Technological progress is accelerating faster than ever before. Are robots going to “take our jobs?” Do we require a Basic Income to solve this? Let’s examine some basic principles.

Existence is the most fundamental thing which is taken for granted. When we actually think about it, we all find it pretty mysterious, but I wonder if you realize just how mysterious it really is. Here’s a few things to consider. The first is Occam’s Razor. A simple logic tool, right?

As anyone familiar with classical political economy knows, true property rights are rooted in self-ownership. You own yourself, and by extension you own what you make through labor or voluntary transactions thereof. Land, however, is not a fruit of labor.

The real solution has nothing to do with techno-utopianism, monetary reform, austerity, or any of the other ideological cul-de-sacs currently being promoted.

You may have heard of Peter Thiel, the right-wing “libertarian” co-founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook. He seems to be a magnet for controversy and intrigue, with his penchant for casual misogyny and exotic philanthropic endeavors. So, who or what is he really?

I have often referred to myself as a progressive but I have felt increasingly uneasy doing so. The word -progressive’, like virtually every other term which refers to a political ideology, has become so broadly applied as to become virtually meaningless.

Pretty early on in my philosophical journey I decided that I was a pantheist, of the naturalist sort. Pantheism is all about the one-ness and unity of everything… and I do mean everything.

The healthcare debate is shockingly narrow. We have the do nothing crowd, the privatize it more crowd, the single-payer people, and the public option folks. On the more radical end of the mainstream debates are those calling for more general practitioners, preventive care/incentives, and co-ops. Of the bills pushing through congress now, I have a feeling the public option is the only one with any teeth, but there are a million other non-mutually-exclusive ideas which could be implemented.

Continuing our effort to flesh out the parameters of technoprogressive policy ideas by building our “Technoprogressive Policy Wiki”, we turn now to the problems created by the push to patent everything, including human genes, and shut down all fair use and copying of music, texts and film. IEET intern Ed Miller has been engaged with open source and intellectual property issues for some time, and has taken a crack at a general policy statement on this issue. We welcome feedback. - J. Hughes

(IEET intern Edward Miller is guest blogging at Sentient Developments this month.) There is a long list of crises that we need to face and I won’t waste time boring you by listing them. As our brightest minds admit they were wrong, I hope that I can say, without qualification, that big changes in our thinking are required. Unfortunately, we haven’t made that “Change” even though we now have some new faces in power, and a bunch of old faces out of business or in prison.