whatwedontknow

NWO Part I:
http://whatwedontknow.livejournal.com/2008/07/07/

NWO Part II:
http://whatwedontknow.livejournal.com/2008/07/09/

There's been a lot of talk about the 'Singularity', but the world sucks now.
Information has NOT become more accessible.
Getting educated takes longer than ever.
Millions of services are designed to be stressful.
Software is full of artificial barriers. Expensive programs are hard to use, making it hard to switch.

The most powerful and potentially useful ideas, like evolution and birth control, are suppressed.
Billions of people own almost nothing, while others get rich without doing anything.
Our world isn't meant to be pleasant. It took an incredible amount of effort to reach the level of total crap. The world makes about as much sense as an ant colony.
Things are this way because the majority allows them to be so, with rock-solid, unwavering passivity. The decision has been ratified by near-universal, unspoken assent, by victim and exploiter alike. In a sense, every country is a democracy, even North Korea.
A powerful force prevents up from completing certain insights, from thinking one step further. If this force didn't exist, everyone's personality would slowly change throughout their lifetimes, but this rarely happens.

The crucial insight is as simple as flipping a switch: THE PAST SUCKS. It should never have happened. Always remember that the world is evil. Sometimes, we need change for its own sake.
The world's problems may require unimagined reforms, international cooperation, new forms of self defense, and even mind-altering drugs.

Step One: make the world transparent, and freer from deception.
- A worldwide property registry would record every piece of real estate and land use right. Evil governments would still have the authority to steal people's meager possessions, but it would be harder for them to hide their actions.
- A World Passport for those areas that require identification documents (currently all of them).

Civilization has slowly evolved by learning to gain pleasure from avoiding pain. This sensation is a necessary part of most dangerous activities, from hunting to woodworking. Delayed gratification for its own sake may be the real key to long term success. The West has even managed to remove the aspect of physical danger.
The most insane example is probably long-term care insurance (paying in advance to be kept alive as an incontinent zombie at the cost of ten lifetimes wages), followed by our tortuous tax laws, not to mention civil lawsuits.
Like technology itself, society's rules have become too complicated - towering edifices about as stable as solar prominences. Most citizens mindlessly accept the money race, the healthcare matrix, the tax vortex. They unthinkingly tolerate immense restrictions in all fields, since everyone pretends it's normal. The biggest problems are often the hardest to see.

Capitalism is bad at finding shortcuts. There are no unsolicited job offers in the mail, except for work-at-home schemes and other scams.
We need new ways to use marginally talented people, allowing them to perform tasks with low economic value, while slowly increasing their own skills.

The motivation problem
Why are there no Arab or African airplanes?
There may be a good reason: it can be depressing when the competition has a ten decade head start.
The path ahead has been methodically picked clean. Other people have already shaped the world, and are perfectly adapted to its present configuration.
There's no reason to develop kites, balloons, airships, biplanes, or rotary engines. It can take decades to build a world-class industry from scratch. That's beyond the horizon for countries that don't allow long-term investment.
Developed countries would rather pay them to stay out of the way altogether, or to become cheap subcontractors.
No visualization means no purpose. The solution is diversity: to create many more options.

Government schemes are unpopular, because people can't predict the effects on themselves.
Peasants being 'relocated' to build the Chinese Three Gorges Dam know others will benefit at their expense. This also explains the resistance to NAFTA, and why Latin America and the Middle East remain fractured despite common languages and cultures.
People have no time for bold experiments when their lives are full-time emergencies.

When they're able to consider their circumstances, Third Worlders do want to change their societies. They're usually prevented from acting by traditions, despots and outmoded economic theories.
It's hard to overhaul a culture from within. Even the most self-evident changes require massive sacrifices. This is especially true in areas with limited resources (which happen to be most of them).
Famine and disease tend to increase in the early stages of most reform efforts. Societies that resist change usually last longer, until their environment has irrevocably changed.

Once civil institutions become established, they tend to remain in place. Their inflexibility is what made them attractive in the first place.

Divide and organize
Most of our art, fashion, and innovation comes from countries with just 10% of the world's population, where creativity is encouraged. The rest is too busy surviving.
Chaos leads to diversity. The world needs many distinct regions that compete with each other. Encourage local and regional specialization within a worldwide free trade zone. Maximum efficiency arises from hyper-competition.
Market integration will lead to more, not less, culture clashes. No one can predict who'll make the next breakthrough. The best solutions involve small groups of people working independently. That's how every great company got started. Artificial distractions can encourage useful rivalries.
The untapped potential is immeasurable. Our planet will look richer than ever, like when the East-Germans first visited West-Berlin in 1989.

Increased diversity will lead to small, autonomous micro territories, where every virtual tribe can find a home. For a while, there may be more nations than ever, including non-geographical and even online ones. They'll have to learn to cooperate. Most will soon vanish.
The next generations may have choices we can't imagine yet.

Large areas of the planet are underutilized. A lot of valuable real estate is going to waste. Some of the most fertile and attractive areas are also among the poorest.
Many wealthy people would retire to the equator if it were possible and safe.
Some regions will always be inefficient, and absorb subsidies.
Freedom of movement and employment should be encouraged wherever it provides benefits.

The Parity Principle: where possible, encourage equal or balanced migration between regions. In the future, as many Americans should want to move to Mexico as vice versa, or at least a reasonable ratio.

Creative loans
The world needs more ways to create 'trust' and accountability, to stimulate more elaborate forms of cooperation.
Billions of medium-sized loans have allowed many nations to build up their industrial capacity, but half a century of megaprojects financed by the World Bank and Cold War rivals have been less successful. Waste, deceit and exploitation always creep in. Micro-loans don't go far enough. International loans may require international collateral, including real estate, complete with private armies to enforce foreclosure verdicts.

Properly configured, an ultra long term bank could replace all government functions, even paying for schooling, infrastructure, and defense
Such a bank could only function if it controlled most of the wealth of society, incorporating almost all private banks.
To survive it would need to be amoral, not immoral. An application would be automatically denied if there was no expected benefit to society - which would be most of them. A charity consortium would fill the gap, replacing many forms of insurance.
Created with a forty-year investment horizon, the bank would provide lifetime education loans, to be paid back in the form of payroll taxes automatically deducted. The recipient's employer or contractor would transfer their salary through the bank. It would perform a ruthless cost/benefit analysis, but have no authority to imprison debtors, or even garnish their wages. It would just get a lot more difficult to function in society, or to accumulate significant wealth.
Because of the slow investment cycle, we still use thirty year old engine designs, and a century-old power grid.
New inventions can provide valuable shortcuts. There should be fewer restrictions on technology transfer.
Fuel cells and small power plants will free up resources and help revolutionize the Third World, but they'll be expensive. While creative, long term loans can help, they will eventually have to be repaid. Such loans will require many guarantees and constant monitoring at every stage. There's no simple solution.

Ease of maintenance
There are too many unscrupulous manufacturers and repair scams.
World consumers need:
-Modular homes with removable power and plumbing conduits, and even structural supports and photovoltaic shingles, that the owner could easily repair and replace, without requiring outside help that may be unaffordable.
-Small and simple vehicles.
-Upgradeable electronics.

The Age of Plenty
It's time to graduate to the third dimension, from virtual to reality. We already have cheap computers and communication devices, that represent their data as strings of bits, or screen images. Miniaturized factories, ultralight cars, and mass-produced homes could be next.
Once the robots reach the self-improvement threshold, when they generate more wealth than they absorb, the benefits could be beyond imagination.
As long as the sun keeps shining, there is ample energy available. It only needs to be transformed and exploited. Most of the light energy absorbed by buildings and roads is wasted. Thin film photovoltaics would increase local autonomy.

Everything by the manual
Society should have clearly defined, formalized rules and instructions at every level. Anyone could follow them if they wanted to achieve a certain result.
Such a society might not even need advanced social skills, with hidden rules and taboos.

-The potentiality matrix: a map of world relations and systems.
-The List: a public database of everyone alive, with a brief biography.

The first step to providing improved healthcare is to pay attention to the patient. This is not a matter of empathy but rigid data analysis. New software will help.

Cheaper and more efficient manufacturing:
We still haven't exploited all the benefits of mass production.
This may be the information age, but the world needs more old-style assembly lines, temporarily bringing back industrial jobs. Most of humanity is still trapped in often desperate poverty.
The need for new power stations, roads, industrial parks, robotics, management services, and basic healthcare could lead to a worldwide Manhattan project to solve most problems at once.

A world state should be as inoffensive as possible. Once started down this road, it will be hard to stop. An intermediate step will be regional unification efforts, like the European Union, Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, and South America.
Laws will be slowly standardized as people cross borders. Their arbitrary nature will become increasingly evident.
The only remaining differences will be language and culture. Those differences already exist within most countries.

The World Police
The alliance of every legal armed force on Earth, responsible for enforcing the universal rights of Inspection and Location.
Wherever they're stationed, agents also help enforce the local laws, whatever they are.
Their ultimate task is to protect nations from each other, up to and including military action.

Maybe money could be replaced by something better.
Some people will always be able anticipate the future to their advantage. We need a way to gather and combine everyone's insights. The best solution is the free market.
Everyone should own a diverse stock portfolio that they helped select.
Shareholders can influence every aspect of the economy in a small way. A new form of democracy could spread the wealth more evenly: a more genuine, if still unequal, type of communism (the 'Ownership Solution').
It won't solve everything. The stock market repeatedly demonstrates that large numbers of people can be easily fooled.
If everyone took part, the sum total of human desires should cancel out the most arbitrary ones, and identify some deep similarities. Software can unearth many unwelcome facts that would otherwise remain hidden.
The potential buying power of billions of people is immense, given enough patience and compound interest.

Despite dire predictions, there won't be vast environmental disasters in the twenty-first century. Conservation will finally get profitable. Recycling has always been a way of life in most poor lands.
A silent, barely noticed process, habitat loss and the decline in the number of species can't be avoided, unless babies are outlawed. Most losses will be due to 'fracturing' of the environment, as people move into previously uninhabited areas. Only opportunist species will thrive, and even they will have trouble. A simpler environment won't necessarily be a bad thing for mankind.
The only way to save nature is to understand it. There will be inadequate efforts to preserve plants in bio-domes, and even in backyards. Robots will gather DNA samples from the rainforest.

Knowledge is everything.
The right information can locate and exploit hidden resources, especially unused labor.
Information brokers will buy and sell insights and hot tips.

Status spurs competition, leading to surplus growth.
Sometimes jealousy is a good thing (the same is true for all other emotions). A few people should be unreasonably wealthy to inspire many others.

Understanding the mind will have an impact as great as changing the laws of physics.

As control functions are decentralized, people will travel less.

A world language
Will everyone speak English or Esperanto in the year 2040?
It would be better to start over and design the most efficient artificial language from scratch, provided it's not too simple.

Africa needs to do its share of scientific research. Too much intellectual capital is left unused. There are fewer patents coming out of Bangladesh than from Luxembourg.

Never abolish existing institutions, even if they're stupid. At worst, prevent them from using force to carry out their aims.

A worldwide free trade zone or common market could create economies of scale, but large monopolies would inevitably arise.

Alternative currencies could stimulate the economy when first introduced.

Underground apartments
Warehousing populations in spacious, efficiently laid out living boxes, illuminated by light tubes and indirect LED's, would allow more farming on the surface, and ease transportation problems.

Education
New, interactive programs using hi-def screens and AI interfaces could make learning easy, or at least faster.

Open source corporations: Every employee would be paid a percentage of the profit they generated.
They would earn the right to perform more important jobs. Qualified individuals could be contracted by other employees, who would share the contractor's commission.

Humanity's ultimate dream is an endless vacation.

Flexible public transportation
Microbuses that know the passengers' schedules (eventually self-driving).

Allow anyone to buy any experimental drugs they want, provided they fully realize the risks.

Artificial conflicts
It appears that conflict and pain are necessary components of human development.
Happiness levels in primitive societies are almost as high as in the West. In extinct stone age tribes they may have been higher.
Sports and games are a way to let off steam, but artificial contests and rivalries between competing groups need to be encouraged.
Some will choose to recreate a semi-nomadic, seasonal, extended-family lifestyle using much less space.
Before the dawn of agriculture, every human could have claimed an area the size of Central Park. By mid century, we'll have to settle for thousands of times less than that.

There could be one last, huge population increase before 2050.

Robot bases on the Moon and asteroids could test new AI and robotics tools.

Food production should be increased at the local level, with automated greenhouses, genetically engineered garden plants, mushrooms, algae.

Waste reduction: shipping in bulk, less packaging, more recycling.
Consumers would order their groceries months in advance.

Redundancy is essential for long-term survival. People will spread out evenly over the Earth's surface, forming the ultimate suburb.

It took northern Europe thousands of years to raise itself from bronze-age levels, while Africa remained there. The stable (and very painful) influence of the Roman Empire and smaller groups was crucial.
In the future, this role may be played by China. Other possible 'anchor' countries include South-Africa, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. They are already forming worldwide trade networks independent of the West.

The Arab countries are long overdue for a renaissance. It will happen - or they will not be able to survive in any recognizable form.

The abolition of the USA
The US is almost unique in history. Most of its recent wars were not triggered by population pressures, but by ideology. However, mankind's greatest experiment needs to be improved.
Turn the System inside out. There may eventually be a movement to replace the US with a complex, strictly functional 'reverse nation'. It would have no sharp internal borders, but gradients. People would have 'negative rights', to be left alone to varying degrees.

Sometimes orphanages are better than brutal, dysfunctional families; provided they're stable, and allow their occupants freedom and privacy. They could also form artificial tribes. This will require an environment that in some places resembles a maximum security prison. Humans are not necessarily more civilized than rats, just smarter.

Drugs could become more powerful than religion, and achieve the same result.

Every government agency will eventually have to be privatized, even if they're charitable monopolies with mandatory participation.

Some people will need more freedom than their government is willing to give them. In the future, it may be possible to 'buy' a small country, or its legal equivalent.

A world suggestion box: new software to sort and combine the ideas from everyone alive.

On a small scale, get the UN involved in as many decisions as possible, in a mostly advisory capacity - even if their help is useless. Simple is better. The UN should not try to create any grand new rights that repressive governments would ignore anyway.

If everyone were to receive a monthly welfare check simply for being alive, many people would promptly quit their jobs. Their work sucks that much.
Real salaries, after all the hidden costs have been deducted, are often much lower than the salaries their employers claim to pay them.
Taxes, expenses, Starbucks, aggravation . . . The real take-home pay often adds up to as little as $2 per hour. It's just not worth it.

Perhaps everyone should live their lives as if they're trapped in a cycle of 'endless recurrence'. Every hour should be experienced as if it will be repeated an infinite number of times.

Life requires incentives and penalties. Some aspects may need to be painful.

The condition that no group within society have a special, exalted status above other groups is useful, but apparently not necessary.
That explains why black people were extremely unhappy under Apartheid - while there was massive illegal immigration into South Africa.

New interface software could help people think better. Aware of its owner's preferences, the program would become a filter, an assistant to 'pre-digest' confusing information. Soon, the mind extension will have a life of its own.

Since education is most effective at an early age, older interface users will fall behind. The future may bring serious generational conflict.
By 2040, humans of all ages will feel obsolete, as they're being overtaken by artificial intelligence.
They will try to keep up. Drugs may open up new perceptions, but the change will have to go deeper than that. To experience the big picture, humans will need a direct brain/machine interface.

An important but unacknowledged truth is that no human is fully rational. People choose to do things they know will hurt them.
The best solution to the world's problems is not charity. It's for everyone to know themselves.
New software could allow everyone to go through deep therapy, if necessary without their full knowledge.

By mid-century, some new dangers will become intolerable. Genetic engineering, micro-factories and new physics (superstring research could lead to a way to create immense explosions) may unleash their destructive power. There may be some horrible terrorist attacks. This struggle can only be won or lost with information.

An overreaction to any crisis is inevitable. People respond to strong personalities. The politicians of the future may destroy democracy.

Preconditions for various types of aid could include mood stabilizing drugs or tranquilizers, making dangerous people less violent.
Many homeless individuals may need extremely potent drugs to quiet their inner demons. The drugs may even kill them sooner, but their lives could be much less agonizing.

Passive behavior should often be encouraged. It's almost always easier not to do something: paying people not to set up roadblocks or to interfere with farming, with bribes to local officials to provide security.

Voluntary euthanasia.
Some people would be better off dead. Some are even in good physical health, but suffer from a mental illness that can't be treated by any known method.

In some ways, the future may bring less freedom than exists now. Individual humans are too simple and specialized to accurately respond to every possible event. Therefore, no human should have the power to do so.
There needs to be a higher level of joint decision making, involving all of civilization.
A new form of intelligence could emerge, a type of awareness. All humans and computers would be connected, contributing a small percentage of their capacity.
Perhaps this new order will oversee a recreation-based economy, with entire lifetimes spent inside virtual dreams. Progress wouldn't end. The simulations could include educational software.

The world needs more cynicism.
Eventually, a time may come to abandon some cherished ideals. Based only on the laws of chance, many common beliefs must be wrong.
Perhaps there should be no more taxes. (Or alternatively, everyone should receive a guaranteed income.)
Only a few principles may remain, the absolute minimum. The rest can be derived or discarded as needed.
What will they be?
Ultimately, science is the ONLY answer. While vastly inadequate, it can give us more truth than all the philosophies ever did. The most interesting revolution of the twenty first century may begin when spirituality and ethics become formalized, self-consistent sciences.
We may not like what we learn then.

Future concepts will be so complex that future minds won't understand their implications until they've already become obsolete.
Integrating new knowledge will be so difficult that ignorance may increase faster than the rate of progress.
The Singularity will always be infinitely far away.


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Arguably the best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.