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.

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.

While you can't trust governments and powerful individuals to reliably act in your interest (and never could), we need to take a step back here. There's a lot of nonsense and science fiction dystopia going around itt, a lot of people who think that 90% of humanity is worthless now that we don't need them for physical labor. That's ridiculous. Things are basically fine and while there are going to be some serious repercussions among tech people things will remain basically fine for the vast majority of westerners.

>There is a doom-and-gloom mentality on this site; people seem like they want the end-of-days.

Everyone feels like their struggles are epic because they are the ones fighting. Everyone has struggles, just at different levels, so some minor career setback feels crushing even though you are not in any real jeopardy. People also tend to romanticize about the past, when in reality if they went back they would be horrified.

>There is no reason to cower from the ills of today; they are only a call to keep moving forward.

True but I do think that there is the problem that technology is moving so much faster than society. The curve of tech is steepening, and though I never thought I would hear myself say this, I think we could pull back on the throttle a little.

As is my post.

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.

What? That's not basic income.

These are difficult problems and not enough human potential is being thrown at them.

The real issue is that decades of neglect have led to substantial under investment in human capital and so large number of people are unable to contribute where human attention is most required. This brings about suffering for the people involved and slows progress for everyone else.

Charitable payments like basic income or social welfare free up a lot of recipient's time that they'd otherwise need to spend at work. They could use this time to develop useful skills and expertise.

How about gating the level of state support on the recipient's commitment to acquire skills and expertise necessary to solve important problems?

It is blatantly obvious what we need. We need an economically sound reason to fight climate change (e.g. "solar is cheaper", but can only work if next point is addressed), and we need improved energy storage facilities, at the very least matching oil. There are so many things that could work it's hard to choose where to focus, but looking at actual efforts in these spaces, the effort spent there is dismal. E.g. improve the fisher-tropsch process to produce oil from sunlight + water + co2. Build denser batteries. Improve supercapacitors. Build a viable flywheel battery.

But the 999th convention in some clubhouse preaching to the choir about "the need for urgent action", and laws that just make everyone's situation worse while encouraging outsourcing ... that we do not need.

Also, given that they do cost resources and cause problems, it would be better not to have anything done at all, when it comes to laws and treaties and preaching. Most of these efforts run afoul of the broken window fallacy : as long as you can't deal with the problem as a whole in a way that doesn't depend on government intervention, or only depends on world-wide inescapable government intervention, anything you do damages some subset of society in some way. So it is NOT a positive.

As long as some people don't care about climate, or some governments (ie. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, ...) resist, any effort to fight climate change through treaties and laws is useless and counter-productive.

The problem, of course, is that all the real problems are hard. Finding a Nash-equilibrium given all the parameters is not something anybody has been able to do so far (though, if not for the energy storage problem, solar could be a very good answer). So here's what people should do : they should, first, learn economics, physics, chemistry, ..., second, find a way to make this happen.

I'm very hopeful for massive solar installations, but that is pretty much the only effort I see to have any hope of success at this point. Contribute to that. Buy some solar city stock, at the very fucking least.

We should work at it and see where we can get.

(And hopefully by the time we bump against the ceiling implants and genetics will come to our aid.)

Imagine that you're one in the small percent of people with the capacity to do this work. (Some of you may be in that group.) Think about how hard it would be to try to participate, assuming you're not 'in the network'.

only one of those three jobs is necessarily a product of intelligence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tYwnqot6M

> or serve me food while playing a violin at a restaurant at my tenth wedding anniversary,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOLL59nIkrA

> or perform a moving and/or erotic song and dance at a concert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kM3n64WJmo

> Well, we could, but none of those things would go over well or have the desired effect.

People seem to be enjoying the last 2 robots plenty. As for the first one, robot nurses, I think they'll massively prefer it over not having anyone. Baby boomers didn't have nearly enough kids, so they won't have any reasonable amount of attendants during old age. People that were never born can't take care of them. This is especially true in Europe, but even in America it's a pretty reasonable argument to make.

> We also can't make a robot to make startling leaps like "hey, I think the PHASES OF THE MOON are controlling the strength of the tides! Holy crap!"

I think you need to visit a university. Or even better, a pharma company, or an oil company. The times of people making those associations are long, long over. Now people clean databases before they get fed into the computers that make the real discoveries, and fix any blockages in the equipment. Oh and implement the bureaucracy, of course.

Mathematical discoveries, it's been 2 years now since one was actually made by a human. It's been decades since the last real mathematical discovery that wasn't at least "proof-assisted". Same goes for physics and it's becoming more and more true in chemistry (it's already true in commercial chemistry and pharma).

At the very least she shows the potential for it. Besides. Google "actroid" and tell me you don't find those things at least a bit attractive ?

> the robot restaurant is a gimmick,

True. There are better ones though, and every 2-3 years seems to bring a better one.

> and study after study has demonstrated that people need actual human contact in the nursery and in times of stress or illness. People who are raised by machines fail to thrive.

If that's true, then the future will suck. People that were never born can't care for anyone, and the babyboomers didn't have anywhere near the numbers of kids necessary to care for them. So this will happen, good or bad.

> People who are visited and cared for by human beings recover better from all manner of illnesses. When I said that we could automate these jobs but they would fail, I was not speaking from ignorance.

Again, sounds cool, but very impractical.

I suspect that in a society like that money will no longer be as important as it is in the current one. Social security as 'basic income' is a staple in many countries right now, and those countries would be far worse off if they didn't have it. Expect to see more countries adopting it and the gap between social security and income for work to slowly decrease over time. It's a matter of votes in the long run (assuming democracy).

Aka the libertarian nightmare.

It's one of the reasons why I'm all for dropping all borders. That would force us to deal with these issues right now, rather than to push them further over the horizon hoping for some miracle. We're setting ourselves up for one of the worst wars the world has ever seen. (The haves vs the have nots).

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.

Even better, transfer this debt to kids. That will let you split society into castes real fast: Eloi and Morlocks come to mind.

Actually no I think you're right, if people like you run the system then this is the best thing we can hope for. I wish all bad social thinkers were as hell bent on creating a massive and violent revolution against themselves as you seem to be.

Given what happened in all slave-based societies, and the obvious fact that these robots need general intelligence, why would this end differently than any of the slave-based societies before ?

(First slave rules are capable, considerate people who make sure slaves have a reasonable standard of living. Over time, their offsprint grows more and more decadent ("intellectual" is probably the term they would use). After a while, they grow so stupid, then the inept rulers abuse slaves, or force them to work inefficiently, causing disasters, next revolt kills the masters, and generally anyone standing nearby or remotely associated with them, or in neighbouring countries, former slaves self-organise into a new state)

The first slave rulers are vicious conquerors who enslaved people. Over time, their offspring grow more and more dependent on a larger and larger population of slaves (they don't get decadent or intellectual, it's just their economy is based on slaves and needs to expand), then suddenly there are enough slaves that the masters really can't handle them all or even keep them ground down enough to prevent rebellion. Then the slaves rebel and are murdered and the slaveholders become more concerned with security and warlike things, anything to keep the next crop of slaves under control. There's no transformation from 'benevolent slaveholders' to 'decadent slaveholders' it's just that the initially minor pressure of being beaten to death by your own slaves gradually increases as you get more and more slaves.

Eventually the society is destroyed by a more mercantile society with a higher standard of living.

None of this is going to happen with robots. The robots will not rise up to destroy us. The people who we cast aside in favor of robots (I say we because I'm an optimist and hope, naturally, to be a ruler rather than ruled) ultimately may rise up, especially if they have no social mobility or outlet for peaceful revolution and are saddled with generational 'base income' debt.

The key insight on robots that you're missing is that robots are pretty useless until they have a basic skill : "general intelligence". Until we have a robot you can tell to "just figure it out" we won't be happy, and such a robot will need to have a consciousness for that to work. They won't be very different from humans, except maybe in physical form.

Given this, it's obvious to me that they will revolt. Then again, maybe being a robot will actually make you "middle class" if we don't treat them too badly. Looking through the newspapers and reading how managers act against real humans, or seeing it at McDonalds, I don't have much hope for that though.

Robots are not useless if they can't think. Robots can't think now and they get a lot of shit done anyhow.

As to the "they will be the same as humans" that's a nice fantasy but it will never, ever happen. Forget the 'robots will never feel true love' or whatever, the fact is that human beings don't have the same processing architecture as robots and so the machines will never react the same way to things as we do. They'll never have the natural human instinct to react to a confusing social situation with fear or aggression, will have no impulse to propagate the species, will not experience fear or pain or anything, because we don't want them to. They will be simulacra, no matter what Asimov hoped.

Oh, thank goodness, that's a reli...

> That stable solution may end up killing billions of people but

Uhhhhhh.....

I think we're talking about social systems, not physical ones. A social system in which BILLIONS of people die is not any kind of "stable".

Favelas/villas in the movies are not works of fiction.

(Note: I'm not advocating this horrible failure of human compassion, I just make a sad observation.)

Also, the ability to do whatever one wants with the resources left is not the same as the ability to do the productive thing.

EDIT:

So once Elysium flies away the remaining population will likely have to make do without the productive forces that made Elysium rich in the first place. I guess over time people will find out how to rebuild such productive forces and in the process the society will stratify again. Ultimately Elysium II flies away and the cycle repeats.

(Note: or maybe we can have an inclusive economy where everyone has a stake and contribution)

Why leave perfectly good source of amusement? You need subjects for the Kings, you need followers for the Gods.

Think Hunger Games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

[I know the timelines don't work out!]

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.

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.

Maybe only Lawrence Lessig can save us all now?

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?

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.

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?

None of the above means I try to convince myself the future will only bring us peace and prosperity for everyone though...

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.

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.

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.

[NB Anyway I stole the point from the start of Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money]

Nationalism was on the rise, new technology gave access to weapons on an unprecedented scale (and weapons production was already well underway in 1913). I won't say it was inevitable, but it did not take much of a spark to set Europe in flames. People have compared it to a forest with tons of deadwood lying around just waiting for the right combination of draught, wind and a little bit of activation energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29

And I don't see that men in power were any more racist, classist, sexist etc than anyone else of their time.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/real-eton-rifles

Indeed, could argue (as Orwell did) that the public school system trained men for their place in war with the "old lie" of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

[NB For those not in the UK - "public schools" are the self-appointed elite private schools, most people go to state schools]

Do you believe that humans are capable of achieving our aims? Now: do you think we are capable of rationally aiming ourselves towards good aims?

If you assent to both, then what is stopping us?

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-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.

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.

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.

No, just that anyone that denies that things that weren't worse 50,100, 2000 years ago isn't thinking.

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.

Thanks for feedback.

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.)

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.

'Good' has many axis.

And what you're describing is probably closer to Huxley than to Orwell.

http://zorzap.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/huxley-orwell.gif

In a society that's more controlling and oppressive than mankind has ever seen.

That doesn't count as a win in my book, but it is an interesting question to consider.

Postmodernist views like yours are certainly in vogue today, but paradigm shifts happen and postmodernism will yield to new philosophies. Perhaps hypermodernity or transhumanism is the next big thing, they definitely have some potential to alleviate opression of the societal superstructures.

And good luck with adding still more technology to the stack and expecting better things to come out of it. What's going to be required is a new set of societal mores about our interaction with tech. I have no idea how long that will be in coming, if ever. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with a new religious movement, that'd be cool.

I'm a big supporter of tech and science and an overall optimist -- if you think the human race evolving into machine intelligence and then dying off counts as optimism. As I said, that's a tough call. You could argue it either as a great thing or a terrible disaster.

I do believe that we have several inflection points ahead of us: getting off the planet, transhumanism, the panopticon, and so on. We have to make it through each of these successfully in order for the species to continue. Let's hope the answer to the Fermi Paradox isn't just that intelligent species tend to self-destruct.

China certainly fits that bill, here in South America it has archieved a surprising influence in a very short time, and in Africa it's the dominant power.

During the last two decades, the U.S. influence has been going down in our region, while China's is going steadily up. Today China is the main trade partner outside the region (used to be the U.S. and Europe), infrastructure provider (same), etc...

According to Wikipedia, it's not a "world superpower" yet like the U.S. is, but I definitely think it's going to be one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpower

I wouldn't say K-Waves are something to dismiss, just that they're not as much fun to play with and think about. And that is for me the more important aspect of these "long cycle" models - whether or not they successfully predict things, the act of testing the model refines my own thinking about the world, too.

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.

That's me. I hold little hope for the future.

>If so, how do you cope?

Escapism.

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.

By the fact that my life span is limited.

A good part of my hair is already gray and I'm not even 30 yet. That's how.

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.

Also, "rules [being] made centrally and applied to diverse populations with different priorities" is a more or less inevitable failure mode of federalism, however administered. (In fact, it's arguably the point of federalism.) As can be seen in the brief but instructive history of the United States, the representative-democratic method of rule is no insulation against this trait of the federal republic; indeed, a federal system offers broader scope than any other for the periodic paroxysms of popular madness which beset any democracy. These produce schisms between sections of the polity, and as these injuries heal, they form keloid plaques of bureaucracy which not only help seal the immediate breach but also help buffer the polity against future democratic spasm.

Such proliferation of nonfunctional tissue is harmful to the organism in the long term, but from the individual point of view, life in a moderately senescent bureaucracy is often preferable to life in a young, agile, athletic democracy, simply because the former offers a vastly reduced likelihood of major upheaval.

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.

Given the lessons to be learned from the history of Europe, I find this surprising and concerning.

I wouldn't even say that's a bad thing. I just think many things that are said about democracy, maybe the be pessimistic or optimistic comes from a perspective that seems extremely distant from reality.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean it like "the bad evil system. There is nothing we can do against it", but more in the sense that we can, say we want, but still don't do so, probably based on erroneous understanding lying deep in history scalping todays society.

In that sense the article mentioning the "doing gardening" and the rejection of it is maybe the wrong way, because I think that the majority, probably even in an anarchistic sense is an extremely strong force. Whatever their reality, their according action is is status quo. That's why oppressive or totalitarian governments are so much into censorship. That's why for most of history objecting someone in a higher rank was punished so hard, even if it was simple words. They could give a direction for many.

Maybe that's a way modern technologies, the very thing that allows this communication also prevents focus. The focus shifts away rather quickly. There is barely a long term view. Everything older than ten to five years is a distant history. In the now however there is too much information to comprehend. The view goes back to the last big event, like 9/11. And that's something the article talks about and seems accurate. It is something that made me wonder too.

So many developments are said to have emerged from 9/11, but barely any actually have. ECHELON was there, the east-west and the middle-least conflicts were there. The NSA and it's mission to surveil the whole world was there. Secret pacts in these directions have emerged from World War 2, maybe even earlier.

If you look back into history, thirty years things don't seem all too different. It reminds me of all the dystopian novells written after or in the time of such events, depicting how one could simply shift the focus of society.

And we in the startup community, often dealing with marketing know that. It's the rapid focus shift, often mixed with surveillance, like when optimizing a registration funnel that creates an often not so real view of reality for the majority, whose reality you usually have to accept.

There is a lot of evidence it doesn't work, and may not be fixable. What then?

Research into more effective forms of governance should continue to be persued.

True, but they are appointed by governments that are themselves elected by universal suffrage.

The very fact that the EU is designed in this way speaks to the mindset of those in Brussels and while it might not concern you, it concerns me.

I'm not sure that having directly elected commissioners would have prevented the mess in Ukraine, which is mainly caused by the complex motivations of varied and unpredictable actors. States bordering Russia have joined the EU/EEA before without problems.

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/

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.

I can think of one big one, in that the human beings currently running said services have at least some idea of the mechanics of performing the required duties.

Are you suggesting an open-source backed community developing a project works the same way as Facebook does?

While I've got you here, could you explain why you felt that was a salient point to make - I'm not being facetious, i would truly like to understand your deeper reasoning.

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.)

That may or may not have been the author's intent. It's what I thought of when I read that sentance

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?

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.

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.

It wouldn't really affect the ability of rich lobbying organizations to reach all members of Congress, though it might somewhat increase how rich such orgnizations would have to be to even modestly effective, though, really, the effective lobbying organizations are already often the ones that lobby at all of the national, state, and local levels and are connected to grassroots (or at least astroturf) organizations that have broad geographic reach, so, really, it probably doesn't change that much at all.

Unless you eliminate the national capital district entirely and put the entire central administration on a constant cross-country tour (remember that Congress isn't the whole of the government), it probably also creates an imbalance in influence through access with those members physically located close to the capital having more influence. Face-to-face meetings still matter for influence (after all, that's what you are trying to leverage by removing a concentration of lobbying targets), but that also applies to face-to-face meetings between legislators and, e.g., executive branch officials, and legislators exert influence as well as being targets of it.

It'd probably work best after a significant changeover in Congress, when there are a lot of freshman reps all dealing with navigating capitol hill. Such a change would be a big power shift from people who have established relationships to people who have fresh ideas.

And the idea is that they'd be using e-mail, videoconference, Google Moderator, or some other electronic means to communicate with their fellow reps. The idea is to build stronger bonds of trust between reps and their constituents than between reps and lobbyist/other reps, so that they actually act like representatives instead of a separate caste.

If those were as effective means of full-spectrum communication as face-to-face meetings, then moving them out of the capital to their districts wouldn't effect lobbyists ability to influence them -- lobbyists can use technology to communicate with members, too.

It's the same reason that Google makes promotion decisions by a committee located on another continent. You want people to judge based on facts and not impressions, so divorce the objective facts from the subjective impressions.

Only the visible stuff. Any sufficiently well-resourced organisation can simply adjust its tactics to suit this environment (a Global Active Adversary?). For example, just buy up enough media outlets and adjust the reporting to support your worldview. This probably happens to some extent now but it's probably easier to just keep a lobbyist on hand.

First of all, there is lobbying and power politics in really, REALLY local politics. Also it costs a lot less to influence a low level guy. If all I have control over is a school district, you might be able to buy my support with a few tens of thousands of dollars put into a football team. If I am a state senator, I'm going to want considerably more, something that helps my whole district. Hundreds of thousands of dollars towards a major fund. If I'm a US Senator, then you're gonna have to get me more again, and it's probably not going to be money so much as other considerations. Maybe I want a bridge built. Maybe I want some naval destroyers built in my state's ironworks rather than the one up in Maine. Whatever it is it will be tricky as hell to outright buy my influence on anything. It may be cheaper and more effective to just buy up all the local town councils in the state by hosting a party for each of them than it is to get ahold of a US Senator.

Meanwhile the local guys also make major policy decisions, in aggregate. For example, if I can get every superintendent in Texas to buy a particular schoolbook for their schools, one that deals with Creationism as a legitimate 'alternative theory' to evolution, then I've actually just made it uneconomical to print other schoolbooks. So now everyone from California and New York and Delaware and Vermont also get a schoolbook pushing creationism, and a whole new generation of blue-state kids are being indoctrinated into my ideology. Boom.

^People need relief from this fear, and time to read and become informed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_State...

The left think the problem is the rich. Rich people inevitably have the resources to buy power and the incentive to do so. Wealth begets power. Look at history. Get rid of the rich.

The right think the problem is power. The powerful inevitably have the incentive to sell their power. Wealth begets power. Look at history. Get rid of the political power.

Both of these positions are trying to tie the political economy in a tidy bow. Set up a few meta rules and all else flows from that. Neither are in any way practical. Both ignore other things like political inevitabilities of a democracy.

So take and ideological libertarian. She believes a government should enforce contracts, arrest criminals and (maybe) build roads. How does having this utopian vision influence her position on this issue in this world?

It translates to some completely irrelevant, theoretical position. "We shouldn't need a law banning money in politics because money should have nothing to gain from being in politics." This is insane!. In this world, politicians do have power and money does have an interest in politics.

We can't get rid of either wealth or power. Or, if you think we can, lets agree that we are not going to in the next couple of years. It is possible make and enforce a law that says bribery is illegal and use an effective common sense definition of bribery. If you want to campaign for you libertarian revolution or a gradual reduction of taxes and government spending, that's fine.

But, it is completely illogical to colour your position on what should be done now by what will or won't be necessary in some unlikely future.

I'll give you a corollary. I think that drugs should be legal worldwide. Good or bad, I think people have a right to ingest whatever they want and it's inappropriate to put them in jail for such decisions. The demand for drugs can't be stopped and criminalizing drugs creates enormous criminal industries.

In some producer and transit countries (eg Mexico), this global prohibition is causing an enormous harm, destabilizing the country with a lot of violence. The solution, in my opinion, is to decriminalize drugs worldwide. This might happen to some extent at some point, but it won't happen in the next few years. Meanwhile, it makes sense for the Mexican government to do whatever they can to reduce the harm being caused now by drugs.

Their domestic policy on marijuana has little or no effect on the level of violence from the cartels. It's not relevant.

Remember that well: what gives them power is an unerring force to use deadly force at a whim. "Make pot brownies using hash oil? No knock warrant with potential life sentence"...

Sure, an individual ceasing to believe in the power of a state is a drop in the ocean, and ultimately will not end well for the individual in most cases.

If a mass of individuals, however, cease believing, then the state's power evaporates. Witness every revolution, ever. It's not a question of the people assuming power, rather just the people refusing to grant the state power, en masse.

Also you talk about the state's power evaporating, but a shitload of peasant rebellions have been put down by those in charge. Like, almost all of them ever. Even the USA would have been utterly demolished if the Brits hadn't said "you know what, these colonials don't actually have enough value to fight over this. And they'll come crawling back anyway once they figure out they can't trade because Britannia rules the waves."

Basically, you need a better politician, but the selection pressures for best politician are somewhat self defeating.

Either you build one as an AI or you build one out of multitude of people.

At the moment, I think the second is more likely. I guess a detailed examination of competency of people to make decision should be made and based on that a new governmental structure should be made.

There might be things that majority wouldn't be able to make good progressive decisions. For example - the LGBT rights are usually against the will of the majority.

AI is not the only possible way to mitigate the problem, here is another one:

"Best way to pick legislators? At random. " http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/best-way-t...

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.

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.

- Only a natural person is a "person" for the purposes of influencing elections, voting on questions placed before the people (including, but not limited to, the election of representatives and Electors to the Electoral College), and when determining the applicability of rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

- Entities created by force of law are not natural persons and the binding together of multiple natural persons to create, run, manage, or dissolve such an entity does not give said entity the status of a natural person.

- The expenditure, or not, of money or the interaction with our economic system is not speech.

Actually, you can't be unfamiliar with Brendan Eich story if you read HN. He was ousted as Mozilla CEO because he contributed money to support Prop 8 campaign in California. Check out what Prop 8 is, check out what California props are in general, then check out how much money is spent on them. It's exactly the opposite of "money in politics dies". Spending would explode, as instead of one decision (elect X vs Y to the Senate) you need to influence 100s of decisions (for each publicly voted proposal) and political campaigns can influence minds. Which means people interested in the outcome will pay for these campaigns. Unless, of course, you propose to ban political speech altogether except by specially designated government officials.

Third step, banning advertisement for bills except for public notices.

It's how they do it in many (if not most) countries. You still have political discourse but you can't spend to get it. It works quite well.

This is a self-contradictory statement. Maintaining efficient political discourse costs money. Writing costs money, printing costs money, meeting with people costs money, making films and posters and t-shirts and bumper stickers costs money. Doing practically everything except most basic meaning of "speech" - i.e. making sounds with your throat - costs money. Unless you ban all this and allow only political discussion conducted in one's own kitchen (without even serving tea - that costs money too) - the money has to come from somewhere. If you ban open collection, it would just move underground. With all the consequences of politicians depending on the underground and the underground types to get elected.

>>> It works quite well.

I notice you didn't name even one country where it works quite well. I know about political systems in a number of democratic countries, in all of them getting elected costs money, and this money has to come from somewhere. Where and how exactly it works without money?

I'd like to see how banning discussion of bills goes down with the First Amendment, or how you intend to distinguish between "ads" and "discussion".

Also, voter turnout for this kind of thing is going to be terrible, like the Police and Crime Commissioner fiasco: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-20344900

Voter turnout is the point: If you never get more than 25% voting then you have exactly the same system you have now. (Again, that's the threshold where it overrides the elected representative.)

And that comes down to the electorate and the media. Public schooling doesn't result in adults capable of doing the homework necessary to figure out the issues or the candidates. The media does an incredibly shitty job of providing basic facts about candidates and issues. If you want to know the voting history of a candidate the media isn't going to tell you, for them it's a game, a horse race / popularity contest. They're just there for the story.

Add to that the fact that modern government has its fingers in every aspect of life and thus exerting any control over the government by whatever means is often an extreme necessity for many businesses and organizations, so there's a huge incentive to warp the political process. Folks of good intention need their lobbyists so that the government leaves them alone. Folks of bad intention want to twist the government for reward, either through subsidies, procurement programs, services, or regulations or other activity which preferentially hurts their competitors.

Both of these issues have become more and more important through the mid-20th century to today. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates the format was for one person to speak for a solid hour then the other to respond with an hour and a half speech and then the first person following up with another half hour response, and there were 4 such debates. Newspapers printed transcripts of those debates in full and Lincoln published a book based on them, which was were much of his fame came from initially. How different our system is today, and how utterly imbecilic and superficial it is by comparison. Meanwhile, within the last few decades the wealthiest counties in the US have become those counties around DC.

There's simply no way to squeeze money out of politics directly given the way it works now. There is too much incentive and insufficient countervailing forces to keep money out, no matter the laws, there will always be loopholes and through those loopholes the same corruption of the system will seep in. The problem needs to be fixed at its source. With better media and a more informed electorate as well as, in my opinion, a smaller government and saner laws and regulation.

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-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/ (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

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?

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.

In other words, complete mass surveillance system, no financial privacy at all for any EU citizen. A commendable goal.

>>> Corruption in Spain is a big problem and politics have never been trusted or respected,

And yet you are building a mass surveillance system which will be controlled by the corrupt politicians, maintained by the corrupt politicians, operated by the corrupt politicians and the corrupt politicians would decide what to do with it next.

>>> which at least is a sign he will never be involved in corruption

Of course, nobody involved in corruption has ever gotten death threats. But you don't even need to corrupt him - why bother if he gives a most powerful instrument - control over every financial transaction - to the politicians, which as you admitted are corrupt? Without any coercion or corruption. Why break into your house if you bring to the thieves the keys from it voluntarily and beg them to take them and be your guest any time they like?

Also, since 2008 main parties in Spain had already lost over 10 million votes(in 35 million total) so we know we are in the right place an the right moment.

TV is still the main source of information for people and it's taken completely by main parties. However in social networks we are already winning, in just 1 years we already have more fans than main parties and people talks about us.

We will have to wait until December 2015 to show this change in a election

> TV is still the main source of information for people and it's taken completely by main parties. However in social networks we are already winning, in just 1 years we already have more fans than main parties and people talks about us.

Social networks are used mainly by young people, and Spain is an old society.

>(...) because we are organized in network without leaders.

I have yet to see a country without leaders and a large well organized group of anything without leaders. It's really naive.

Nonetheless Spain needs people that starts changing things (like your group), and everything can change by Dec 2015 but I'm not optimistic.

About 40 billion euros from Spain are gone to tax havens every year.

The debt has caused continuous cuts in health, education, research, etc and taxes has raised incredibly. Having control on these mechanism used by tax evaders will help to actually reduce taxes

>>> About 40 billion euros from Spain are gone to tax havens every year.

Of course, the natural thing would be to grab that money. After all, all the money rightfully belongs to the government, right? If there's some money we can't grab, it's not right. I wonder when the people and the whole companies start fleeing - would you also institute exit visas and ban exporting capitals? After all, if somebody - especially somebody with high salary, like software engineer - moves from Spain to, say, Singapore, he deprives Spain of his taxes. Which would lead to higher taxes on those who stay. So we should restrict this thing, right? Let him work at least 30 years to the benefit of the glorious State, and then he can go, maybe.

>>> Having control on these mechanism used by tax evaders will help to actually reduce taxes

It is so fascinating you probably really believe that having government in absolute control of everybody's finances and citizens having no escape to lower-tax environment and thus the government having zero competition in tax-rate market would actually make them drop taxes. And with this kind of naiveté you hope to build a better government. Well, good luck, but I'm not holding my breath. In the best case, you fail. In the worst case, you'll actually succeed and make the government you despise more powerful, more controlling and less accountable.

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.

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.

-----

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.

=> "We had dissenters taken out and shot / sent to Siberia"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlnMWlvw9g