Of the 128 of you who voted on the question “Is the current meltdown the end of free market ideology and a new start for global social democracy?,” only 29% agreed “Yes, this is a phase transition in the global political economy.”
Do the current economic slowdown, the dwindling of fossil fuels, and the looming disasters of climate change mean we should aspire to a new steady state economic model, instead of the growth-based economics of the past? Or do emerging technologies like nanotechnology offer a third alternative, a growing and sustainable economy?
Boy, Marshall sure stirred the pot at the Singularity Summit this weekend. Apparently you are allowed to opine that super-robots will either bring us a perfect world free from want, or possibly wipe us off the map. But if you suggest that we might need social policies to ensure our economic welfare when robots take most of the jobs then you are a socialist throwback unaware that free markets have always solved the structural unemployment problems of the past.
IEET Fellow Marshall Brain spoke on his projections of widespread structural unemployment as a result of automation, and the need for a basic income guarantee, at the Singularity Summit in San Jose.
IEET Fellow Mike Treder reports: Tonight I am flying from New York to Rhodes, Greece, to attend and participate in the World Public Forum’s “Dialogue of Civilizations,” an annual event that brings together experts, politicians, public and religious dignitaries from all the continents of the world.
Okay, hang onto your hats. We’re clearly in for a bumpy ride over the next couple of years; even discounting the worst-case scenarios (I’m a happy pessimist: I always need something to worry about) it looks like we’re in for a recession that will be at least as bad as the 1990-92 one, and possibly much worse.
In the 1980s, the savings and loan meltdown produced a number of amazing stories of greed and fraud. The Keating scandal, involving Lincoln Savings and Loan, was one of the biggest.
The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year. These courses all promised to teach the properly motivated American how to find homeowners down on their luck and approaching foreclosure, as well as how to buy those homes from under them and resell them at a great profit. What made the spectacle doubly outrageous were not the dancing girls or indoor fireworks; it was the fact that most of the participants were themselves desperate former homeowners, whose illnesses, divorces, fires, and floods had put them in to foreclosure, too. Get it? They were paying to learn how to feed on people just like themselves.
You were all pretty pessimistic, or perhaps optimistic, about the prospects for employment in 2050 in Europe and N. America. The mean response was about 50% adult employment, while a quarter of you predict less than 25% employment. This poll was open for the last two months by the way, so it doesn’t just reflect the current market turbulence.
The IEET and the editors of the Journal of Evolution and Technology (JET) are pleased to announce the publication of two special issues of JET, one brought together by Sky Marsen with the intention of publishing a book on transhumanism, and the other a collection of papers from the IEET’s May 2006 Human Enhancement Technology and Human Rights conference at Stanford University. Together they represent the wide array of issues at play in the debate over human enhancement and our transhuman future, from the daily lived experience of pushing to maximize one’s potential, to the legal, political and philosophical arguments we will need to secure universal access to safe enhancement technologies. Enjoy!
What’s wrong with this sentence: “give me $700Bn with no oversight and I’ll keep your banking system from going down the tubes by buying up the bundles of sub-prime mortgages and other investments they’re elbow deep in”?
So much to say about the current financial mess, so little time. I’ll leave investors to fend for themselves this week. I’ve given enough of that CNBC-style advice lately, contrarian though it may be. I’d rather spend these precious minutes explaining why the financial meltdown is not a bad thing for a lot of us.
Does the present financial crisis signal the end of capitalism, as we know it? The question was asked on Friday by our colleague Stephen Aguilar-Millan of the European Futures Observatory.
IEET Fellow Riccardo Campa, helped by IEET Board member Giulio Prisco and others, has crafted this very interesting statement of a transhumanist vision and strategic point of view, which has been endorsed and adopted by the Italian Transhumanist Association (AIT). The English translation was done by Stefano Vaj of the AIT, with advice from the IEET’s J. Hughes (who is not a member of the AIT). As with all translation the meanings have probably shifted somewhat, so please note that the original is online here.
Lutheran theologian Ted Peters is the author of the sixth and last of the generally hostile articles on transhumanism in the June 2008 issue of The Global Spiral .
How much power do we truly have in making our ideas matter? My estimate that only about one in a million among us—about six thousand people in the whole world—has enough power to effect change on a global basis.
Over 200 years ago, Adam Smith proclaimed, "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." Rather, he asserted that when any given business owner or consumer "intends only his own gain, [he] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Thus, in "pursuing his own interest," he will be "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
There’s two kinds of people asking me about the economy lately: people with money wanting to know how to keep it “safe,” and people without money, wanting to know how to keep safe, themselves. Maybe it’s the difference between those two concerns that best explains the underlying nature of today’s fiscal crisis.
China is often depicted by the traditional media as a nation with a booming economy, a thriving middle class, and an unlimited future. We’re led to expect that it soon will become the world’s unchallenged economic and geopolitical superpower.
IEET Intern Edward Miller argues that we can have a more democratic world by embracing the decentralizing and liberatory potentials of open source or P2P approaches to biotechnology and informatics.
I don’t mean innovation in the healthcare space in particular, although that’s possible. I mean more generally, as an unanticipated benefit, an “economy of scope,” if you will, of universal health coverage. It may well be that a shift to broad health coverage could trigger a period of surprising economic growth. This may actually be an argument that would win support for single-payer insurance among those not persuaded by the moral or social aspects.
Foreign Policy magazine has come out with its annual listing of “Failed States. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the media attention to this list has focused on Iraq being #2 on the list, behind Sudan.
The articles Robotic Nation and Robotic Freedom, as well as the book Manna, have only been on the Internet for a short period of time, and already the response has been startling. Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions about my proposals to provide all human beings with a basic income guarantee in order to facilitate our transition to a fully automated economy.
Precarity is a word that is coming to be used by more and more people to designate what they take to be key continuities in the conditions, experiences, and implications of a growing majority of the human population to the characteristic mode of exploitation in the contemporary world.
IEET Blog |
email list |
newsletter |
The IEET is a 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the State of Connecticut in the United States.
Contact: Executive Director, Dr. James J. Hughes,
Williams 119, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford CT
06106 USA
Email: director @ ieet.org phone:
860-297-2376
FEMEN “Topless Warriors” Documentary
IEET Blog