Tag Archives: the future

One Way A Basic Income Could Work

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There is probably more than one way a basic income could work but I want to share at least one that I have considered to help people see that it might be possible.
First I want you to consider if there are people living with a basic income in today’s society? What provides for their income if they are? Why is there a basic income provided for them?

There are many people living on a basic income today. There are many different groups receiving a basic income and they receive their basic income under different circumstances and provided from by different sources. Analyzing these groups and sources could help us understand the opportunities for more widely possible basic incomes.

The first obvious example of people receiving a basic income is children. They are provided for by their parents because the kids can’t provide for themselves.

Another group is the mentally disabled, again, because they can’t provide for themselves they are provided for by loved ones.

The third group that receives a basic income is those on physical disability from the government. Again, the requirements is that they can’t provide for themselves so they are provided for, this time, not by loved ones but because the government has mandated that it is important for us to take care of others who can’t take care of themselves.

The final group that receives a basic income is the retired. Their basic income is slightly different from the previous groups because they have created their own basic income. The reason they need a basic income is similar, in that many of them might not be able to physically work anymore so they have to create a situation where income is provided for them while they can’t actively create it.

So the similarities between all the groups is that they need money to provide their daily needs and they aren’t working themselves to create the income. The first 2 groups, kids and mentally disabled, are provided for by loved ones.

The physically disabled are provided for by the government and the retired are provided for by themselves.

Which of these is most applicable to a world wide model?

First, the love model? Where does the money for the love model come? The money from the love model comes from working income of the parents or loved ones who care for the disabled or children. The guardians have to continually create new income to cover the needs of those in their care. If they lose their job the basic income provided for the loved disappear. The important idea here is that income comes from continued work/creation of value.

Unfortunately love, doesn’t seem to be working for the world. It doesn’t seem like we’ve produced enough love to take care of all the people who need it. Love usually comes from a place of closeness and stems from family ties. I want to believe we are one human family, but by our mass actions, we have shown we are not there yet.

The 2nd way, governmental care, has an income collected from the working class. This class is likely providing for some loved ones already, and are also providing a basic income for another class, the disabled, who they don’t necessarily know personally or love directly. At a fundamental level, the income from the government really comes from the same place as the money from the first group, from working people continually creating value.

The government assistance model for basic income has shown some more success in places that have more government oversight as well as a more robust economy that can handle more being “siphoned” (taxed) from the working populace. The difficulty here is that that the governments money ultimately comes from the working people. They are only able to support so many non-working people. .

The final group, the retired, have their money come from growth or dividends of capital from businesses that they are owners in, stock owners or direct private business owners, that they have accumulated their whole life. Dividends are actually income (value), produced by the first group, the working class, but that is not awarded to the working class! It is awarded to the owners of the business. This is a very important concept because it gives us a glimpse of where we can obtain income if we aren’t working. If you are a business owner you will gain some profits from the business you own.
It is important to understand a business idea here. Your employees must produce at least as much value as you are paying them. Most businesses employees actually produce more value than they cost the company. They have to if the business wants to show a profit!

Think of the business that you work for. You should ask, how does this business make money. Then you should ask “How much profit per employee a year does this business create?” You should also ask “How much profit do I create for the business a year?”

Good businesses know how much profit they make per employee. For example, Facebook makes $188,000 per employee per quarter! That’s $752,000 per employee per year. That is why starting employees at Facebook can make over $100k a year, because they add way more value than that to the company each year. The profit you make over the salary you pay the employees is the extra profit that can be paid to the business owners. They are awarded this extra income for taking the initial financial risk of starting a business, investing in capital, etc. It is just as easy, or even easier, to invest in a business and lose all your money if you are starting from scratch.

The important idea from above, business owners can potentially gain income from a business in which they are solely owners, they don’t have to be doing any work and that is a form of basic income we see today.
Somebody has to do the work, today. These are the workers. Now I am going to ask you to take a mental journey to a future with me where we can envision a business, started by a person where they invest a lot of their money into fully autonomous machines, such that there are 0 people actually working in the factory. There is solar energy provided for the plant. There are autonomous robots creating, whatever product you want and the maintenance is also handled by robots. There are 0 people working in this factory, but the factory is producing a product, something of value, that other people will pay for. In this scenario, there is still a business owner, there is still value being created and income coming in, but there is no work being done by any people. This is exactly the scenario in which a basic income is viable. Now let’s say this person’s autonomous factory makes shirts. Now another person has a 100% autonomous factory where he grows food. These 2 people can create enough food and clothes between them, while neither is physically working himself, to feed and cloth each other. Now consider a 3rd person who has no factory of his own. The 2 autonomous factory owners factories can produce enough that they could feed and clothe this 3rd man but will they? That is the critical question! I believe in an abundance economy, which is what you would have when everything is being created from 100% autonomous work, that the capital owners, the factory owners, would be generous people. My belief stems from some fantastically rich people today, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, who have so much wealth to be in the position of capital owners who have 0 necessity for work and who are working to give it away.

Since we now have one idea for a possibility for how a basic income would work I think it should be pretty obvious that the goal is clear. We should work to invest in factories and other methods of creation that are 100% autonomous.

Once we are creating enough to provide for everyone the desire and ability to distribute the spoils of this abundance should manifest rather quickly from either the care and responsibility we feel towards our fellow humans, when our own survival is not threatened, or from the fear that our survival will be threatened if we keep a large segment of the population under-cared for. Either way, there should be a path for care for all when abundance is possible.

I realize that the thought of fully autonomous factories seems fantastical. But it truly is not! Complete autonomy is just the final step in what has been happening for many years, at least since the start of the industrial revolution. The increase in productivity of any individual is the hallmark of our age. I personally am paid more than the average person because the tools and knowledge I have access to allow me to produce more. Full autonomy is the final act in that progression. Infinite creation with no input. If you can’t see that end you lack creativity. It is the ultimate efficiency, which is what our economy is working towards.

Some examples include the push towards autonomous cars. While there is certainly investment upfront, the final output, value add, work done, autonomously is the obvious outcome. The best thing about the investment is that once the investment is made in full self sustaining autonomy, robots fixing themselves, that is the end of the cycle.

Then the imperative question is, who owns the robots?

How does the value get to the people who don’t own the robots?

These are important questions and ones that must be considered. If you aren’t able to consider that this is a very likely future though, we won’t’ get there and the answers don’t’ matter.

Texts I Have Sent Myself

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One thing I hope to do with this blog is to help others think more critically about their life, their life path, the lives of others and the direction of the world. To do that I think it might be helpful to share what I think about from time to time. I generally have a text in my phone that I am writing to myself to remember at a later date. I believe that like writing, verbalizing and sending to myself helps me remember some stuff. It is also good to look back and see what I was thinking at various times. Below is the set of texts that I’ve sent myself in the past few months.  Let me know if you find anything interesting.

5-29-02016

Take one product and see how many improvements we can think of. There is a danger that when old friends meet  they will only talk of the past. Saturday night 5-28-02016 dreams. Evel knievel. Going up jump inside.  A semi trailer is to of ramp (only appears as he is about to take off and he hits his head and doesn’t jump. We are in  a building and I am freaking out at an old roommate in a place that our 3rd roommate is there checking. We didn’t have a 3rd roommate though. Weird.  At the Evel Knievel  jump there were 2 attractive sisters. Bodybuilders. I went back to find them.  Then a building fell down outside ours from and earthquake. We were standing there in or building not moving waiting for our building to fall I guess. Then I remembered something that in my dream dad said to me about don’t wait for it to fall whatever anyone says get out so I got out a window and started helping people

We already use technology to do so many things. We can text is near to telepathy. Writing is similar to expanding your memory as is Facebook (for stuff like  remembering people’s birthdays) enhanced reality will be when more so.  If you tell your computer or Facebook or write down to remember someone’s birthday is it any less genuine just because you didn’t remember it yourself? But the same for designing things. If you are just reading a design guideline where do you start and where is it mostly the design guideline? Just because new technology helps us remember old lessons faster does that change our relationship with it?  If we have Wikipedia on hand does that make certain conversations obsolete? What will we focus on? Knowing each other more? Is that the last thing we can focus on knowing because it’s the last mystery since people lives aren’t all on the Internet?

5-30-02016

Video games is similar to the Matrix. It’s also similar to teleporting. Quantum entanglement. Works at a distance if we can read stuff that small and it can be 1 of 2 states why can’t it be binary band read at vast distances? What does it mean  to be Christian?  I haven’t gotten many Christian responses to my questions about Christianity

Share real costs of things with people. Of course people don’t know what stuff costs since money is right after politics and religion on by talking points. Funny how what you drive elicits different responses from people. If I pull up in a 57 Chevy I get a different response than if I pull up in a Prius. Am I any different of a person?

6-13-02016

Like my question to myself about how much can you take out of milk and it still be milk the same thing applies to Christianity how far can you remove yourself and still say you’re a Christian. What parts can different groups call themselves Christian and agree or diagree on? . How to Achieve? What is really important in life?  List of things I’ve failed at. List of things I’ve done well at. future world Movie. How can we make tractors able to be adapted quickly to individual farmer needs? Rapid prototyping, Etc. Do we want to try to start a race track Automotive destination? How can I get more clear Direction more often at work? Funny that I’m taking notes talking to my phone and trying to think of something that’s a pain and this is something that is a pain I can only fit a small number of characters in a text. Is there a way to make a better note keeping audio device or is there probably already one around? 2nd round of Disney leaders after nine old men didn’t want the younger generation to move up as fast and so stifled creativity.  

6-17-02016

Want to read Elliot Rodgers my twisted life. What gets someone so twisted up?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-elliot-rodger-manifesto.html.  

6-21-02016 (In Texas)

Met Issac in the mall (Dallas, TX).  He is just starting studying engineering. He is from south Korea where this guy who claimed to be the 2nd coming of Jesus was from.   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Mission_Society_Church_of_God

7-4-02016

Why is it illegal to use poison gas in war but not to shoot each other? Maybe if we had the threat of really hurting each other we’d end the wars faster. Jealousy is rooted in lacking belief in abundance 7-4-02016 I watched a YouTube video series about the human genome.  And then ordered a book about it. A bit of a departure from my recent space fascination but does kinda fall into the transhuman realm.

List of future words. Transhuman. Quantum I physics. Freezing people. Nano technology. . Dark matter. Electric car. Telomeres.  Singularity. Solar power. Abundance. Singulairty. Basic income. Mars. Autonomous car. Virtual reality augmented reality. Artificial intelligence.  Sort of like list of new speak from 1984. Although that was sort of bad. It’s 5:12  am. I’m. Waiting for dad to wake up to go to the barn. Of course I forgot my books at my brothers. So I’m looking at the Internet.

(I ended up writing a blog based on the future words idea – The Future)

7-9-02016

I guess there are people who will always be upset. There will be people who will always believe the world is against them.  You can’t make them change their thoughts. But for some people you can show them a better way.the best way to do that is to live your life as joyously as possible and invite others to do the same and walk with you as much as they want to. Long vs short term help. Unfortunately giving people some money now might not be the best use of the money.  Maybe investing in technology for the future is better. We talk ourselves into that saving for our retirement is the most imp thing but is it? If the goal is happy life years we can certainly buy more of that now with smaller investments in other countries than in our own futures. I should talk with Finley about that. Need to provide people access to information and invite them to use it.

7-9-02016

The only way to stop violence is to expose people to people who are different than them in a safe environment. See American History X how the Nazi guy turns to be okay with black guys after he talks with the one in an environment where he can’t harm him. How do we change people’s minds? Exposure. People feel threatened but really few people want to fight.

7-17-02016

How should we deal with people who are ignorant or violent? Should we kill them? should we lock them up? if we lock them up when would we ever let them go? There is a similar problem with the mentally ill in that you can’t really trust them. That’s the problem with people who have previously been violent as you can never be sure if they renounce their violence. Could it be possible to convince people who have a religious belief to kill other people that that is wrong and returned from their ways? I’m not sure if that’s even possible. Did Muhammad said no one would come after him as a prophet? If so this could cause some issues for the Nation of Islam.

7-18-02016

We know how to make a working spaceship. We just need to make a little earth and a sun to power it 🙂  sun is a bit inefficient as it wastes a ton of energy. If we could slow it down it’d last a lot longer. Short vs long term thinking. How to make world work for everyone. Can’t let Venezuela go to dark ages based on oil tanking even if they didn’t plan well.  You wouldn’t let your brother starve. We are all brothers (and sisters). People need to understand genes to see we are all 99% the same. .that (could) stop the ignorance of racial violence. also understanding could stop ignorance (fear) about gmo’s. (Could repost old wheel life articles on jalopnnik to get exposure). Build an “Eccentric” trailer park. They might be hard to sell after they were built. But they’d be cool.  And have a community shop. Could have a few “normal” apartments available while people were building their houses. 7th day Adventist emerged from Henry miller who wrongly predicted the end of the earth. .and Jehovah’s witnesses were heavily influenced by 7th day Adventist beliefs. Could you heat the ground in winter and keep growing plants?  How much energy would that take? Like in floor cement heating. Use water and hoses? Or heated steel rods in ground?  Only need for flowers or crops.  I guess not for trees. Would crops grow then though?  Better to work on growing plants more efficiently or transcending plants? Soylent. Or making our bodies make everything we need from anything. We should work to make the world work for everyone.  We shouldn’t try to hoard things to save for the future if someone could use it today. Ex: I shouldn’t hoard money that people could use now. There are people starving through no fault of their own except circumstance.  I certainly don’t deserve to have enough to buy whatever food I want whenever. Bran Ferren  applied minds.

The Future

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I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about things that are coming “in the future” and I often want to write about them after but it often doesn’t happen. Usually future technology or ideas are aimed at making the world a better place and thinking about stuff like that can put you in a good mood.  I wanted to just share a few quick notes and key people related to some future ideas in the hopes that it might spark some of you to look into one or two of them and go boldly into the future with me.

Transhumanism is the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. Zoltan Istvan is a writer currently running for President Of The United States on a Transhuman platform. One of his thoughts is we can potentially live forever. Is he crazy? Maybe.

Cyborgs  are people who have had things implanted in their body to help increase efficiency or capacity of current bodily functions. Implants could help with healing, memory, increasing hearing or sight. We could have phones implanted in our earlobe that could read our brains instead of us having to physically talk. I think that phones already do a lot of the type of things that cyborgs are thinking about but it is just not integrated in our bodies yet. As things get smaller with nanotechnology it will be easier and easier to be a cyborb but the small bots might be able to leave our bodies fast as new models come out so it won’t even be obvious our bodies are being enhanced.

Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease. They have been linked with longer life spans. It is suspected that exercise is one way we can help keep them healthy. Aubrey de Grey is one of the leading researchers in this area of study and other ways to help telomeres stay long and keep us alive and healthy.This goes directly along with the idea of transhumanism mentioned above.

Cryonics is the study of feezing people as they die or just after to hopefully restore them to better health in the future. This obviously relates to the above studies as the people, if they are unfrozen, would benefit from research in any anti aging information as well as anything that helps people live longer lives.

Nanotechnology can be used for many things from material design to robots that could help us become cyborgs. They could be programed to fight infections or cancers more effectively than our current immune system. They could also be used to stop bleeding, from inside of us. Other robots could be used to manufacture or heal materials.

Augmented reality is having a coming day soon. It is where the current world is projected over by some virtual components. Really I would say that Google maps is already a very basic form of augmented reality as we can get reviews and notifications about things that are near to us we might be interested in.  A new game is coming out soon, Pokemon Go, that is another step for augmented reality.

Virtual reality is the next step after augmented reality. It has a future where we might eventually be plugged into a Matrix type computer. We could do whatever we wanted. Again, I think we have had very basic virtual reality for a long time, at least as long as video games have been around. If you think about it books are even a form of virtual reality that we create in our minds. We are just taking it a step further with a headset that works to trick more of our senses.  This site gives you a neat rough VR tour of Mars. The lines of what “counts” as VR will obviously stay blurred. Current technology such as the Oculus Rift is making VR even more sophisticated than most people realize.  I see a future where we will have VR vacations that will obviously be cheaper than real trips. VR will also allow us to experience historic places and events.

Abundance is more a concept than an actual thing. There was a great book written about it by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They promote the idea that we have more than enough to survive now. We need to stop hoarding stuff and being afraid of the future because we will have so much in the future. We need to get rid of the mindset that if someone else has more that means we have to have less. There is plenty to go around. Buckminster Fuller also shared a similar though, over 50 years ago, just without using the term Abundance.

Basic income is the idea that we will have so much via abundance and so little that we have to do thanks to increases in computers and robots that we might have to give people money to live off of because there will be no jobs. Instead of this being bad it could be great as we’ll be able to all spend time doing things we enjoy and taking up challenges we want to do that will lead to more innovation because of the passion we could have for our endeavors. There are many places that are starting to look at this such as Give Directly, the city of Utrecht (in the Netherlands) and Finland.

Mars – If you watched the Martian you know it was rooted in a lot of good science. We are probably going there in my lifetime and that’s just exciting!

Electric cars – With energy being probably the most important thing (after air) to our survival and only some forms of electricity being renewable, I see electric cars coming on strong in the coming years, boosted by better battery technology as well as cheaper electricity.

Autonomous cars – Although the first death was recently recorded that related to an autonomous (or assisted driving) car, it wasn’t actually determined that it was the fault of the car. My bet is it will not be. It wasn’t mentioned how many people died as a result of their own driving that same day but I bet it was a lot more. The systems will only be better as our technology increases.

The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a ‘runaway reaction’ of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly. (Wikipedia). The Singularity Is Near is a great book written by Ray Kurzweil about this idea. You can also learn more about this, and many other topics, from the YouTube channel Singularity Weblog. Obviously such computing power could help solve many of the problems associated with the ideas discussed above and maybe make some of them obsolete.

If you want to read about a few more exciting things that could be in store for the future I encourage you to look up Quantum  physics, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Human Genome project.
I know I am excited for the future and hoping to contribute in my own small way. What are you most excited about for the future? How are you helping it come?

The Unabomber Manifesto – A Book Review

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“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ― Aristotle

I read “Industrial Society & It’s Future” also knows as “The Unabomber Manifesto” in 6 days in December 2015. It is not a very long book, only 79 pages.

It was written by Ted Kaczynski, also known as The Unabomber for his attacks on Universities and Airlines with homemade bombs between 1978 and 1995.

Ted Kaczynski wrote (p16) “we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people.”

He believed providing for our own basic needs, water, food, shelter satisfied some “power process” in us. If we didn’t have that power process satisfied we would turn to “surrogate activities” which often lead to creation of technologies that he believed lead to a reduction in the need for people having to provide their own basic needs. It is a never ending circle of people being less worried about what they had to do to survive turning to activities to make us feel as though we were in control of something.

A surrogate activity could be literally anything that does not contribute to our immediate survival including sports, writing blogs!, any viewing of television, fancy clothes, basically every industry or hobby you can think of would be under attack in his mind.. He specifically mentions the irony of the obsession of many of working out by saying “there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles”  (p27) as well as pointing to our fear of death by saying “It is not the primitive man, who has used his body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man, who has never has a practical use for his body beyond walking from his car to his house.” (p25)

I do find this quite personally relevant. I went through a phase of working out in 2012 where lifting heavy weights was one of the only important things to me. I got big. But what did it yield me? Not much but potentially a micro tear in my left shoulder. Examination by a doctor has been inconclusive as to the cause of constant dull pain, but as everything is still working more or less fine, life continues on. The foolishness that lead to that situation though is one of the problems with modern society that Ted Kaczynski was pointing to while writing this book.

On page 30 Ted shares his definition of freedom “the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals, not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone.”

It is difficult for me to determine what he feels is a “real goal”. The only reason people see developed technology as a goal in the first place was to help them meet their “real goals” and we can agree that technology has succeeded in that endeavor, at least in the “rich world”. Now the proliferation of that technology to those who are disadvantaged should be our top goal or surrogate activity, if you consult myself or Buckminster Fuller.  

“Make the world work,
for 100% of humanity,
in the shortest possible time,
through spontaneous cooperation,
without ecological offense
or the disadvantage of anyone.”

  • Buckminster Fuller

My own goal for the world:

Our biggest goal for the world should be providing security to each person, the security to prosper independently or in collaboration with each other. People should get the opportunity to seek any position they desire. There will be people who don’t reach their goals but the fact that they got the opportunity to try is the important thing. – Axel Hoogland

Of note to the above should be that we should be allowed, as a society, to vet the goals of others, just a little bit, to determine that it’s not directly harmful to the rest of society. This is usually what wars arise from and this is where government regulations come in. For example: ISIS should not be free to try to reach their goal on world domination and imposing their form of Sharia Law on everyone. Also the car companies are restricted on emissions of greenhouse gases because it has been determined to be harmful to society at large. I think it’s obvious what I mean when saying that people should have the opportunity to seek positions such as engineer, doctor or policeman, unencumbered by the social or financial position they were born into. I believe we have a lot of systems in place to help these people already but those can always be improved and should be relentlessly.

Ted Kaczynski is not an idiot. In fact he is literally a genius having graduated from Harvard at 20 and receiving a PhD from the University of Michigan after that.

The irony of his situation is that his crusade to destroy all technology was in itself a surrogate activity of the type that he deplored.

In the rest of the book he explores some very advanced concepts, the kind which “normal” people give very little thought to, being absorbed in surrogate activities. On page 40 he says “If you think that big government interferes in your life too much NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children.” The possibility of this level of genetic engineering is moving closer and closer to reality. A page later he says “each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.” (P42). This is a very real thought and one that we need to consider when developing any new technologies. Who will regulate them? That is why if you are really concerned about that you should work to attain positions of power in the government such that you can affect the regulation. If you can’t, you should at least be reasonably engaged in correspondence with your governmental representative. We in the USA have a strange relationship with the government. It seems we are always distrustful of “the government”. We are sure they are out to get us. That sort of thinking is just useless at best and damaging at worst. Perhaps we all need to go back to the words of JFK.

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy

Another idea that Ted Kaczinski discusses is the thought of “The Singularity”.

“The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. – From “The Singularity Is Near” by Ray Kurzweil.

Although Kaczinski doesn’t mention it by that name, he describes it thus, on technology “it would presumably advance towards its logical conclusion, which is complete control over everything on Earth, including human beings and all other important organisms.” For a less negative take on The Singularity I recommend the long book “The Singularity Is Near” by Ray Kurzweil.

On page 60 he says “We can imagine a future society in which there is endless competition for positions of prestige and power.”  If that doesn’t describe our current society, I don’t know what would. But there are plenty of rays of hope for our future in both religious and nonreligious people. I am just finishing a book called Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne which discusses the drive by some religious to live with the poor and downtrodden instead of apart from them. There is also the book “Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth” by Buckminster Fuller which shares a vision of the world in which none are suffering.

I would encourage everyone to read The Unabomber Manifesto and consider what surrogate activities you are working towards and why and how you could apply your free time to a better future for all as opposed to just yourself. As an alternative to the future envisioned by Ted Kaczynski, I would recommend reading “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think” which lays out ways in which technology, rather than destroying our future, will build it better than we could ever imagine.