly disillusioned with the state of things. I presently reconcile this by subscribing in some degree to Strauss-Howe generational theory. It posits that we(in the USA) go through a crisis of up to 20 years roughly every 80 years. e.g. the last one was the start of the Depression through the end of WWII. And the present one most likely started around September 2008 when the GFC surfaced. The downside of living in a crisis period is that nightmarish things are happening all around you. The upside is that coming out of it, the external-facing institutions of society are completely restructured to address the problems that caused that crisis. And so I am motivated to do what I can to make sure that what we're working with coming out of this crisis is as good as we can get it. (Strauss and Howe are unfortunately also responsible for all those "Millenials" articles, but you take the bad with the good.)
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    If this is a crisis it's an amazingly comfortable one for a large chunk of the world. There is plenty of talk that the bottom has already past and that we're on our way up. (not that I subscribe to that view or the view that this is a crisis but one thing is fairly certain: during the depression people were not able to argue convincingly that they were not in a depression).
    - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
      The grandparent made me start thinking: how would you define things getting worse? I think that's the core of it. For most of the world, we are entering a golden age where lifespans will dramatically improve, income will allow new luxuries unheard-of, and so on. For those in richer nations, we're also entering a new world, where your every move will be recorded and analyzed. Depends on how you look at it. 100 years from now, however, when we're all living to 110 and we all look like fashion models, yet we're living in an Orwellian state? That doesn't look too good to me.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        The Romans were already wise to this. It's just the modern day variety of 'give them bread and games'. 'Good' has many axis. And what you're describing is probably closer to Huxley than to Orwell.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  >>There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future. If the right to EDIT is only granted to a security elite, who have granted themselves the power to inject false data in any stream, for any reason they want, then the war has indeed been lost, ethically. Or, if there is another war, it is to prevent an elite from being able to INTERCEPT and INJECT, completely and utterly, at massive scales. Its not a matter of being cynical about it. Its about not having a single iota of TRUST for the people who create and maintain the security state fiction that allows military junta and ultra-elite special interests to make extraordinary, mass-scale Decisions.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- kybernetyk 12y ago
  > If so, how do you cope? By the fact that my life span is limited.
  - abollaert 12y ago
    ... and don't have children?
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  "how do you cope?" A good part of my hair is already gray and I'm not even 30 yet. That's how.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Sure. There are people who assert that all we have to do is vote. I find that laughable. We have a controlled democracy and an illusion of choice that falls into a narrow range, all controlled by the same sources of money. It's easy to cope because I, like many people on this forum, am materially comfortable. I didn't get sucked under like the bottom tiers of the middle class. But I am not optimistic. I think many of those ex-middle-class people will get desperate enough to start killing the people they blame for their misfortune. At that point we start to look like we've fallen out of the First World and everyone with money needs a bulletproof SUV and guards. So what to do? Embrace the surveillance/security state because it might keep us safe? You see some of that attitude here among the apologists. I don't like that but I have no answers.
dan_bk 12y ago
> So what now? On the political level, the meta problem causing most of other problems is money. Take money out of politics. No political advertising allowed, no "donations", no lobbying. 1 official website (or print brochure) as the only means for voters to get political information (or brainwash) from.
- dsirijus 12y ago
  That only changes strategy of how money goes into politics. In your scenario, the focus will most likely be on "building a politician" before the actual nominations and office runnings, boosting his popularity before his public announcement to go into politics even comes to table, ending up with a lot more Terminator governers. You can't take money out of it.
  - easytiger 12y ago
    Sure you can. For all its problems UK elections are fairly money neutral for the big 3 parties.
  - david927 12y ago
    You can't take money out of it. Sure you can -- using technology. The first step is massive deployment of accessible internet stations in public places, such as libraries, and voter chip cards. When someone votes they get two unique numbers with each type of vote (Yes and No). Of these two, one is circled: that is their vote number that they can write down and check on a national register. (e.g. #2359235 : Yes) They can use this number to change their vote at any time within the 72 hour voting period. Second step, every bill before Congress has a 72 hour delay where it's publicly available to read and vote on by the public. If more than 25% of eligible voters vote, their result overrides the vote of their Representative and Senator. Third step, banning advertisement for bills except for public notices. Congress is reduced to turning small bills to law. Anything serious is left to the people. And money in politics dies.
    - techsupporter 12y ago
      California and Washington are two examples of why I disagree: Both have direct initiative and referendum by the people and both reserve the "power of the purse" to the people, in addition to the legislature, through those methods. In both states, moreso in California than Washington, popular initiatives that have passed overwhelmingly have shown that We The People are horrible at money. Washington's mandatory-$30-car-registration (that didn't last long, but long enough and with lingering consequences), imposed statewide, flattened the Puget Sound region's public transportation and road systems (ohai, toll roads). California's Proposition 13, well, we know what that did to the state budget. I happen to be one of the people who thinks that government can be and is a force for good, when used appropriately. Ham-handed direct democracy through "bumper sticker" campaigns--like this would turn into--is no way to govern. "Defund the NSA" could be up there right alongside "abolish the EPA." We elect people to represent us, we need to be more resilient about voting out people who don't represent us at a common level.
spacefight 12y ago
It's from 2006, but it's more relevant than ever.
thomasmarriott 12y ago
'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.'
hdivider 12y ago
> "Genetic engineering and other biotechnology as well as nanotechnology (and potentially _free energy_ technologies if they exist)..." Somehow this part makes me think the whole article lacks a healthy dose of skepticism and manages to hide it well. For what Frank seems to be talking about here is stuff like 'zero point energy' or other such misconceptions. (Apologies if he means things like cold fusion on a tabletop device, which is _slightly_ less crazy.)
- moreati 12y ago
  In the context of nanotechnology (specifically MNT/molecular manufacturing as described by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation) "free energy" could refer to photovoltaic panels that cost essentially $0. That may or may not have been the author's intent. It's what I thought of when I read that sentance
- mschuster91 12y ago
  I believe he means "free" in a sense of "next to zero cost energy", like geothermal, solar or nuclear fusion energy (and in a stretch, nuclear fission energy).
ciudadanox 12y ago
In Spain, having all this in mind we have created a citizens network in 2013 to force in a short time a real democracy in our country. We are common people, hackers, lawyers, engineers with our jobs but we are very well organized, we have learnt a lot from open source development organizations, we have no investors but we have the best people with us. We created the party to lobby our institutions and in just 1 year we are growing much faster than expected. This article in NYT was right after we were born http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/is-spains-newest-political-party-party-x-too-idealistic/ http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/is-spains-newes... We may be wrong but certainly our are proposal for a new democracy is one of the most advanced in the world after years studying examples all around http://partidox.org/basic-information/ http://partidox.org/basic-information/ (sorry but the information in English is very reduced) On Monday 25th of May there are European elections and for the first time we will be in the list of candidate parties. Our fisrt candidate is a "hacker", he is Herve Falciani who since 2009 has been collaborating with numerous European nations by providing information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts. We have very exciting times ahead and thanks to technology we have new ways of organizations and new ways for pushing changes
- mrobert 12y ago
  >Our fisrt candidate is a "hacker", he is Herve Falciani who since 2009 has been collaborating with numerous European nations by providing information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts. So instead of attempting to scale back the mass surveillance state, the candidate embraces it with open arms and knocks on its door with a vaguely-indicative list of nonviolent alleged criminal code violations of 130,000 people whose metadata he's aggregated?
  - ciudadanox 12y ago
    Not exactly, first he was proposed and voted in a open list. His list of evaders, which is not public includes the top bankers and politics in Europe including some of European deputies. His personal goals are to deploy by law in European banks a system he has developed to monitor bank transactions at European level to elaborate a map of money movements to detect tax evaders. Because of him, governments in Europe have been able to get back millions of euros back Corruption in Spain is a big problem and politics have never been trusted or respected, he is death treated by looking for the common good which at least is a sign he will never be involved in corruption and he will never hide his head in the attempt to achieve our goals.
b1daly 12y ago
Eh, I'm amazed at the ignorance of the obvious by authors like this. This is chickenlittleism on full throttle. The tone is vaguely ellegaic, harkening back to that time when freedom and democracy was the law of the land. Let's see, looking at the 20th century: totalitarianism, the industrialization of genocide, nonstop global warfare (hot and cold), institutionalized tacism and other forms of oppression, CIA trained death squads, pitiful consumer protection stsnfatds , union busting, riots, high profile political assasinstions, colonialisms of all types. It's hard to see a some kind of serious decline in the progress of civilization ushered in by pervasive surveillance technology. Furthermore, to the extent that the author is persuasive that technologically advanced and ubiquitous surveillance will be used to maintain the social order, he highlights a weakness in his thesis. The coming challenges he enumerates, climate disasters, energy problems, migration pressure are not the result of insecure communications. They will come anyway. IMO he rightly guesses that selling increased surveillance to the public will be easy, as very few people in the developed world want society to fall apart. Electronic communication infrastructure cannot be ignored by the power structure. Suppose these horrible changes were stopped by our idealistic hackers from being easily used for social control. What would take their place? I shudder to think. Somehow a world where power can be consolidated by unaffiliated creation of dark networks doesn't sound like much of an improvement. The quality of a society will be progressed through cultural means. Technology is just part of the fabric of this human world.
- anon4 12y ago
  This is exactly what a social damage control drone paid by the government would say. As is my post.
  - hughw 12y ago
    You could substitute for "paid by the government", "deeply invested in the current system." People who are well off, have good engineering jobs at corporations, drive $50,000 cars, have jumbo mortgages, think the current system is working pretty well.
- el_zorro 12y ago
  I am sorry you were downvoted (particularly because you were called a shill for daring to voice your reasonable opinion). There is a doom-and-gloom mentality on this site; people seem like they want the end-of-days. I noted, as you did, that almost all of the problems listed were independent of communications protocol. This entire argument is one of "exaggerate the bad and completely ignore the good". We have companies working on cheap space travel, which opens up asteroid mining (mitigating resource crunches) and allows us to use space-based resources to alleviate problems on Earth (solar shades to reduce warming, etc). Asimov made a great point at the end of I, Robot, where he notes that the intractable problems of one age are rendered moot by the technology of the next. People feared that NYC would be uninhabitable by the year 1950 because there wouldn't be enough place to put all the horse manure - which became a non-issue with the advent of automobile. People feared mass starvation in the 1970's because we couldn't produce enough food - made irrelevant by the green revolution. People fear global warming and totalitarianism today, and it will be made irrelevant by the tech of tomorrow. We already see birth rates falling globally, to the point where we will soon be shrinking in population. This will reduce stresses from unemployment, and paired with a burgeoning space economy we will have more to share with fewer people. There is no reason to cower from the ills of today; they are only a call to keep moving forward.
scrrr 12y ago
I believe in fundamentals. Just don't post anything online, unless you're certain you want to. Do not post pictures. Don't use social networks and cloud services. Your life won't get THAT much harder if Google Maps cannot guess which coffee shop you mean immediately.
Udo 12y ago
> paid manual labor will be eaten away further by technology As labor continues to be automated, we'll need a minimum income for "unproductive" members of society. In reality, they're not really unproductive as long as they can engage in consumer behavior, which is something we absolutely need them to do. We simply can't afford an underclass without access to our new high tech quality of life. So we'll subsidize them. Of course, this will come with restrictions. To be eligible, you won't be allowed to own your house, a part of that income will most likely be added to your "debt", and you'll have to take part in certain mandatory activities. But in essence, basic income will have to be introduced.
- digitalengineer 12y ago
  They said the same thing about health care.
  - gdewilde 12y ago
    no they didn't.
- w0utert 12y ago
  What you are describing is not 'basic income' but 'social security', and many developed countries already have it.
  - Udo 12y ago
    Including mine. What I'm describing will of course supersede social security. While it's true that they don't allow you to own anything if you're on long-term social security, it's not really the same. First, at least in my country social security is so vanishingly small, those people can hardly be called consumers anymore. So basic income will have to be a lot higher, over time approaching a normal salary. Second, social security is not added to your debt. That means you can in theory get out of social security and resume a normal job. Basic income, on the other hand, must be added to your debt for a variety of obvious reasons.
    - deleted 12y ago
Shivetya 12y ago
typical alarmist sensationalism, let alone dates because of its reliance on doom and gloom global warming scenarios that amazingly don't occur and whose model predict such dire fates cannot even be used to show how we are now compared to forty years ago. Will give them points on robotics, robotics will change the world so significantly I doubt we can exaggerate it. We literally will have to find something to do.
hitchhiker999 12y ago
"Decentralized infrastructure is needed. " There is absolutely nothing I can think of more important than this. There's room for companies, there's room for restricted centralised services - but in my humble opinion the core services should be managed and run by the people. We are capable of doing it, if we're not - it's time to learn. Interesting place to start: http://maidsafe.net/ http://maidsafe.net/
- read 12y ago
  "Only true peer-to-peer systems that need as little centralized elements as possible can survive." I'm not sure how to interpret statements like this. Decentralization seems ideal. But some of the most successful services so far either begun or are centralized, not decentralized. If I'm not mistaken, the electric and water utilities, Google, and Facebook are all centralized for example. On the other hand, other services like email and the web (excluding DNS) are decentralized. Is the intention behind this idea that control over those services shouldn't be centralized, while pooling resources could be ok, depending on the service involved?. I'm not saying it's possible to remove control in a centralized service, but I am saying that there is a distinction. A blanket statement that "centralized services can't survive" would seem incorrect, and the existing statement of "as little centralized elements" implies that "as little" in the relative sense will be equal to little in the absolute sense, which might not be true. It could be that "little" practically equals centralization. The reason such a misconception is dangerous is that one might put their efforts in designing a fully decentralized service that isn't adopted. Good design is often hard in that it challenges your assumptions in ways you hadn't originally anticipated.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Everything seems to start centralized, and become more decentralized in the long run. That's because it's easier to build things "in-house" first, and it's also simpler from ca technological point of view. P2P systems need to build communities that can take advantage of the technology, too, otherwise they won't be very effective.
    - 12y ago
benaston 12y ago
If you think there is any truth in this article, then real democracy becomes ever more important as a check on the power afforded the elite. I note that the European Project (i.e. the slow but relentless move towards a United States of Europe) is a step away from democracy in that the European Commission is not elected by universal suffrage, but appointed, and that rules are made centrally and applied to diverse populations with different priorities.
- cstross 12y ago
  You missed the European Parliament, which is elected (with elections taking place right now). The balance of power between the EC and the EP needs to be shifted towards the EP, and other reforms are essential -- but the EU is not intrinsically anti-democratic; the real problem is that the members are all (at least nominally, esp. in the case of Hungary) democracies, with parliaments jealous of delegating power to a higher authority, so the regional governments have deliberate policies of trying to keep the center weak and unaccountable to the polity.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    No doubt you know the United States had a similar problem in their early days, and that nothing sufficed to resolve that conflict short of a half-decade of generally very ugly warfare. Here's hoping the "United States of Europe" so-called don't find themselves so afflicted. From what I hear, though, that seems unlikely; it sounds as though those charged with its assembly are, whether or not they consider it in these terms, attempting wholly to preëmpt the democratic phase, by not only skipping straight to the bureaucratic sclerosis, but actually designing said bureaucracy instead of letting it simply grow in its own fashion. It's an interesting idea, and probably the best chance they've got of avoiding the susceptibility to dangerous enthusiasms which is a young democracy's besetting flaw. On the other hand, it seems at least plausible that attempting to subsume into federalism a range of distinct polities each of which has centuries of history as an independent state, without hammering them together by main force as was eventually done in the American case, is a project doomed to ignominious failure. Whether it'll actually work and how well, I haven't the slightest, but I sure do look forward to finding out.
hownottowrite 12y ago
From H.G. Wells interview with Joseph Stalin, which made the charts on HN a week or two ago: ----- The capitalist is riveted to profit; and no power on earth can tear him away from it. Capitalism will be abolished, not by "organisers" of production not by the technical intelligentsia, but by the working class, because the aforementioned strata do not play an independent role. The engineer, the organiser of production does not work as he would like to, but as he is ordered, in such a way as to serve the interests of his employers. There are exceptions of course; there are people in this stratum who have awakened from the intoxication of capitalism. The technical intelligentsia can, under certain conditions, perform miracles and greatly benefit mankind. But it can also cause great harm. We Soviet people have not a little experience of the technical intelligentsia. After the October Revolution, a certain section of the technical intelligentsia refused to take part in the work of constructing the new society; they opposed this work of construction and sabotaged it. We did all we possibly could to bring the technical intelligentsia into this work of construction; we tried this way and that. Not a little time passed before our technical intelligentsia agreed actively to assist the new system. Today the best section of this technical intelligentsia are in the front rank of the builders of socialist society. Having this experience we are far from underestimating the good and the bad sides of the technical intelligentsia and we know that on the one hand it can do harm, and on the other hand, it can perform "miracles." Of course, things would be different if it were possible, at one stroke, spiritually to tear the technical intelligentsia away from the capitalist world. But that is utopia. Are there many of the technical intelligentsia who would dare break away from the bourgeois world and set to work reconstructing society? Do you think there are many people of this kind, say, in England or in France? No, there are few who would be willing to break away from their employers and begin reconstructing the world. Besides, can we lose sight of the fact that in order to transform the world it is necessary to have political power? It seems to me, Mr. Wells, that you greatly underestimate the question of political power, that it entirely drops out of your conception. What can those, even with the best intentions in the world, do if they are unable to raise the question of seizing power, and do not possess power? At best they can help the class which takes power, but they cannot change the world themselves. This can only be done by a great class which will take the place of the capitalist class and become the sovereign master as the latter was before. This class is the working class. Of course, the assistance of the technical intelligentsia must be accepted; and the latter in turn, must be assisted. But it must not be thought that the technical intelligentsia can play an independent historical role. The transformation of the world is a great, complicated and painful process. For this task a great class is required. Big ships go on long voyages.
w_t_payne 12y ago
Technology is a lever that can be used to amplify power. Surveillance is the example du jour, but there are plenty of others. We are social beings, (vertices in the social graph) and we have relationships with (edges that connect us to) other individuals and groups of individuals. Some of these relationships are characterized by asymmetric power (influence & coercion) attributes. The aggregate effect of these relationships on us as individuals is sometimes beneficial, sometimes deleterious; an effect characterized in terms of personal liberty; economic utility, and perhaps other factors too. We naturally have an interest in understanding the benefits and risks inherent in this network of relationships; and in understanding the factors that maximize the aggregate benefit whilst reducing the aggregate risk. I am idly pondering what it would take to build a statistical model of the network of power relationships between individuals and groups, and explore how various types of technological power amplification change the distribution of reward and risk across individuals. I.e. does the amplification of existing power relationships through technological change increase the risk that personal liberty will be restricted? What about the economic impact? Is there a risk that the distribution of "personal liberty" will become more concentrated? How big is that risk, and what is the spread? What about economic wealth? Of course, this is just a silly thought experiment ... but I am sure that some of the readers here have access to both the computational resources and the raw data (graphs of interlocutors with power/influence attributes decorating the edges) to do this experiment ... if you haven't already done it. I'd be interested to know if any unclassified & publicly available results exist?
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Cooper's Law: All machines are amplifiers.
bobzibub 12y ago
While we, the techno intelligencia, discuss how to manage technological change against the powerful security state, it is probably the case that the more desperate will just start shooting oligarchs despite the vast security apparatus designed to protect them. Once they realize they're not secure, they'll decide to cede power. The question is who will be able to negotiate this transition in a transparent and positive way when politicians are already corrupted by them? I in no way advocate violence, (except occasional lapses of thought on the hockey rink). I just think that these events will occur: If there are millions of people that the state believes are refuse, many will turn to crime to eat and as the social contract is broken, some of these people will tend towards violence against those who run (what were once democratic) countries. The oligarchs are a natural enemy to the "refuse" of society because they do have a large hand in their plight. Consider: They generally advocate for trade pacts which lower the wages of low skill workers. They extract high rents for education so many cannot better themselves. They pay as little and hire as few as humanly possible. The only aspect of their operations that they would have in a first world country are point where they receive customers' money. To many of them, their ideal is that both the production and the profits are off shore. None of this endears them to millions of the poor. So that, unfortunately is how things change. Please prove me wrong.
- virmundi 12y ago
  It is for this reason that I'm a fan of the masses being armed. Without weapons, they can never revolt. True, one could manufacture weapons, but a good side arm and long riffle go a long way. I see violence as a sad, but necessary thing. The history of man is one of warring between to groups. Once the rich/super rich become so powerful that they basically enslave the rest of us, there has to be a war. There is no society in the world that hasn't had a war of some kind. It is true that one could, in theory, use non cooperation to dismantle the existing apparatus of state. The difficulty lies in the fact that the "refuse" are already disenfranchised. In the techno world of the future, they are not needed on any level. They are not consumers, therefore no one should care. Without a good portion of the elite siding with them, their non-conformism won't help. Even with India, the government of England and its citizenry were tired of empire anyway. India wasn't worth the effort to them. It is unlikely that we'll see the same from the elite anytime soon. They are on the uptick now. Oddly Marx is right. There will be a class war. A new synthesis will be struct. In the mean time, sadly, people will die or be wounded. The best thing to do is prepare for it and try to mitigate it.
sebastianconcpt 12y ago
What is painful for me about this is that while we might sensibilize a handful of (A) talented hackers here and there that (B) are in good shape to do anything about it, there are legions of lobbists and bureaucrats with big budgets daily working to expand the State, some of those legions are tax minions who's "added value" is bite yours
socrates1998 12y ago
I think we should go back to a real democracy, not a representative republic. Why can't all citizens vote online? We bank online, we pay our taxes online. We could develop a system that is more secure than the local polling stations we have now and vote on laws, regulations and budgets all online. We don't need congress. We would vote on laws ourselves. We would vote on the budget ourselves. We could even vote on budget proposals line by line. Voting out any projects that only favor local communities. We could approve or disprove going to war. The president would answer to us directly. Some would this is would be chaos, but it could be implemented on the local level first and then scaled bigger. Others say that the common person can't understand laws. I say it's imperative that everyone be able to understand our laws. If a law is too complicated, then it shouldn't be a law. Anyways, just my thoughts.
negativity 12y ago
This article nails several realities dead on. The premise of a pervasive electronic panopticon is a modern fatal charade, that we've unwittingly cast ourselves in. There's an enourmous power differential at play now, in everything we do. Even buying a pack of gum at the gas station with pocket change can be readily transformed into permanent public record. On the other hand, it's important to bear in mind that the problems highlighted here are social. Between human beings. The manner in which we share the world we live on, and whether we reduce it to ashes by fighting with each other. It's not a problem that can't be solved. It's a problem that can only be sabotaged.

180 points by tete 12y ago

Great analysis. Reminds me of an updated, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", by Bill Joy.

There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future. I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell? If so, how do you cope?

Ygg2 12y ago
Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago. And same can be generally said of things 50,100,500 or 2000 years ago. Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant. At first empathy was reserved only for members of one family and tribe. Then empathy expanded towards people of same nationality and religion. As long of circle of empathy expands to encompass more and more things, we'll be fine. I won't say there haven't been some really dark blemishes on history, but in spite of all that humanity as a whole moved on. Humans make mistakes. A lot of mistakes. It comes with the turf. As for coping, try reading some Terry Pratchet and embrace the ancient philosophy of Discworld - Things happen, what the heck.
- dsirijus 12y ago
  I resent your "working brain" allusion and, while I do have plenty of counter-arguments to your statements, I'll just walk away. <- That's how I cope.
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    It's there to filter people that keep clamoring for return of 'good old ages' (as in ancient Aztecs times). I hate that.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Then you could have been specific. Now you are essentially saying that it is not possible to disagree with you because that would imply someone does not have a working brain. I'm not sure what that particular rhetorical trick is called but it isn't a nice one. As anyone with a working brain can surely see.
      - Ygg2 12y ago
        > Now you are essentially saying that it is not possible to disagree with No, just that anyone that denies that things that weren't worse 50,100, 2000 years ago isn't thinking.
        polymatter 12y ago
        Consider just saying you are not open to discuss the idea, or that you hold it self-evidently true that things are better now. The way you phrase it you are preemptively insulting people who hold different views (or more likely different ideas of 'worse'). To be clear, suggesting someone "isn't thinking" or doesn't have a brain, is still an insult. This can lower the whole tone of the conversation. In real life, I have to do something similar to certain people on religious topics, people who I can't call mindless idiots to their faces without immediate repercussions. I find its a great way of letting people know politely, that I will not discus the topic.
        Ygg2 12y ago
        I admit, I'm bit of a bad mood lately. I'll try to keep the snark in check and avoid preemptively removing people from discussion. Thanks for feedback.
- robertfw 12y ago
  > Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago. And same can be generally said of things 50,100,500 or 2000 years ago. While I desperately want to believe that - after all, there are so many indicators that show how far we have come - I fear that our future will not be dictated by a linear progression of our past. Golden eras do end.
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    Things can take a turn for the worse, but it world will recover for it. Sooner or later. I think climate change is our biggest threat, bigger than NSA, Russia dick waving and War on * combined. The longer we ignore it or pretend its not our fault the longer will it take for us/world to recover. EDIT: By us I don't necessarily think humanity, but the environment overall. I hope humanity will survive, but I'm not deluding myself.
- arethuza 12y ago
  "Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant." Part of me desperately wants to agree with that, but then I remember that the world probably looked a pretty decent place in 1913 and look how downright awful and risky the next ~75 years turned out to be. There is no fundamental law of civilization that guarantees that things will only get better. Having said that, I think that on balance things will keep getting better - but only because a lot of people fight for those improvements based upon observations of where our societies are going wrong and putting up a fight to bring them back on course.
  - oofabz 12y ago
    In 1913, the US was just wrapping up fifteen years of bloody guerilla warfare in the Phillippines after starting the Spanish-American war and the Phillippine-American war. First the government got the masses worked up with a propaganda campaign, and then went to war to annex new lands and seize booty. That's what healthy, vigorous countries did, and we had recently run out of Native Americans to pillage. We killed millions in Cuba and the Phillippines and demolished their industry, economy, and infrastructure - a major reason they are poor countries today. Our Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, personally led men into battle, killed people defending their homelands, and made millions off the war. So we elected him President. The world was a rough place 100 years ago.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      Of course, there was an implicit "from here in the UK and from a very comfortable middle class home" in my statement there... [NB Anyway I stole the point from the start of Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money]
  - lostlogin 12y ago
    Steven Pinker wrote quite the tome on this subject. Its worth the read. "I argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. This calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible." http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
- jimbokun 12y ago
  "Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago." 50 is pretty debatable, if you live in the U.S. Some argue real wage growth stopped in the 1970s. http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/04/04/the-end-of-prosperity/ http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/04/04/the-end-of-prospe... "The post-1978 stagnation of real wages for both less skilled and for typical workers is a big part of the explanation of why economic inequality has been growing in the United States since the 1970s." That's 36 years ago. Going back another 14 years to 1964, wages were still growing, and prosperity was much more broadly shared than today. As a society, we are all much fatter now, probably exercise much less on average, and growth in life expectancy seems to have leveled off. We probably work more hours, especially on a per family basis. A lot of technological progress has been devoted towards entertainment, and it's debatable how much happier that has actually made us. I'm sure there are some things that have improved, it's just not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
w0utert 12y ago
I wouldn't call myself a cynic (I prefer realist), but yeah, in the medium-to-long term I think society as we know it is going to pretty much disintegrate, and it won't be pretty. Not because of technological progress by the way, but despite it. There's enough other forces that will ensure rough times in the future: scarcity of resources, (further) concentration of power, collapse of monetary systems, destruction of the middle class in developed economies, environmental pressure and rising inequality in upcoming economies, the list goes on and on. We've had a pretty good run, but looking at the history of mankind over the last few thousand years one would have to be colossally naive to assume this time is different, and everything will only get better for everyone. Especially when this assumption is based on the belief that technology will save us all. How do you cope? That's easy: you just don't bother too much about it, in the larger context there's not much (if anything) you can do about it anyway, so you might just as well enjoy it while it lasts and make the best out of it. I prefer a nihilistic attitude: on the scale of the universe me, or mankind in general, are pretty much a blip on the radar anyway, and there will be a moment we're done for as a species sooner or later no matter what. No need to get depressed about it, I just take it as a fact.
- digitalengineer 12y ago
  I suppose you don't have any kids? Simple things start to matter rather quickly if you do.
  - w0utert 12y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm following you. What does having kids change about the future of society as we know it, and how does worrying about this future more because you have kids make your (or their) life better or easier? As a thought experiment, try to imagine you are not living in a modern, safe and developed country, but somewhere in dark africa or some deserted sandbox somewhere. Do you think people there have the same ideas about 'progress', 'technology', and do you think they feel the same about the importance of simple things when they have kids?
    - digitalengineer 12y ago
iopq 12y ago
The cynics want to decrease government power and influence over everything until it's small enough to be tolerated.
na85 12y ago
>I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell? That's me. I hold little hope for the future. >If so, how do you cope? Escapism.
chipsy 12y ago
I am an optimist at heart but am also thoroughly disillusioned with the state of things. I presently reconcile this by subscribing in some degree to Strauss-Howe generational theory. It posits that we(in the USA) go through a crisis of up to 20 years roughly every 80 years. e.g. the last one was the start of the Depression through the end of WWII. And the present one most likely started around September 2008 when the GFC surfaced. The downside of living in a crisis period is that nightmarish things are happening all around you. The upside is that coming out of it, the external-facing institutions of society are completely restructured to address the problems that caused that crisis. And so I am motivated to do what I can to make sure that what we're working with coming out of this crisis is as good as we can get it. (Strauss and Howe are unfortunately also responsible for all those "Millenials" articles, but you take the bad with the good.)
- jacquesm 12y ago
  If this is a crisis it's an amazingly comfortable one for a large chunk of the world. There is plenty of talk that the bottom has already past and that we're on our way up. (not that I subscribe to that view or the view that this is a crisis but one thing is fairly certain: during the depression people were not able to argue convincingly that they were not in a depression).
  - DanielBMarkham 12y ago
    The grandparent made me start thinking: how would you define things getting worse? I think that's the core of it. For most of the world, we are entering a golden age where lifespans will dramatically improve, income will allow new luxuries unheard-of, and so on. For those in richer nations, we're also entering a new world, where your every move will be recorded and analyzed. Depends on how you look at it. 100 years from now, however, when we're all living to 110 and we all look like fashion models, yet we're living in an Orwellian state? That doesn't look too good to me.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      The Romans were already wise to this. It's just the modern day variety of 'give them bread and games'. 'Good' has many axis. And what you're describing is probably closer to Huxley than to Orwell.
fit2rule 12y ago
>>There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future. If the right to EDIT is only granted to a security elite, who have granted themselves the power to inject false data in any stream, for any reason they want, then the war has indeed been lost, ethically. Or, if there is another war, it is to prevent an elite from being able to INTERCEPT and INJECT, completely and utterly, at massive scales. Its not a matter of being cynical about it. Its about not having a single iota of TRUST for the people who create and maintain the security state fiction that allows military junta and ultra-elite special interests to make extraordinary, mass-scale Decisions.
deleted 12y ago
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kybernetyk 12y ago
> If so, how do you cope? By the fact that my life span is limited.
- abollaert 12y ago
  ... and don't have children?
guard-of-terra 12y ago
"how do you cope?" A good part of my hair is already gray and I'm not even 30 yet. That's how.
Zigurd 12y ago
Sure. There are people who assert that all we have to do is vote. I find that laughable. We have a controlled democracy and an illusion of choice that falls into a narrow range, all controlled by the same sources of money. It's easy to cope because I, like many people on this forum, am materially comfortable. I didn't get sucked under like the bottom tiers of the middle class. But I am not optimistic. I think many of those ex-middle-class people will get desperate enough to start killing the people they blame for their misfortune. At that point we start to look like we've fallen out of the First World and everyone with money needs a bulletproof SUV and guards. So what to do? Embrace the surveillance/security state because it might keep us safe? You see some of that attitude here among the apologists. I don't like that but I have no answers.

dan_bk 12y ago

> So what now? On the political level, the meta problem causing most of other problems is money. Take money out of politics. No political advertising allowed, no "donations", no lobbying. 1 official website (or print brochure) as the only means for voters to get political information (or brainwash) from.

dsirijus 12y ago
That only changes strategy of how money goes into politics. In your scenario, the focus will most likely be on "building a politician" before the actual nominations and office runnings, boosting his popularity before his public announcement to go into politics even comes to table, ending up with a lot more Terminator governers. You can't take money out of it.
- easytiger 12y ago
  Sure you can. For all its problems UK elections are fairly money neutral for the big 3 parties.
- david927 12y ago
  You can't take money out of it. Sure you can -- using technology. The first step is massive deployment of accessible internet stations in public places, such as libraries, and voter chip cards. When someone votes they get two unique numbers with each type of vote (Yes and No). Of these two, one is circled: that is their vote number that they can write down and check on a national register. (e.g. #2359235 : Yes) They can use this number to change their vote at any time within the 72 hour voting period. Second step, every bill before Congress has a 72 hour delay where it's publicly available to read and vote on by the public. If more than 25% of eligible voters vote, their result overrides the vote of their Representative and Senator. Third step, banning advertisement for bills except for public notices. Congress is reduced to turning small bills to law. Anything serious is left to the people. And money in politics dies.
  - techsupporter 12y ago
    California and Washington are two examples of why I disagree: Both have direct initiative and referendum by the people and both reserve the "power of the purse" to the people, in addition to the legislature, through those methods. In both states, moreso in California than Washington, popular initiatives that have passed overwhelmingly have shown that We The People are horrible at money. Washington's mandatory-$30-car-registration (that didn't last long, but long enough and with lingering consequences), imposed statewide, flattened the Puget Sound region's public transportation and road systems (ohai, toll roads). California's Proposition 13, well, we know what that did to the state budget. I happen to be one of the people who thinks that government can be and is a force for good, when used appropriately. Ham-handed direct democracy through "bumper sticker" campaigns--like this would turn into--is no way to govern. "Defund the NSA" could be up there right alongside "abolish the EPA." We elect people to represent us, we need to be more resilient about voting out people who don't represent us at a common level.

spacefight 12y ago

It's from 2006, but it's more relevant than ever.

thomasmarriott 12y ago

'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.'

hdivider 12y ago

> "Genetic engineering and other biotechnology as well as nanotechnology (and potentially _free energy_ technologies if they exist)..." Somehow this part makes me think the whole article lacks a healthy dose of skepticism and manages to hide it well. For what Frank seems to be talking about here is stuff like 'zero point energy' or other such misconceptions. (Apologies if he means things like cold fusion on a tabletop device, which is _slightly_ less crazy.)

moreati 12y ago
In the context of nanotechnology (specifically MNT/molecular manufacturing as described by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation) "free energy" could refer to photovoltaic panels that cost essentially $0. That may or may not have been the author's intent. It's what I thought of when I read that sentance
mschuster91 12y ago
I believe he means "free" in a sense of "next to zero cost energy", like geothermal, solar or nuclear fusion energy (and in a stretch, nuclear fission energy).

ciudadanox 12y ago

In Spain, having all this in mind we have created a citizens network in 2013 to force in a short time a real democracy in our country. We are common people, hackers, lawyers, engineers with our jobs but we are very well organized, we have learnt a lot from open source development organizations, we have no investors but we have the best people with us. We created the party to lobby our institutions and in just 1 year we are growing much faster than expected. This article in NYT was right after we were born http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/is-spains-newest-political-party-party-x-too-idealistic/ http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/is-spains-newes... We may be wrong but certainly our are proposal for a new democracy is one of the most advanced in the world after years studying examples all around http://partidox.org/basic-information/ http://partidox.org/basic-information/ (sorry but the information in English is very reduced) On Monday 25th of May there are European elections and for the first time we will be in the list of candidate parties. Our fisrt candidate is a "hacker", he is Herve Falciani who since 2009 has been collaborating with numerous European nations by providing information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts. We have very exciting times ahead and thanks to technology we have new ways of organizations and new ways for pushing changes

mrobert 12y ago
>Our fisrt candidate is a "hacker", he is Herve Falciani who since 2009 has been collaborating with numerous European nations by providing information relating to more than 130,000 suspected tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts. So instead of attempting to scale back the mass surveillance state, the candidate embraces it with open arms and knocks on its door with a vaguely-indicative list of nonviolent alleged criminal code violations of 130,000 people whose metadata he's aggregated?
- ciudadanox 12y ago
  Not exactly, first he was proposed and voted in a open list. His list of evaders, which is not public includes the top bankers and politics in Europe including some of European deputies. His personal goals are to deploy by law in European banks a system he has developed to monitor bank transactions at European level to elaborate a map of money movements to detect tax evaders. Because of him, governments in Europe have been able to get back millions of euros back Corruption in Spain is a big problem and politics have never been trusted or respected, he is death treated by looking for the common good which at least is a sign he will never be involved in corruption and he will never hide his head in the attempt to achieve our goals.

b1daly 12y ago

Eh, I'm amazed at the ignorance of the obvious by authors like this. This is chickenlittleism on full throttle. The tone is vaguely ellegaic, harkening back to that time when freedom and democracy was the law of the land. Let's see, looking at the 20th century: totalitarianism, the industrialization of genocide, nonstop global warfare (hot and cold), institutionalized tacism and other forms of oppression, CIA trained death squads, pitiful consumer protection stsnfatds , union busting, riots, high profile political assasinstions, colonialisms of all types. It's hard to see a some kind of serious decline in the progress of civilization ushered in by pervasive surveillance technology. Furthermore, to the extent that the author is persuasive that technologically advanced and ubiquitous surveillance will be used to maintain the social order, he highlights a weakness in his thesis. The coming challenges he enumerates, climate disasters, energy problems, migration pressure are not the result of insecure communications. They will come anyway. IMO he rightly guesses that selling increased surveillance to the public will be easy, as very few people in the developed world want society to fall apart. Electronic communication infrastructure cannot be ignored by the power structure. Suppose these horrible changes were stopped by our idealistic hackers from being easily used for social control. What would take their place? I shudder to think. Somehow a world where power can be consolidated by unaffiliated creation of dark networks doesn't sound like much of an improvement. The quality of a society will be progressed through cultural means. Technology is just part of the fabric of this human world.

anon4 12y ago
This is exactly what a social damage control drone paid by the government would say. As is my post.
- hughw 12y ago
  You could substitute for "paid by the government", "deeply invested in the current system." People who are well off, have good engineering jobs at corporations, drive $50,000 cars, have jumbo mortgages, think the current system is working pretty well.
el_zorro 12y ago
I am sorry you were downvoted (particularly because you were called a shill for daring to voice your reasonable opinion). There is a doom-and-gloom mentality on this site; people seem like they want the end-of-days. I noted, as you did, that almost all of the problems listed were independent of communications protocol. This entire argument is one of "exaggerate the bad and completely ignore the good". We have companies working on cheap space travel, which opens up asteroid mining (mitigating resource crunches) and allows us to use space-based resources to alleviate problems on Earth (solar shades to reduce warming, etc). Asimov made a great point at the end of I, Robot, where he notes that the intractable problems of one age are rendered moot by the technology of the next. People feared that NYC would be uninhabitable by the year 1950 because there wouldn't be enough place to put all the horse manure - which became a non-issue with the advent of automobile. People feared mass starvation in the 1970's because we couldn't produce enough food - made irrelevant by the green revolution. People fear global warming and totalitarianism today, and it will be made irrelevant by the tech of tomorrow. We already see birth rates falling globally, to the point where we will soon be shrinking in population. This will reduce stresses from unemployment, and paired with a burgeoning space economy we will have more to share with fewer people. There is no reason to cower from the ills of today; they are only a call to keep moving forward.

scrrr 12y ago

I believe in fundamentals. Just don't post anything online, unless you're certain you want to. Do not post pictures. Don't use social networks and cloud services. Your life won't get THAT much harder if Google Maps cannot guess which coffee shop you mean immediately.

Udo 12y ago

> paid manual labor will be eaten away further by technology As labor continues to be automated, we'll need a minimum income for "unproductive" members of society. In reality, they're not really unproductive as long as they can engage in consumer behavior, which is something we absolutely need them to do. We simply can't afford an underclass without access to our new high tech quality of life. So we'll subsidize them. Of course, this will come with restrictions. To be eligible, you won't be allowed to own your house, a part of that income will most likely be added to your "debt", and you'll have to take part in certain mandatory activities. But in essence, basic income will have to be introduced.

digitalengineer 12y ago
They said the same thing about health care.
- gdewilde 12y ago
  no they didn't.
w0utert 12y ago
What you are describing is not 'basic income' but 'social security', and many developed countries already have it.
- Udo 12y ago
  Including mine. What I'm describing will of course supersede social security. While it's true that they don't allow you to own anything if you're on long-term social security, it's not really the same. First, at least in my country social security is so vanishingly small, those people can hardly be called consumers anymore. So basic income will have to be a lot higher, over time approaching a normal salary. Second, social security is not added to your debt. That means you can in theory get out of social security and resume a normal job. Basic income, on the other hand, must be added to your debt for a variety of obvious reasons.
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Shivetya 12y ago

typical alarmist sensationalism, let alone dates because of its reliance on doom and gloom global warming scenarios that amazingly don't occur and whose model predict such dire fates cannot even be used to show how we are now compared to forty years ago. Will give them points on robotics, robotics will change the world so significantly I doubt we can exaggerate it. We literally will have to find something to do.

hitchhiker999 12y ago

"Decentralized infrastructure is needed. " There is absolutely nothing I can think of more important than this. There's room for companies, there's room for restricted centralised services - but in my humble opinion the core services should be managed and run by the people. We are capable of doing it, if we're not - it's time to learn. Interesting place to start: http://maidsafe.net/ http://maidsafe.net/

read 12y ago
"Only true peer-to-peer systems that need as little centralized elements as possible can survive." I'm not sure how to interpret statements like this. Decentralization seems ideal. But some of the most successful services so far either begun or are centralized, not decentralized. If I'm not mistaken, the electric and water utilities, Google, and Facebook are all centralized for example. On the other hand, other services like email and the web (excluding DNS) are decentralized. Is the intention behind this idea that control over those services shouldn't be centralized, while pooling resources could be ok, depending on the service involved?. I'm not saying it's possible to remove control in a centralized service, but I am saying that there is a distinction. A blanket statement that "centralized services can't survive" would seem incorrect, and the existing statement of "as little centralized elements" implies that "as little" in the relative sense will be equal to little in the absolute sense, which might not be true. It could be that "little" practically equals centralization. The reason such a misconception is dangerous is that one might put their efforts in designing a fully decentralized service that isn't adopted. Good design is often hard in that it challenges your assumptions in ways you hadn't originally anticipated.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Everything seems to start centralized, and become more decentralized in the long run. That's because it's easier to build things "in-house" first, and it's also simpler from ca technological point of view. P2P systems need to build communities that can take advantage of the technology, too, otherwise they won't be very effective.
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benaston 12y ago

If you think there is any truth in this article, then real democracy becomes ever more important as a check on the power afforded the elite. I note that the European Project (i.e. the slow but relentless move towards a United States of Europe) is a step away from democracy in that the European Commission is not elected by universal suffrage, but appointed, and that rules are made centrally and applied to diverse populations with different priorities.

cstross 12y ago
You missed the European Parliament, which is elected (with elections taking place right now). The balance of power between the EC and the EP needs to be shifted towards the EP, and other reforms are essential -- but the EU is not intrinsically anti-democratic; the real problem is that the members are all (at least nominally, esp. in the case of Hungary) democracies, with parliaments jealous of delegating power to a higher authority, so the regional governments have deliberate policies of trying to keep the center weak and unaccountable to the polity.
- aaronem 12y ago
  No doubt you know the United States had a similar problem in their early days, and that nothing sufficed to resolve that conflict short of a half-decade of generally very ugly warfare. Here's hoping the "United States of Europe" so-called don't find themselves so afflicted. From what I hear, though, that seems unlikely; it sounds as though those charged with its assembly are, whether or not they consider it in these terms, attempting wholly to preëmpt the democratic phase, by not only skipping straight to the bureaucratic sclerosis, but actually designing said bureaucracy instead of letting it simply grow in its own fashion. It's an interesting idea, and probably the best chance they've got of avoiding the susceptibility to dangerous enthusiasms which is a young democracy's besetting flaw. On the other hand, it seems at least plausible that attempting to subsume into federalism a range of distinct polities each of which has centuries of history as an independent state, without hammering them together by main force as was eventually done in the American case, is a project doomed to ignominious failure. Whether it'll actually work and how well, I haven't the slightest, but I sure do look forward to finding out.

hownottowrite 12y ago

From H.G. Wells interview with Joseph Stalin, which made the charts on HN a week or two ago: ----- The capitalist is riveted to profit; and no power on earth can tear him away from it. Capitalism will be abolished, not by "organisers" of production not by the technical intelligentsia, but by the working class, because the aforementioned strata do not play an independent role. The engineer, the organiser of production does not work as he would like to, but as he is ordered, in such a way as to serve the interests of his employers. There are exceptions of course; there are people in this stratum who have awakened from the intoxication of capitalism. The technical intelligentsia can, under certain conditions, perform miracles and greatly benefit mankind. But it can also cause great harm. We Soviet people have not a little experience of the technical intelligentsia. After the October Revolution, a certain section of the technical intelligentsia refused to take part in the work of constructing the new society; they opposed this work of construction and sabotaged it. We did all we possibly could to bring the technical intelligentsia into this work of construction; we tried this way and that. Not a little time passed before our technical intelligentsia agreed actively to assist the new system. Today the best section of this technical intelligentsia are in the front rank of the builders of socialist society. Having this experience we are far from underestimating the good and the bad sides of the technical intelligentsia and we know that on the one hand it can do harm, and on the other hand, it can perform "miracles." Of course, things would be different if it were possible, at one stroke, spiritually to tear the technical intelligentsia away from the capitalist world. But that is utopia. Are there many of the technical intelligentsia who would dare break away from the bourgeois world and set to work reconstructing society? Do you think there are many people of this kind, say, in England or in France? No, there are few who would be willing to break away from their employers and begin reconstructing the world. Besides, can we lose sight of the fact that in order to transform the world it is necessary to have political power? It seems to me, Mr. Wells, that you greatly underestimate the question of political power, that it entirely drops out of your conception. What can those, even with the best intentions in the world, do if they are unable to raise the question of seizing power, and do not possess power? At best they can help the class which takes power, but they cannot change the world themselves. This can only be done by a great class which will take the place of the capitalist class and become the sovereign master as the latter was before. This class is the working class. Of course, the assistance of the technical intelligentsia must be accepted; and the latter in turn, must be assisted. But it must not be thought that the technical intelligentsia can play an independent historical role. The transformation of the world is a great, complicated and painful process. For this task a great class is required. Big ships go on long voyages.

w_t_payne 12y ago

Technology is a lever that can be used to amplify power. Surveillance is the example du jour, but there are plenty of others. We are social beings, (vertices in the social graph) and we have relationships with (edges that connect us to) other individuals and groups of individuals. Some of these relationships are characterized by asymmetric power (influence & coercion) attributes. The aggregate effect of these relationships on us as individuals is sometimes beneficial, sometimes deleterious; an effect characterized in terms of personal liberty; economic utility, and perhaps other factors too. We naturally have an interest in understanding the benefits and risks inherent in this network of relationships; and in understanding the factors that maximize the aggregate benefit whilst reducing the aggregate risk. I am idly pondering what it would take to build a statistical model of the network of power relationships between individuals and groups, and explore how various types of technological power amplification change the distribution of reward and risk across individuals. I.e. does the amplification of existing power relationships through technological change increase the risk that personal liberty will be restricted? What about the economic impact? Is there a risk that the distribution of "personal liberty" will become more concentrated? How big is that risk, and what is the spread? What about economic wealth? Of course, this is just a silly thought experiment ... but I am sure that some of the readers here have access to both the computational resources and the raw data (graphs of interlocutors with power/influence attributes decorating the edges) to do this experiment ... if you haven't already done it. I'd be interested to know if any unclassified & publicly available results exist?

dredmorbius 12y ago
Cooper's Law: All machines are amplifiers.

bobzibub 12y ago

While we, the techno intelligencia, discuss how to manage technological change against the powerful security state, it is probably the case that the more desperate will just start shooting oligarchs despite the vast security apparatus designed to protect them. Once they realize they're not secure, they'll decide to cede power. The question is who will be able to negotiate this transition in a transparent and positive way when politicians are already corrupted by them? I in no way advocate violence, (except occasional lapses of thought on the hockey rink). I just think that these events will occur: If there are millions of people that the state believes are refuse, many will turn to crime to eat and as the social contract is broken, some of these people will tend towards violence against those who run (what were once democratic) countries. The oligarchs are a natural enemy to the "refuse" of society because they do have a large hand in their plight. Consider: They generally advocate for trade pacts which lower the wages of low skill workers. They extract high rents for education so many cannot better themselves. They pay as little and hire as few as humanly possible. The only aspect of their operations that they would have in a first world country are point where they receive customers' money. To many of them, their ideal is that both the production and the profits are off shore. None of this endears them to millions of the poor. So that, unfortunately is how things change. Please prove me wrong.

virmundi 12y ago
It is for this reason that I'm a fan of the masses being armed. Without weapons, they can never revolt. True, one could manufacture weapons, but a good side arm and long riffle go a long way. I see violence as a sad, but necessary thing. The history of man is one of warring between to groups. Once the rich/super rich become so powerful that they basically enslave the rest of us, there has to be a war. There is no society in the world that hasn't had a war of some kind. It is true that one could, in theory, use non cooperation to dismantle the existing apparatus of state. The difficulty lies in the fact that the "refuse" are already disenfranchised. In the techno world of the future, they are not needed on any level. They are not consumers, therefore no one should care. Without a good portion of the elite siding with them, their non-conformism won't help. Even with India, the government of England and its citizenry were tired of empire anyway. India wasn't worth the effort to them. It is unlikely that we'll see the same from the elite anytime soon. They are on the uptick now. Oddly Marx is right. There will be a class war. A new synthesis will be struct. In the mean time, sadly, people will die or be wounded. The best thing to do is prepare for it and try to mitigate it.

sebastianconcpt 12y ago

What is painful for me about this is that while we might sensibilize a handful of (A) talented hackers here and there that (B) are in good shape to do anything about it, there are legions of lobbists and bureaucrats with big budgets daily working to expand the State, some of those legions are tax minions who's "added value" is bite yours

socrates1998 12y ago

I think we should go back to a real democracy, not a representative republic. Why can't all citizens vote online? We bank online, we pay our taxes online. We could develop a system that is more secure than the local polling stations we have now and vote on laws, regulations and budgets all online. We don't need congress. We would vote on laws ourselves. We would vote on the budget ourselves. We could even vote on budget proposals line by line. Voting out any projects that only favor local communities. We could approve or disprove going to war. The president would answer to us directly. Some would this is would be chaos, but it could be implemented on the local level first and then scaled bigger. Others say that the common person can't understand laws. I say it's imperative that everyone be able to understand our laws. If a law is too complicated, then it shouldn't be a law. Anyways, just my thoughts.

negativity 12y ago

This article nails several realities dead on. The premise of a pervasive electronic panopticon is a modern fatal charade, that we've unwittingly cast ourselves in. There's an enourmous power differential at play now, in everything we do. Even buying a pack of gum at the gas station with pocket change can be readily transformed into permanent public record. On the other hand, it's important to bear in mind that the problems highlighted here are social. Between human beings. The manner in which we share the world we live on, and whether we reduce it to ashes by fighting with each other. It's not a problem that can't be solved. It's a problem that can only be sabotaged.