Birth of the global mind

because of copyright issues i only share the link of this fantastic article :)

here it is : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a4bce7e8-e32b-11e0-bb55-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1cMr7wL5K

Macrowikinomics: Rethinking Civilization for an Age of Networked Intelligence

with Don Tapscott

Magical ! HoloDesk - Direct 3D Interactions with a Situated See-Through Display

HoloDesk is a novel interactive system combining an optical
see through display and Kinect camera to create the illusion
that users are directly interacting with 3D graphics. A virtual
image of a 3D scene is rendered through a half silvered mir-
ror and spatially aligned with the real-world for the viewer.
Users easily reach into an interaction volume displaying the
virtual image. This allows the user to literally get their hands
into the virtual display. A novel real-time algorithm for rep-
resenting hands and other physical objects, which are sensed
by the Kinect inside this volume, allows physically realistic
interaction between real and virtual 3D objects.

Post scarcity

From Wikipedia

  

The scarcity problem

Main article: Scarcity

Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants, in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be pursued at the same time; trade-offs are made of one good against others. As such, the term post-scarcity economics may be somewhat paradoxical. To quote a 1932 essay by Lionel Robbins, economics is "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."^[1]
Although some argue that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth,^[2][3][4][5] this would generally not be termed a "post-scarcity society" unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone.^{[citation needed]} (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel, a software engineer working on open-source software, or an editor creating or modifying some types of wiki pages and other user-generated content.)^{[citation needed]}
There are some exceptions to this use of the term. For example, Anthony Giddens, uses "post-scarcity" to refer to a set of trends he sees in modern industrialized nations, such as an increased focus on "life politics" and a decreased focus on productivity and economic growth.^{[citation needed]} Giddens acknowledges that the term has also been used historically to mean a literal end of scarcity.
Most Marxists envision later phases of a worldwide communist society as a form of post-scarcity society.^{[citation needed]}

 

 

Means

 

Speculative technology

Most visions of post-scarcity societies assume the existence of new technologies which make it much easier for society to produce nearly all goods in great abundance, given raw materials and energy. More speculative forms of nanotechnology (such as molecular assemblers or nanofactories) raise the possibility of devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy.^[6] Even before that level of technology can be achieved, fab labs and advanced industrial automation might be able to produce most physical goods that people desire, with a minimal amount of human labor required.^[6]
As for the raw materials and energy needed as input for such automated production systems, self-replicating automated mining plants set loose in the asteroid belt (see asteroid mining) or other areas of space with huge amounts of untapped raw materials could cause the prices of these materials to plummet. New power sources such as fusion power or solar power satellites could do the same for energy, especially if the power plants/power satellites could themselves be constructed in a highly automated way, so their number would be limited only by raw materials and energy.^[6]

Digital abundance

Traditionally, creators have used (and continue to use) raw materials to instantiate their works: a painter might use oil and canvas, a sculptor might work in clay, an architect might draft designs in pen and ink. Such work would result in a single copy (or "artifact"). While mass reproduction of such works ("impressions") — by processes such as printmaking or photocopying — is possible and common, such reproduction still incurs appreciable costs (for example for the paper used, and for the physical distribution of the copy).
Where the artifact can be captured digitally, copies have minimal reproduction costs. The same painter could create an original work with graphics software; the sculptor might use rapid prototyping, direct digital manufacturing, and 3D printing; the architect CAD/CAM tools. Most of the "cost" in such works is in paying for the original design and development (but most of it goes too to distribution, administration and production, thereby the artist being paid only a minimal amount of what the enterprise really produces) — for the creators' expertise and for their tools (though these also do not wear out the same way physical tools do). While the creators of such works must still labor to create the design matrix, there are virtually no raw-materials required to recreate the work once completed.
This negligible-cost reproduction raises the question, "How much should one pay for something that can be copied near-indefinitely at minimal expense?" Does a purchaser have the right to reproduce their own copy as much as they can afford to? Some people believe the purchaser does not or should not have any rights to copy or transfer ownership, and use Digital Rights Management to try to enforce this view^{[citation needed]}. Others instead feel that information should be freely distributed (see copyleft), and that DRM measures are attempts to restore prior business models' viability by inducing artificial scarcity.^{[citation needed]}
Many advocates of open source software and Free software attempt to collaboratively create open-source software programs which are intended to offer similar capabilities to their proprietary software competitors, but with the source code made public and permission granted for users to freely copy the software. Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project which designed the Free software GNU operating system, and co-founder of the free software movement, has explicitly cited the eventual creation of a post-scarcity society as one of his motivations:^[7]

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

Effects

Economic paradigm

Market economies or planned economies may be unnecessary in a post-scarcity age, though gift or exchange economies may take their place once the scarcity driving earlier types of economy disappears.^[8][9] Post-scarcity societies might also have their market economies limited to the exchange of energy and resources, or of other scarce or even non-material things, such as status or reputation (see Whuffie for a fictional example), real estate, or skills and expertise.
Many science-fiction variants also imagine the very concept of ownership to weaken or disappear,^[10] as people lose attachment to all but sentimental-value items, knowing that they will always be able to receive or create replacements. Monetary systems in consequence also cease to be a factor. Many stories depict these changes as a positive advancement, freeing humanity from both toil and greed. Others posit that handing production and most other services over to machines and computers will stunt the spirit of humanity, or even lead to a loss of control over humanity's own fate, e.g., Jack Williamson's With Folded Hands.

Unavoidable scarcity

Some things will remain rare even in a post-scarcity society. There is a practical limit to the number of people who can live in any specific, 'in-demand' locale. However, hypothetical machines such as a nanofactory are envisioned as being able to produce any real-world artifact, and some fictions even envision the physical creation of new living space (orbitals^[10] or ringworlds^[11]) to reduce this scarcity. This would likely further reduce (though not fully abolish) the value of an 'original' item or a specific locale to live in. Engineers have suggested megascale structures such as an Alderson disk or Dyson sphere to provide abundant living space and energy.
Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unavoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Thomas Robert Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Albert Bartlett, and others, exponential growth in human population has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe^[12] Although this would imply the invention of faster than light travel, necessary for humanity to spread throughout the universe as fast as population growth, even at lower growth rates these levels would still be reached in readily imaginable times.^{[citation needed]} It is therefore difficult to conceive of a credible post scarcity scenario which does not also imply zero population growth or relatively low population growth, even though possible future technologies such as self-replicating spacecraft could theoretically maintain exponential growth far beyond earth's carrying capacity.
At present, the total fertility rate is high in poor countries with poor health infrastructure, but it tends to drop to replacement levels or lower once a nation reaches a per capita income of roughly $10,000.^[13] In fact, virtually every wealthy OECD nation currently has a total fertility rate that is below replacement levels, implying a coming population decline for the west. Due to the decline in fertility that tends to accompany wealth (of the 233 countries listed by the CIA for fertility, 100 have fertility rates below replacement rates), human population is expected to stabilize at near 9 billion by 2050.^[14]

Fiction

Utopias

Fictional post-scarcity societies include varied settings, such as The Queendom of Sol in the series of the same name by Wil McCarthy, "the Festival" and agalmic economics from Singularity Sky and Accelerando by Charles Stross, and the United Federation of Planets from the Star Trek series.
One of the earliest treatments of a transition to a post-scarcity society occurs in Pandora's Millions by George O. Smith, in which the development of a "matter duplicator" that can replicate almost any scannable object causes an economic collapse, and a return to a barter economy for the only remaining scarce resource: Skilled human labor. Chaos ensues until the inventors of the matter duplicator discover a substance that explodes when scanned by the duplicator beam. This new substance, "Identium," serves as a new medium of exchange for skilled labor, in a post-scarcity society otherwise primarily devoted to the pursuit of leisure, science, art, the occasional lawsuit, and the sale and exchange of "Certified Uniques" — objects whose chain of provenance can legally establish that they have never been scanned by a duplicator beam.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy describes the beginning development of a highly automated society whose economy was to be based on caloric input/output and had only a few materials valued based on their scarcity. However, the inherent problems of such a system (such as its remaining capitalist elements or the difficulty in fixing the worth of academic work) are not resolved within the timeframe depicted in the trilogy.
An intermediate step to a post-scarcity society is shown in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where fabricator technology allows the growth of any item that one has design plans for - however, the poor receive a lesser amount of energy and resources per day to use, and thus have to wait longer for their items to be fabricated. Also, their items tend to be smaller, as they have no access to large-scale fabricators. This system, fueled by a centrally-distributed matter 'feed' is eventually replaced by the protean 'seed', which is able to take in raw materials from its environment to develop into whatever its program dictates. No longer bound to the aristocratically-controlled feeds, the society moves to a post-scarcity economy.
James P. Hogan has written several works where post-scarcity plays a major role. Voyage from Yesteryear details the society of the "Chironians", embryo colonists of Alpha Centauri who have adopted such a lifestyle. Cradle of Saturn and its sequel The Anguished Dawn is mostly told from the perspective of the "Kronians", a pseudo-religion who colonize Saturn's largest satellite in the process of developing such a society. Both stories are driven by the difficulties of changing an existing economic paradigm, and postulate that a fresh start may be necessary to overcome old thinking about money and possessions.
Rudy Rucker also dealt with this jarring transition in Realware in which humans receive an alien device that can instantiate any consumer product they have seen. This leads to a breakdown of the market, with stores blacking out their windows in a vain attempt to prevent people from 'copying' their products. Still, people who do buy the products find them instantly copied once out on the streets.
Iain M. Banks' The Culture stories center around an advanced spacefaring civilization that has used artificial intelligences to provide extremely abundant (and in daily practice unlimited) amounts of goods and services using advanced technology, describing a fully post scarcity society, which also attempts to influence other galactic societies towards the advanced cultural stage that freedom from greed and material need has allowed it. As Banks puts it in a 1994 article, "nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."
John C. Wright's novel The Golden Age deals with a future voluntary libertarian society spanning the solar system called the Golden Oecumene. Due to technology, nearly everyone is immortal and tremendously wealthy except those living outside society due to exile or by choice. The Sophotechs, a superior line of computer intelligences, do most of the work, research, and simulations required by the society. Throughout the book the main character, Phaethon, has to face off against a technologically superior and unknown enemy while also dealing with a post-scarcity society which is afraid of death and instability more than anything else and does not believe his plight.
In the short novel Manna^[15], Marshall Brain writes of a dystopian society ruined by advanced robotics as well as a utopian society enabled by it. The protagonist escapes life in a government run dormitory because his father bought shares in the fictional "Australia Project".

Dystopias

There have also been fully dystopian science fiction societies where all people's physical needs are provided for by machines, but this causes humans to become overly docile, uncreative and incurious. Examples include E. M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops", Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel The City and the Stars. "Riders of the Purple Wage", Philip José Farmer's dystopian 1967 science fiction novella also explores some ramifications of a future wherein technology allows everyone's desires to be met. David Weber's Honor Harrington saga has the example of the People's Republic of Haven, in which each citizen is due a Basic Living Stipend. With most of their population "on the dole", productivity and their economy collapse. In Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague," resources and luxuries are so common, that the poor must bear the burden of consuming and disposing of the bounty, as well as working at meaningless jobs to produce more meaningless plenty; the rich, conversely, are allowed to live simple but comfortable lifestyles. In Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, a central motif is unbounded progress of technology. In The Highest Possible Level of Development civilization, the inhabitants have become passive, and the visitors have to shoo away machines trying to comfort them. In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the Time Traveller speculates, based on the Eloi, that mankind had been "armed with a perfected science" which reduced all dangers in nature, epitomized by the quote: "Strength is the outcome of need". The 2008 Pixar film WALL-E also depicts what appears to be a post-scarcity dystopia, albeit humorously imagined.

See also

Capacity development Gift economy James S. Albus (section Peoples' Capitalism) Julian Lincoln Simon Post-capitalism Post-Scarcity Anarchism Pure communism Strong AI

Socialist economics Techno-progressivism Techno-utopia Technocracy movement Technological singularity The Ultimate Resource The Venus Project Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt

References

1. ^ Robbins, Lionel (1945). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. http://www.mises.org/books/robbinsessay2.pdf. , p. 16
2. ^ Press Release United Nations Environment Programme - Cutting Food Losses from Farm to Kitchen and Converting Wastes into Animal Feeds a Key Opportunity. Published 17 February 2009, retrieved 26 Dec 2010. http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=562&ArticleID=6084&l=en
3. ^ The £20bn food mountain: Britons throw away half of the food produced each year. Published 2 March 2008, retrieved 26 Dec 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/the-16320bn-food-mountain-britons-throw-away-half-of-the-food-produced-each-year-790318.html
4. ^ One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country’s Meal. Published 18 May 2008, retrieved 26 Dec 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18martin.html
5. ^ Office of Knowledge Exchange, Research and Extension (Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN) http://www.fao.org/oek/oek-home/en/
6. ^ ^{a b c} Engines of Creation (full text online, see also Engines of Creation) - Drexler, Eric K., Anchor Books, 1986
7. ^ GNU Manifesto (full text online, see also GNU Manifesto) - Stallman, Richard; Dr. Dobb's Journal, March 1985
8. ^ "The Gift Economy" - Vaughan, Genevieve, Ms. magazine, 1990
9. ^ The Hacker Culture as Gift Economy (full text online, see also Homesteading the Noosphere) - Raymond, Eric S., April 1998
10. ^ ^{a b} Various novels set in the 'The Culture' universe - Banks, Ian M.; 1987-2000
11. ^ Various novels from the 'Ringworld' series - Niven, Larry; 1970-2004
12. ^ Muir, Patricia (2007-11-01). "Cornucopian versus New Malthusian perspectives". http://oregonstate.edu/~muirp/cornucop.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-18. 
13. ^ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TFR_vs_PPP_2009.svg
14. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png
15. ^ [1]

Economic Impact of the Personal Nanofactory

Robert A. Freitas Jr
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, Palo Alto, California, USA


Is the advent of, and mass availability of, desktop personal nanofactories (PNs) likely to
cause deflation (a persistent decline in the general prices of goods and services), inflation (a
persistent general price increase), or neither?
A definitive analysis would have to address: (1) the technical assumptions that are made,
including as yet imprecisely defined future technological advances and the pace and order of
their introduction; (2) the feedback-mediated dynamic responses of the macroeconomy in
situations where we don’t have a lot of historical data to guide us; (3) the counter-leaning
responses of existing power centers (corporate entities, wealthy owners/investors, influential
political actors, antitechnology-driven activists, etc.) to the potential dilution of their power,
influence, or interests, including their likely efforts to actively oppose or at least delay this
potential dilution; (4) legal restrictions that may be placed on the widespread use of certain
technological options, for reasons ranging from legitimate public safety and environmental
concerns to crass political or commercial opportunism; (5) the possibility (having an as yet illdefined probability) that nanotechnology might actually “break the system” and render conventional capitalism obsolete (much as solid state electronics obsoleted vacuum tubes), in which
case it is not clear what new economic system might replace capitalism; and (6) the changes in
human economic behavior that may result when human nature itself may have changed.
A definitive answer is beyond the scope of this essay. Here, we take only a first look at
the question...

http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/NoninflationaryPN.pdf

Histories of Human Innovation as Histories of Computation

Innovation	Viewed as a Computation
Speech	Moving from gestures to speech gives people a higher bandwidth channel for communicating their thoughts. Society becomes able to perform more complicated computations.
Hunting and fishing	Knowing where to look for game means mentally simulating animal behavior, that is, it means emulating a computation. Using bait means influencing an animal’s computation by applying the proper inputs.
Agriculture	Knowing that seeds compute plants involves insight into the process of wetware computation. Plowing is a form of soil randomization. Irrigation is a way to program the analog flow of water. Crop rotation is an algorithm to optimize yields.
Animal husbandry	Caring for animal requires insight into their computational homeostasis. Selecting optimal individuals for further breeding is genetic engineering on the hoof.
Wheel	Wheeled carts allow long-range glider-like transferal of embodied information, making society’s computation more complex.
Law	A legal code is a program for social interactions. Enforcing the code produces high-level determinism which makes the system easier to manipulate.
Surveying	Surveys allow a society to determine simple address codes for physical locations. Space becomes digital.
Calendar	Noting the solar system’s cycles marks coordinates in time. Time becomes digital.
Sailing	Sailors learn to simulate and tweak the analog computation of airflow effects. Course planning involves higher-level simulation.
Pottery	The clay and the brushed-on glazes are the input, the kiln is the computer, the pot is the output.
Brewing and fermentation	The vat is a biocomputer, sensitive to the input variables of malt, sugar, and yeast. Over time, the best yeast strains are sought out by tasting and comparing; this is hill-climbing in a gustatory fitness landscape.
Spinning and weaving	The yarn is computed from the fibers. Weaving digitizes a surface into warp/woof coordinates. The loom is the first programmable mechanical computer.
Mining, smelting, and metallurgy	Mining is a form of data retrieval. The blast furnace transforms ore inputs into slag and metal outputs. Metallurgy and chemistry concern the computational rules by which matter combines and transforms.
Writing	Writing translates speech into a format portable across space and time. A written text promotes long-distance information exchange and long-term memory storage.
The alphabet	Using a limited number of symbols digitizes writing. Use of the alphabet also simplifies the algorithm for writing. The democratization of writing allows people to write things they wouldn’t be allowed to say.
Printing press	The type letters act as primitive symbols that are assembled into a kind of program--- which prints a page. Printing multiple copies of a text enhances class four communication.
Books	The book amasses large amounts of text into portable form. The book is the precursor of the hard drive.
Universities	A university provides a node where adults can exchange very large amounts of information. Given that the students go out and affect the society as a whole, the university is in some sense a central processing unit for the social hive mind, drawing together and processing society’s thoughts.
Water wheel and windmill	These devices convert chaotic fluid motions into regular periodic form. The excess information is returned to the fluid as turbulence.
Gunpowder	Bullets are high-speed gliders. Shooting someone allows an individual to do a remote erase. Reckless, catastrophic killing enhances interest in long-term information storage.
Machine tools	By creating precise mechanical tools for making machines, we model the biological process of self-reproduction. The machines come alive and begin evolving towards greater complexity.
Clocks	A finer-scale calendar, a zoom into the time dimension. Clocks use class two systems of gears that do the same thing over and over. Clocks are a tabletop model of determinism.
Steam engine	The steam engine is an artificially alive device that eats coal and transforms it into motion. The chaos of fire is converted into the reliable class two oscillation of the pistons.
Locomotive	When placed upon wheels, the steam engine becomes an autonomous glider. The country-to-city diffusion rate is changed, which in turn alters the Zhabotinsky scrolls of population movement.
Internal combustion engine	An evolutionary advance above the steam engine, and an early example of compressing the size of computational hardware.
Factory assembly line	The factory represents a computing system that codifies the procedures of a given craft. The possibility of mass production allows us to view physical objects as information, as abstract procedures to be implemented as many times as we please. Three dimensional objects can now be reproduced and disseminated as readily as books. Mass-produced devices become plug-ins for the computations embodied in people’s homes.
Movies	A temporal sequence is modeled by a series of discrete frames. An early form of virtual reality.
Automobile	The personal vehicle allows individuals to control transportation. A formerly centralized technology is now in the hands of the people. Meetings and markets can be freely arranged, making the economy’s computation more class four.
Electrical generators and motors	Electricity collapses the length of society’s computation cycles. The system clock speeds up. Electrical lights disrupt the cycle of day and night; computation becomes continuous. There is now less of a border between the media and the human nervous system. People begin to view themselves as components plugged into the hive mind.
Telegraph	Writing is transmitted as a digital binary code. Society begins to grow its electrical network.
Telephone	Unlike the telegraph, the telephone is a peer-to-peer medium--- you can make a phone call from your home without having to deal with a telegrapher. People are free to exchange “unimportant” information, that is, to talk about their moods and emotions, thus in fact exchanging a much higher-level kind of information than before.
Plastics	By designing new materials, chemists begin to program brute matter. Deformable and moldable, plastics can take on arbitrarily computed shapes. Objects are now programmable.
Radio	While books could broadcast digitized thoughts, radio broadcasts analog emotion. The hive mind gains power, as listeners form realtime virtual crowds.
Airplane	When riding in a plane, one can look out the window and see a landscape as an undivided whole, gaining a notion of a nation as a unit. With familiarity, people stop looking out the airplane windows, and air travel becomes a hyperlink, a teleportation device. In the United States, the “flyover” states become invisible to the cultural powers, promoting a schism in the hive mind.
Television	Since moving objects are important, our eyes have evolved to stare at flickering things; therefore we find TV hypnotic. Watching TV is work, our minds labor to fill in the missing parts of the virtual reality. Society gains a stronger hive mind than ever before. But at the same time, the hive mind is debased by ever more centralized control.
Atomic power	The physicists complete the chemists’ work, and even atoms become programmable. We see the must fundamental units of matter as information to be manipulated.
Computers	Billed as the universal machine, the computer is brittle and hard to use. The digitization of essentially everything begins, in most cases degrading and corrupting the information.
Email	Email spreads the workplace into the home. The upside is that you don’t have to commute, the down side is that you can’t leave the office. Email is addictive, and people become ever more plugged in. Yet email provides an alternate to the centralized news network, and many smaller hive minds take form.
The Web	The hive mind expands its consciousness. And at the same time the subhives’ minds gain further definition. The web page does for publication what the automobile did for transport --- the gatekeepers lose importance. The Web becomes the ultimate global information resource, the universal data base. Social computation becomes nearly frictionless; people can interact at a distant every more effortlessly.
Biotechnology	Biologists begin to program life. Society tries to apply legal codes to life, with unpleasant and confusing results. Real biological life continues anyway, still managing to avoid control.
Cell phones	A tight, personal, peer-to-peer medium that approaches telepathy. As people coordinate activities in real time, short-lived spontaneous mini-hive minds emerge.

The Past and Future Histories of Human Innovation as Histories of Computation

by Rudy Rucker
Copyright © Rudy Rucker, 2011

[In honor of Marshall McLuhan, this essay is adapted from Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul (Basic Books, New York 2005), and published online on July 24, 2011]

Link : http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/pastandfuture.html

TEDxHamburg - David F. Flanders - 3D Printing: This Century's most disruptive innovation?!