Let's say we invent the Star Trek replicator. Finally -- goods can be made out of thin air. Food can be made out of thin air. Replicators would be a scarcity destroying machine with the possibility of both destroying labor AND ending world hunger. It'd be a major shift for society. But insert the corporation and the capitalist who would wrap this machine's usage up in license fees, laws restricting usage, etc. They would use it to destroy labor, but they would prevent the device from destroying scarcity. It's too threatening to the power structures that control capital. You'll never technologically innovate yourself out of the exploitation of capitalism.

What about just using technology to make ourselves happy? Here's an article, illustrated with a great comic, about a Dutch biologist and his research into supernormal stimuli:

Tinbergen succeeded in isolating the traits that triggered certain instincts, and then made an interesting discovery. The instincts had no bounds. Instead of stopping at a 'sweet spot', the instinctive response would still be produced by unrealistic stimuli. Once the researchers isolated the instincts' trigger, they could create greatly exaggerated dummies which the animals would choose instead of a realistic alternative. Songbird parents would prefer to feed fake baby birds with mouths wider and redder than their real chicks, and the hatchlings themselves would ignore their own parents to beg fake beaks with more dramatic markings.

Of course the point is that humans play these tricks on ourselves when we eat junk food and watch TV and so on. The conclusion is that we have to learn the awareness to hold these urges in check. But as technology continues to make stimuli more powerful, can our awareness keep up? Here's a 2007 article on the subject, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.

It took a long time and some real work, but we were able to put together what we think is the most comprehensive list of black NFL quarterbacks ever compiled. More than a compilation of names, this was an opportunity to find and publish these men's stories. Some are brief; others are long. We penned longer pieces on the most notable players, like Fritz Pollard, Warren Moon, Steve McNair, Michael Vick, the immortal Akili Smith, and many more, but every player on this list is part of a broad narrative that traces the history of football and its relationship with the broader society.

So the most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing. Because once you think you know what you're doing, you stop looking around for other ways of doing things. And you stop being able to see other ways of doing things.

In terms of what computers will actually do, that guy seems to be a naive techno-utopian. Here's something smarter from Norbert Wiener in 1949. The NY Times asked the famous mathematician to write an essay on the coming machine age, but mistakes by editors kept it from being published. In 2012 it was rediscovered. My condensed excerpt of their condensed excerpt:

These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
...
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

Completely unrelated, today I made this quick reddit comment about a dumb article arguing that globalization has reduced poverty:

Dollars per day sounds like a good definition of poverty, but it isn't. Globalization goes with monetization: goods and services that were formerly outside the money economy are brought into the money economy, so now you can't get them without money. Having more dollars per day is meaningless if the things you need for quality of life also cost more dollars per day.

It's true that global poverty is decreasing, but you measure it with stuff like infant mortality or access to clean water. An article that measures it purely in terms of money changing hands has no credibility.

I've seen that strategy referred to as "Leading from the Middle". In the middle, you can have as many leaders as there are things that need some leading. Instead of relying on very few hierarchically placed Leaders to lead on all fronts at once all the time, you can have the best person at each time and for each purpose, working in an over-lapping and hopefully non-competitive, collaborative, fluid, organic, ebbing and flowing kind of way.

Resistance only defines the edge of the system. It might be important to define that limit but it's just the limit. And the social limit is a hard place to be. What defines the centre is the institutions, the permanent effective networks that are space filling and area preserving. More interesting though is that the control points in these hierarchical systems are not the centres. They are lower down. It's the sales guy who moves between the management and branches and talks to all the people on the shop floor. It's the minor bureaucrat who actually makes the government run. It could be the bottom up institutions that people know to go to because they are so much more effective than the government services that are constantly cut back and falling apart. The ones that make them less dependent and more capable of being fully realized people. The institutions that are working to put themselves out of job instead of trying to maintain their power. So taking the centre is not really the strategy either. It's building the alternative that the centre has to contend with.

In case you missed it, Cannabis during pregnancy endangers fetal brain development. I've also seen studies about mild brain damage if you use it as a teenager. Still no evidence that it's bad for adults, and I'm looking forward to buying it legally in a few months.

And a reader sends this good news link, School ditches rules and loses bullies.

I'm not sure that what they call "success" is a good thing. At least they admit (about 2/3 of the way down) that these three personality traits are not all good. But do we want to live in a society where the rules are set up so that people with these traits have vastly more wealth and influence than people who don't? Do these traits lead people to use their wealth and power in a good way once they have it?

Would it be a better world if we could somehow set it up so that the wisest or most generous people had the most wealth and power, instead of the most narcissistic, insecure, and self-controlled people?

And whoever is most "successful", we should ask how much of this success is zero-sum. For example, if I make lifestyle changes to improve my health, it doesn't require someone else to be sicker. But with wealth and power, success often requires someone else's failure. I'd rather live in a society that guarantees happy and comfortable lives to everyone, than one that condemns people to poverty for having the wrong personality.

Loosely related, a new video/article from the Onion: Laid-Off Man Finally Achieves Perfect Work-Life Balance.

Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? ... Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

Hunter Gatherers vs 21st Century Desk-sitters. Basically we spend too many hours under stress and sitting down.

Reddit comment on automation and unemployment. Automation is making more jobs unnecessary, the economic benefits are being sucked to the top of the pyramid, and our obsolete agricultural-age work ethic is preventing us from seeing the obvious solution: pay people to do nothing.

For the Love of Money is a confession by a former seven-figure-income hedge-fund trader. It's no surprise that all those people are addicted to making money. More generally, I would say that any human, in any position of power, will be tempted to narrow their consciousness to compulsively chase rewards that are harmful to society as a whole. I see only two ways out: everyone is enlightened enough to resist that temptation, or no one is in a position of power.

Think about modeling phenomena, modeling situations, simulating models, gaining a common-sense intuition for nonlinear dynamic processes. Then think about a society in which every educated person does these things, in the computational medium, as easily and naturally as we today read and write complex logical arguments in the written medium.

Reading used to be reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses. Today, it's just what everyone does. Think about a society in which science is not reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses, but is just what everyone does.

Next, from a post on the Dark Futurology subreddit I learned about philosopher Nick Land, whose writing is almost incomprehensible. From Meltdown:

Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process.

If I read his stuff carefully, I think he's actually saying something, but he's deliberately making it hard to read, and if he made it easy to read it would be easier to see where he's wrong.

And a techno-design movie review, Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report. The idea is, instead of technology being all in your face, it will "fade into the background" and the world will look superfically low-tech.