Many people seem to think that I'm against the existence of suffering solely on the grounds that it is a negative phenomenon, and that I'm promoting a futuristic utopia of nothing but unfeeling robots in its place. To extinguish this false notion, I'd like to present two sets of negative sensations -- one acceptable and the other not so acceptable.
Please note that these sets are somewhat subjective; the real solution would entail that each consciousness immerse itself within a simulation perfectly customized to its particular preferences -- at least, so long as said preferences do not interfere with the fundamental teachings and meta-teachings of the society, in case the consciousnesses ever need to leave their respective simulations.
Unacceptable Sensations
Suicidality and extreme depression
Starvation
Panic attacks
Pain caused by cancers and other deadly diseases
Physical torture
Vomiting
Nausea and any intensely uncomfortable stomach sensations
Fevers
Agoraphobia
Trigeminal neuralgia
Passing kidney stones
Stab wounds
Bullet wounds
Natural childbirth
Acceptable Sensations
Stubbed toes
Hunger
Thirst
Scrapes and bruises
Fatigue
Pulled muscles (excluding some back muscles, anyway)
Soreness/aches
Headaches (possibly excluding migraines)
Disappointment
Confusion
Cold and hot (excluding extreme burns, frostbite, etc.)
Itches
The latter set wouldn't really make the world such a horrible place, honestly. If that's all that our children had to look forward to, then I don't think that your having children would be that big of a deal, even in spite of the fundamental nature of deprivation as a cause of discomfort. Too bad for you -- and me -- that these are definitely not the only possibilities, and that set 1 must also be accounted for.
Showing posts with label ideal society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideal society. Show all posts
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Sunday, July 31, 2011
No leadership does not equal no regulation
Some axioms:
1. There exist transmittable information patterns which guide the course of other information patterns in the universe. The former patterns are best understood when condensed into discrete concepts, or "ideas."
2. There exist facilitators, senders, recipients, and processors of the aforementioned information patterns. These could be loosely defined as information agents, and are currently most apparent in the form of human beings.
3. Information agents should agree upon a foundational set of information patterns as "ideals." Furthermore, this set should serve as the broadest base for work. For example, "Suffering is unwanted among sentient beings" is a maxim that should probably aid in the foundation of this base.
4. Ideals, while serving as the base of society over both self-satisfaction and ruling groups, should be questioned in order to promote consistency and uniformity among information agents. This axiom is the -- or one of the -- meta-ideals.
5. In theory, a meta-ideal could be questioned by a meta-ideal another layer back in the chain, but as this process has the potential to carry on ad infinitum and has no apparent point of logical termination, it is best, for practical reasons, to avoid it and instead opt to carry out the above in a manner which encourages positive demonstrable results.
On a related note, the IEEE standards are great examples of how information can be centrally standardized without the interference of any particular group of people. No one "rules" the IEEE or keeps "the people" who use its standards "out of power," yet networking technologies seem to get on just fine; likewise, Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, etc. do not "enforce" IEEE standards or promise punishment for breaking with them.
Of course, the difference between a truly open system promoting the establishment of standards and the IEEE is that the latter exists within a capitalist paradigm, and is therefore channeled through corporate activities. Imagine if, instead of computing organizations, standards similar to those endorsed by the IEEE existed for nation-states, and that those states, binded by the standards, no longer had a reason to exist.
1. There exist transmittable information patterns which guide the course of other information patterns in the universe. The former patterns are best understood when condensed into discrete concepts, or "ideas."
2. There exist facilitators, senders, recipients, and processors of the aforementioned information patterns. These could be loosely defined as information agents, and are currently most apparent in the form of human beings.
3. Information agents should agree upon a foundational set of information patterns as "ideals." Furthermore, this set should serve as the broadest base for work. For example, "Suffering is unwanted among sentient beings" is a maxim that should probably aid in the foundation of this base.
4. Ideals, while serving as the base of society over both self-satisfaction and ruling groups, should be questioned in order to promote consistency and uniformity among information agents. This axiom is the -- or one of the -- meta-ideals.
5. In theory, a meta-ideal could be questioned by a meta-ideal another layer back in the chain, but as this process has the potential to carry on ad infinitum and has no apparent point of logical termination, it is best, for practical reasons, to avoid it and instead opt to carry out the above in a manner which encourages positive demonstrable results.
On a related note, the IEEE standards are great examples of how information can be centrally standardized without the interference of any particular group of people. No one "rules" the IEEE or keeps "the people" who use its standards "out of power," yet networking technologies seem to get on just fine; likewise, Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, etc. do not "enforce" IEEE standards or promise punishment for breaking with them.
Of course, the difference between a truly open system promoting the establishment of standards and the IEEE is that the latter exists within a capitalist paradigm, and is therefore channeled through corporate activities. Imagine if, instead of computing organizations, standards similar to those endorsed by the IEEE existed for nation-states, and that those states, binded by the standards, no longer had a reason to exist.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
An Ideal Society, Part 4: Language
I'm going to make a rather bold statement:
There should be only one language.
Honestly, why the redundancy? It's not as though, if English were to "crash," we'd have Italian waiting on standby to pick up its slack as part of some array of languages. The less that we are able to understand one another, the worse off we are.
We can't solve the problem by becoming multilingual, either, because:
1. It'd be pretty difficult to learn every language on Earth.
2. If I know English and Spanish and you know English and Spanish, that's two people who each have two distinct symbols in their brains for every imaginable human conception. Multiply this waste of time and space by six billion and you'll see where I'm going with this. You should only learn a second language if you need to in order to understand someone who doesn't already know your language -- but in an ideal society, this problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
Imagine having two cars, but living alone. Imagine owning two pairs of shoes when you only need one to protect your feet. Imagine having two computer keyboards that you occasionally swap back and forth for fun. Imagine having two beds to sleep in and oscillating between them at random.
A duplicate item needn't be identical to the original in order to qualify as being functionally void or needlessly redundant. Sure, you may enjoy the aesthetic variation, the novelty, the sheer variety; perhaps these qualities supersede boredom. There's nothing wrong with this, but if you're acquiring duplicate items at the expense of something more materially valuable at that moment, then you're woefully ignoring opportunity cost, which necessarily leads to your generating wasted space.
Brain space is no different from other forms of space; it's certainly finite, above all else. Don't waste time learning a new version of something with which you're already familiar when there's much more to be learned in its place; doing otherwise promotes pretentiousness, frivolous socialization, and, ultimately, a fragmented species intermittently predominated by huge communications holes.
Important disclaimer: If you're not American, British, Australian, or Canadian and you read this blog, you're likely bilingual. Please take note that it isn't your fault that a second language has been imposed upon you by academia; furthermore, considering the gradual encroachment of the English language upon much of the territory of the other languages of the world, there may be some practical benefit in your knowing English. Just keep in mind that it'd be really dumb of you to decide to learn Arabic for fun or to show off how cultured you are to friends. In any case, this post isn't about what you should be doing with your own personal life, but what a society as built from scratch should look like.
There should be only one language.
Honestly, why the redundancy? It's not as though, if English were to "crash," we'd have Italian waiting on standby to pick up its slack as part of some array of languages. The less that we are able to understand one another, the worse off we are.
We can't solve the problem by becoming multilingual, either, because:
1. It'd be pretty difficult to learn every language on Earth.
2. If I know English and Spanish and you know English and Spanish, that's two people who each have two distinct symbols in their brains for every imaginable human conception. Multiply this waste of time and space by six billion and you'll see where I'm going with this. You should only learn a second language if you need to in order to understand someone who doesn't already know your language -- but in an ideal society, this problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
Imagine having two cars, but living alone. Imagine owning two pairs of shoes when you only need one to protect your feet. Imagine having two computer keyboards that you occasionally swap back and forth for fun. Imagine having two beds to sleep in and oscillating between them at random.
A duplicate item needn't be identical to the original in order to qualify as being functionally void or needlessly redundant. Sure, you may enjoy the aesthetic variation, the novelty, the sheer variety; perhaps these qualities supersede boredom. There's nothing wrong with this, but if you're acquiring duplicate items at the expense of something more materially valuable at that moment, then you're woefully ignoring opportunity cost, which necessarily leads to your generating wasted space.
Brain space is no different from other forms of space; it's certainly finite, above all else. Don't waste time learning a new version of something with which you're already familiar when there's much more to be learned in its place; doing otherwise promotes pretentiousness, frivolous socialization, and, ultimately, a fragmented species intermittently predominated by huge communications holes.
Important disclaimer: If you're not American, British, Australian, or Canadian and you read this blog, you're likely bilingual. Please take note that it isn't your fault that a second language has been imposed upon you by academia; furthermore, considering the gradual encroachment of the English language upon much of the territory of the other languages of the world, there may be some practical benefit in your knowing English. Just keep in mind that it'd be really dumb of you to decide to learn Arabic for fun or to show off how cultured you are to friends. In any case, this post isn't about what you should be doing with your own personal life, but what a society as built from scratch should look like.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
An Ideal Society, Part 3: Communication; Law
Communication is something that we've been bad at from day one. In some ways, we've gotten better at it (e.g. the lack of revenge killings between "groups"), while in others, we've gotten worse (e.g. passive aggression, political correctness, bureaucracy). I'm not sure if we've really broken even per se, but the situation is nevertheless not very good.
What would it look like if it were?
Well, all of our communications media would be consolidated and centrally monitored. At birth, everyone would be assigned an ID number in addition to a name; however, unlike a social security number, this new number would be made available to everyone on Earth by everyone on Earth.
The news media would be incorporated into the future equivalents of RSS feeds and email subscriptions. If, for example, a powerful earthquake were to hit a given part of the world, rather than finding out in a more traditional way, you would receive a news update via email -- not because you'd be subscribed to a service of your own volition, but because the central computer would utilize something like IP broadcasting for sending out messages to all communications addresses on Earth.
For those not familiar with the process, all computers connected to IP-based networks -- or at least those configured to receive their addresses from a server -- must first communicate with any nearby servers in order to negotiate for an address. The problem is thus: How can something ask for an address -- that is, communicate -- without already having an address? Well, the solution to this problem is to design an address which can be utilized by any network object at any given time, but whose messages are also intended for all objects located within a given network segment's boundaries. This allows more or less any network object -- computer, printer, etc. -- to send out a quick, undirected broadcast to as many other objects as possible, with little preconfiguration, and no need to know who to contact beforehand.
In other words, we already have the ability to broadcast messages from one computer to any number of computers at once -- even if we don't know the individual addresses of the recipients; furthermore, rather than needing to keep track of which devices are currently online or within the replication boundaries, we can allow an address to be dedicated to the task of sending messages to every device, regardless of status.
Imagine what the world would be like if we were to apply this concept to the media. You'd no longer receive text messages and voicemails solely from friends, family, and stalkers; you'd also receive them from any number of organizations, including the government (if there were one at all, which there shouldn't be), schools, academies, research centers, your local news station, etc. If you were born into the society, it would be a requirement that you not only possess at least one portable communications device, but that you also be capable of receiving text messages and videos from literally anyone.
Communications devices would each have the future equivalent of a MAC address/IP address hybrid. If you ever wanted to replace your communications device with a new one, you'd simply go to an area where devices are distributed -- regardless of whether you were returning your current device(s) -- and check one out by swiping it through a computer on your way toward the exit; this would update the central database by mapping your personal ID number to the "IP address" of the device, thereby allowing all subnetworks on Earth to realize that, when that "IP address" does something, you're doing it -- not someone else. To put it simply, we'd do away with host names and domain names, and would instead utilize personal names and IDs for everything.
Staying informed would only be the beginning, however. With global broadcasting and a centralized Internet, help could be requested -- and subsequently received -- at lightning speed. Has someone just fallen from a building and shattered his spinal column? Don't call 911; send out a broadcast. Message options would have any number of designations, from "interesting" to "urgent," and everything in between. An urgent message, for example, would cause a person's device to buzz or beep, while most messages would not immediately interfere with daily activities. This way, in the event of an emergency, everyone within a given zone or sector would be aware of the situation. On top of this, if we apply my idea that first aid and mild medical knowledge should be taught at a young age to everyone on Earth, then it would be a rare thing indeed for an accident to go unattended, or to be attended in an untimely fashion.
The world is a big place, of course. Sending out broadcasts to everyone on the planet would be ridiculous; no one would be able to read all of their messages, and the whole system would become pointless in less than a day after its implementation. Therefore, while unicast and multicast messages would remain global in nature, broadcasts would come in three major types:
1. Those sent by the central computer, as input by some body of individuals who've deemed the message(s) globally relevant. These messages would first need to be approved, and would perhaps also need to be limited according to how many messages had recently been sent in succession in this manner. Examples of relevant information might include asteroid impacts, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and major social transformations.
2. Those sent by anyone who feels that they are educational or otherwise interesting, but not urgent. These would be akin to the news, advertisements, etc., and would be grouped according to category on a central server rather than replicated locally on each individual device. These messages would not be broadcasts in the literal sense, but rather, free information available on the Internet. We more or less already receive these messages today.
3. Emergency messages pertaining to local events, such as a person having a heart attack in the street. These broadcasts would be the only kind that could be sent by an individual communications device, and would be designed with immediacy in mind. They would also be limited to particular population centers; every time that you'd leave a population center for another, in fact, a sensor would get triggered that would update the central computer as to the location of the communications device(s) that you'd be carrying.
If someone were to be assaulted unprovoked and you were a witness to this, you could submit something along the lines of a "trouble ticket" as a broadcast to the entire population center, complete with the approximate time of the interaction and the coordinates of the specific area within the center wherein the interaction occurred. Even if the interaction were to occur within a camera's blind spot, any interested parties could nevertheless consult the logs for the coordinates on the map for who'd triggered the sensors during that time.
For example, if the fight occurred at 30:20 (30 megaseconds and 20 kiloseconds) and you were a witness, you could simply broadcast an "email" that would be sent only to those within the population center; in computing terms, this would be something like how packets of data might only get sent to those hosts defined as within a domain, subdomain, workgroup, etc. behind a particular switch or router.
Next, Wikipedia-style communication would occur between interested individuals, who would then negotiate who got to investigate the skirmish. Because you were directly involved, you would be deemed valuable as a witness, but your role in making decisions would be diminished to prevent biases from influencing the consensus.
After that, logs would be checked in order to determine all of the people who had, from 30:19 to 30:21, walked "into" the invisible lines defining the particular sector of the population center (they would be much like modern alarm systems, only they'd belong to one, unified system, which would know where each sector existed via the previously mentioned GPS system). Whenever a sector's sensor would get triggered, data from a person's communications device would be downloaded to a server; this data would then get logged in order to ascertain which devices last triggered the sensor -- and, by extension, which individuals, as each device, again, must be mapped to a specific person's ID number in the central database.
Each sector, complete with its own unique coordinates, would be relatively small, and perhaps of standard dimensions. Because of the granular nature of each population center, let's say that only twenty individuals other than yourself had been registered as having entered the area during the three kiloseconds wherein the action occurred. Within little time, the people who'd remotely communicated their desire to be involved in evaluating the situation would then be in direct contact with the twenty people who'd been in the area from 30:19 to 30:21. Furthermore, even if you were unable to identify the "suspect," with some interrogation, it wouldn't take long before the investigation party would have an idea as to who perpetrated the assault.
More on interrogation methods, punishment, and the absence of police in a forthcoming post.
What would it look like if it were?
Well, all of our communications media would be consolidated and centrally monitored. At birth, everyone would be assigned an ID number in addition to a name; however, unlike a social security number, this new number would be made available to everyone on Earth by everyone on Earth.
The news media would be incorporated into the future equivalents of RSS feeds and email subscriptions. If, for example, a powerful earthquake were to hit a given part of the world, rather than finding out in a more traditional way, you would receive a news update via email -- not because you'd be subscribed to a service of your own volition, but because the central computer would utilize something like IP broadcasting for sending out messages to all communications addresses on Earth.
For those not familiar with the process, all computers connected to IP-based networks -- or at least those configured to receive their addresses from a server -- must first communicate with any nearby servers in order to negotiate for an address. The problem is thus: How can something ask for an address -- that is, communicate -- without already having an address? Well, the solution to this problem is to design an address which can be utilized by any network object at any given time, but whose messages are also intended for all objects located within a given network segment's boundaries. This allows more or less any network object -- computer, printer, etc. -- to send out a quick, undirected broadcast to as many other objects as possible, with little preconfiguration, and no need to know who to contact beforehand.
In other words, we already have the ability to broadcast messages from one computer to any number of computers at once -- even if we don't know the individual addresses of the recipients; furthermore, rather than needing to keep track of which devices are currently online or within the replication boundaries, we can allow an address to be dedicated to the task of sending messages to every device, regardless of status.
Imagine what the world would be like if we were to apply this concept to the media. You'd no longer receive text messages and voicemails solely from friends, family, and stalkers; you'd also receive them from any number of organizations, including the government (if there were one at all, which there shouldn't be), schools, academies, research centers, your local news station, etc. If you were born into the society, it would be a requirement that you not only possess at least one portable communications device, but that you also be capable of receiving text messages and videos from literally anyone.
Communications devices would each have the future equivalent of a MAC address/IP address hybrid. If you ever wanted to replace your communications device with a new one, you'd simply go to an area where devices are distributed -- regardless of whether you were returning your current device(s) -- and check one out by swiping it through a computer on your way toward the exit; this would update the central database by mapping your personal ID number to the "IP address" of the device, thereby allowing all subnetworks on Earth to realize that, when that "IP address" does something, you're doing it -- not someone else. To put it simply, we'd do away with host names and domain names, and would instead utilize personal names and IDs for everything.
Staying informed would only be the beginning, however. With global broadcasting and a centralized Internet, help could be requested -- and subsequently received -- at lightning speed. Has someone just fallen from a building and shattered his spinal column? Don't call 911; send out a broadcast. Message options would have any number of designations, from "interesting" to "urgent," and everything in between. An urgent message, for example, would cause a person's device to buzz or beep, while most messages would not immediately interfere with daily activities. This way, in the event of an emergency, everyone within a given zone or sector would be aware of the situation. On top of this, if we apply my idea that first aid and mild medical knowledge should be taught at a young age to everyone on Earth, then it would be a rare thing indeed for an accident to go unattended, or to be attended in an untimely fashion.
The world is a big place, of course. Sending out broadcasts to everyone on the planet would be ridiculous; no one would be able to read all of their messages, and the whole system would become pointless in less than a day after its implementation. Therefore, while unicast and multicast messages would remain global in nature, broadcasts would come in three major types:
1. Those sent by the central computer, as input by some body of individuals who've deemed the message(s) globally relevant. These messages would first need to be approved, and would perhaps also need to be limited according to how many messages had recently been sent in succession in this manner. Examples of relevant information might include asteroid impacts, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and major social transformations.
2. Those sent by anyone who feels that they are educational or otherwise interesting, but not urgent. These would be akin to the news, advertisements, etc., and would be grouped according to category on a central server rather than replicated locally on each individual device. These messages would not be broadcasts in the literal sense, but rather, free information available on the Internet. We more or less already receive these messages today.
3. Emergency messages pertaining to local events, such as a person having a heart attack in the street. These broadcasts would be the only kind that could be sent by an individual communications device, and would be designed with immediacy in mind. They would also be limited to particular population centers; every time that you'd leave a population center for another, in fact, a sensor would get triggered that would update the central computer as to the location of the communications device(s) that you'd be carrying.
If someone were to be assaulted unprovoked and you were a witness to this, you could submit something along the lines of a "trouble ticket" as a broadcast to the entire population center, complete with the approximate time of the interaction and the coordinates of the specific area within the center wherein the interaction occurred. Even if the interaction were to occur within a camera's blind spot, any interested parties could nevertheless consult the logs for the coordinates on the map for who'd triggered the sensors during that time.
For example, if the fight occurred at 30:20 (30 megaseconds and 20 kiloseconds) and you were a witness, you could simply broadcast an "email" that would be sent only to those within the population center; in computing terms, this would be something like how packets of data might only get sent to those hosts defined as within a domain, subdomain, workgroup, etc. behind a particular switch or router.
Next, Wikipedia-style communication would occur between interested individuals, who would then negotiate who got to investigate the skirmish. Because you were directly involved, you would be deemed valuable as a witness, but your role in making decisions would be diminished to prevent biases from influencing the consensus.
After that, logs would be checked in order to determine all of the people who had, from 30:19 to 30:21, walked "into" the invisible lines defining the particular sector of the population center (they would be much like modern alarm systems, only they'd belong to one, unified system, which would know where each sector existed via the previously mentioned GPS system). Whenever a sector's sensor would get triggered, data from a person's communications device would be downloaded to a server; this data would then get logged in order to ascertain which devices last triggered the sensor -- and, by extension, which individuals, as each device, again, must be mapped to a specific person's ID number in the central database.
Each sector, complete with its own unique coordinates, would be relatively small, and perhaps of standard dimensions. Because of the granular nature of each population center, let's say that only twenty individuals other than yourself had been registered as having entered the area during the three kiloseconds wherein the action occurred. Within little time, the people who'd remotely communicated their desire to be involved in evaluating the situation would then be in direct contact with the twenty people who'd been in the area from 30:19 to 30:21. Furthermore, even if you were unable to identify the "suspect," with some interrogation, it wouldn't take long before the investigation party would have an idea as to who perpetrated the assault.
More on interrogation methods, punishment, and the absence of police in a forthcoming post.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
An Ideal Society, Part 2: Time
We currently do a horrible job of keeping track of time. The two things that immediately come to mind when I think about how time is kept on Earth are:
1. Our time system doesn't integrate very well with our other measuring systems; in fact, it has nothing to do with them at all, which is strange.
2. Our time system is based on a medieval peasant's work day. Also strange.
Daylight saving time may conserve sunlight, but unless you don't have electricity, I don't really see why it's necessary. Actually, it's worse than unnecessary: It breaks the system. It's one thing to arbitrarily label a moment when the sun is positioned at a specific angle in the sky as 6:00 PM EST, but it's another altogether to later claim that that same angle occurs at a moment labeled as 7:00 PM EST, or 5:00 PM EST.
Wouldn't it be easier to get up at a different time than to change time?
Think about it: A lot more people than we might realize forget to set their clocks back, and while I'm most certainly in favor of automating all such menial processes to avoid lapses in memory, this particular one really doesn't need to exist in the first place. Furthermore, no credible academic or governmental body -- not even the U.S. Department of Energy -- has found any significant reduction in energy use or costs as a result of daylight saving time, with many studies reporting as little as a 0.5-1% difference in electricity use.
Worse still is that DST doesn't apply to all time zones, and some people frequently travel from one time zone to another, causing confusion regarding DST rules, which differ from region to region. Does this make any sense? If we are going to impose a confusing, arbitrary standard with no benefit to anyone whatsoever, can we not at least universalize it?
You might think that my proposal to do things at different times of day depending on sunlight output is myopic. First of all, in our technological society, it's extremely rare that the amount of sunlight matters to anyone for getting something done -- especially a mere hour's difference. Second of all, if our society didn't so rigidly impose its schedules, we wouldn't have to worry about reminding ourselves to do things at different times of day -- were schedules ever necessary in the first place. In an ideal society, if you really had to change how early you got up in order to increase the length of the day, because your boss wouldn't care whether you took lunch at 12:00 or 1:00, you'd eat whenever a "natural" break presented itself in the day. This would ultimately deemphasize the importance of arbitrary scheduling, which almost never accounts for scope creep, and certainly does not parallel the processes of human work and energy use.
If you need to be at work by 8:00, and the sun starts rising earlier, then change your time of arrival from 8:00 to 7:56, and keep gradually knocking it down a few minutes every few weeks until the sun starts rising later in the morning again. A guestimate really is good enough for stuff like this.
The problem of conserving sunlight isn't that we need to find a better way to transition from one time* to another; it's that we need to find a better way to transition from doing things at one time to another -- or even that we need to stop caring whether we're five minutes late for work in the first place (OR, that we shouldn't "work" in the way that we currently do!).
Time zones are also pointless. They're dictated by time of day, of course, but again, the day is an archaic unit of measurement restricted by the activity of the sun. If you want to eat dinner on one part of the Earth, perhaps you do so at 6:30 PM, but if you move, does it really matter if it's suddenly dark outside at 3:00 PM? Do you have to wait until 6:30? What's more important -- the little numbers on the clock, or what's happening in the world?
Finally getting back to point 1. above, consider that the metric system is widely used throughout most of the first world (outside of the United States) for measuring physical quanta. Why not for quanta within the fourth dimension as well? Instead of sixty seconds to a minute, there should be one thousand seconds to one kilosecond -- not because the latter are somehow the "right" units to use, but because consistency is important for avoiding slop. There would then be one thousand kiloseconds per megasecond, and so on, with the base unit (seconds) remaining the suffix to each unit in order to remind us of its fundamental nature. Not only would this ally our time system with our other measuring systems, it would also standardize the time system itself.
Why base a particular scale of measurement on how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun or rotate? We no longer need to track how many days we have left until we have to start preparing for the winter. Why does where the moon exist in the sky matter to us? What is the point of the month as a unit of measurement? Instead of each unit containing 60, 24, 30, or 365 of the previous, why doesn't each simply contain 1,000 of the previous, regardless of its scale? Wouldn't that be much simpler?
If we ever wind up living somewhere else -- a prospect which I find rather unlikely, admittedly -- then we will need to acknowledge that days and years are meaningless, anyway, given the extreme variation in them from one planet to another.
* The little numbers on the clock -- not the actual time per the activity of the solar system and universe
1. Our time system doesn't integrate very well with our other measuring systems; in fact, it has nothing to do with them at all, which is strange.
2. Our time system is based on a medieval peasant's work day. Also strange.
Daylight saving time may conserve sunlight, but unless you don't have electricity, I don't really see why it's necessary. Actually, it's worse than unnecessary: It breaks the system. It's one thing to arbitrarily label a moment when the sun is positioned at a specific angle in the sky as 6:00 PM EST, but it's another altogether to later claim that that same angle occurs at a moment labeled as 7:00 PM EST, or 5:00 PM EST.
Wouldn't it be easier to get up at a different time than to change time?
Think about it: A lot more people than we might realize forget to set their clocks back, and while I'm most certainly in favor of automating all such menial processes to avoid lapses in memory, this particular one really doesn't need to exist in the first place. Furthermore, no credible academic or governmental body -- not even the U.S. Department of Energy -- has found any significant reduction in energy use or costs as a result of daylight saving time, with many studies reporting as little as a 0.5-1% difference in electricity use.
Worse still is that DST doesn't apply to all time zones, and some people frequently travel from one time zone to another, causing confusion regarding DST rules, which differ from region to region. Does this make any sense? If we are going to impose a confusing, arbitrary standard with no benefit to anyone whatsoever, can we not at least universalize it?
You might think that my proposal to do things at different times of day depending on sunlight output is myopic. First of all, in our technological society, it's extremely rare that the amount of sunlight matters to anyone for getting something done -- especially a mere hour's difference. Second of all, if our society didn't so rigidly impose its schedules, we wouldn't have to worry about reminding ourselves to do things at different times of day -- were schedules ever necessary in the first place. In an ideal society, if you really had to change how early you got up in order to increase the length of the day, because your boss wouldn't care whether you took lunch at 12:00 or 1:00, you'd eat whenever a "natural" break presented itself in the day. This would ultimately deemphasize the importance of arbitrary scheduling, which almost never accounts for scope creep, and certainly does not parallel the processes of human work and energy use.
If you need to be at work by 8:00, and the sun starts rising earlier, then change your time of arrival from 8:00 to 7:56, and keep gradually knocking it down a few minutes every few weeks until the sun starts rising later in the morning again. A guestimate really is good enough for stuff like this.
The problem of conserving sunlight isn't that we need to find a better way to transition from one time* to another; it's that we need to find a better way to transition from doing things at one time to another -- or even that we need to stop caring whether we're five minutes late for work in the first place (OR, that we shouldn't "work" in the way that we currently do!).
Time zones are also pointless. They're dictated by time of day, of course, but again, the day is an archaic unit of measurement restricted by the activity of the sun. If you want to eat dinner on one part of the Earth, perhaps you do so at 6:30 PM, but if you move, does it really matter if it's suddenly dark outside at 3:00 PM? Do you have to wait until 6:30? What's more important -- the little numbers on the clock, or what's happening in the world?
Finally getting back to point 1. above, consider that the metric system is widely used throughout most of the first world (outside of the United States) for measuring physical quanta. Why not for quanta within the fourth dimension as well? Instead of sixty seconds to a minute, there should be one thousand seconds to one kilosecond -- not because the latter are somehow the "right" units to use, but because consistency is important for avoiding slop. There would then be one thousand kiloseconds per megasecond, and so on, with the base unit (seconds) remaining the suffix to each unit in order to remind us of its fundamental nature. Not only would this ally our time system with our other measuring systems, it would also standardize the time system itself.
Why base a particular scale of measurement on how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun or rotate? We no longer need to track how many days we have left until we have to start preparing for the winter. Why does where the moon exist in the sky matter to us? What is the point of the month as a unit of measurement? Instead of each unit containing 60, 24, 30, or 365 of the previous, why doesn't each simply contain 1,000 of the previous, regardless of its scale? Wouldn't that be much simpler?
If we ever wind up living somewhere else -- a prospect which I find rather unlikely, admittedly -- then we will need to acknowledge that days and years are meaningless, anyway, given the extreme variation in them from one planet to another.
* The little numbers on the clock -- not the actual time per the activity of the solar system and universe
Sunday, May 22, 2011
An Ideal Society, Part 1: The Suburbs; Occupations
Alright, we've hit on all of the major problems of the world, as far as I can tell. Occasional posts will still appear here regarding them, but today, I start a new series: An Ideal Society. It's time to stop talking about why our current situation is bad and start talking about what a good situation -- independent of whether a preceding bad one ever existed -- would look like, hypothetically. Over the months, I've hinted at some of the ideas that I'll be posting in this series, but I think that it's about time that I lay them out more explicitly.
Let's get started with the following two premises:
1. Our entire infrastructure is out of whack.
2. This is caused by bad values.
We waste things. A lot. The environmentalist movement seems to be aware of this, but in their quest to find a bad guy to blame, they've neglected the vast majority of the waste that humans produce in this society; perhaps one of their biggest blunders has been their blatant disregard for how we manage oil. Sure, there's lots of talk -- some of it legitimate -- about alternative energy, but what never gets discussed is that we could have continued to use oil for far longer than we will if we'd only structured society itself in a more rational, efficient way.
Let's pretend that society as we know it doesn't exist. If humans were to be dropped onto the Earth today, with big brains, language, and a need to understand whether the universe has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, how would their society (or societies) be structured in the ideal scenario?
For one, there'd be no suburbs. For two, there'd be no occupations.
Something that people generally don't seem to realize about jobs is that, in addition to being nauseatingly bureaucratic in nature, they're usually designed only to help someone else do his job; furthermore, for some reason, they don't really end.
Curious, isn't it? If jobs actually accomplished something, wouldn't they end at some point? If you need to paint your house, doesn't the need terminate once the house has been painted? You don't devise new ways to paint the house just to keep your family on the payroll, do you?
You might bring up more indefinite chores, like taking out the trash. To this, I say:
1. We already have the technology available to us to automate the majority of modern jobs. The only reason for why 90% of our jobs haven't been taken over by machines is that people need to make money in order to live. If we didn't need to make money, then machines would already be doing most of our menial chores.
2. Menial chores do not require that you hop into a car and drive for two hours to an entirely different building every day at a set time which cannot be violated. This is because menial chores are not enough work to constitute a true occupation, generally; they can be done by anyone whenever they're required to be done without forcing someone in particular to be "the guy" who does them at the same time every day. In short, while the chore of taking out the trash may be indefinite, my role as the person who handles the chore needn't be.
Number 2 takes us to the first assertion above: that the suburbs are a pathetic waste of resources.
Here's how our living spaces should be structured instead:
Housing units as large as one entire neighborhood -- or at least as large as some substantial portion of one, depending on architectural technicalities -- would exist all over the Earth. These units would look something like shopping malls in their openness, though they'd probably be much more aesthetically pleasing, given that no money means no capitalistic concerns over architectural parsimony. They would also contain individual quarters. There would be no leases, no deeds, and no mortgages, just as there are no leases, deeds, or mortgages for those who routinely and lawfully enter shopping malls all over the country every day today; if you wanted to take up residence within a housing unit, you'd simply walk inside at your leisure, just as you do today in parks, malls, libraries, and other public places where accommodations like benches and water fountains already exist.
For our ideal living quarters, though, the difference would be that, instead of mere water fountains and benches, you'd have access to cushioned resting areas, computers, pleasing scenery, and food kiosks. The analog to mall security in this scenario would be a centralized computer, complete with a camera system, alarm system, and connection to the main global network, where all information regarding individuals and material resources would be tracked (everyone would be monitored by a GPS in orbit around the planet). Of course, without money, there'd be no reason to hoard items and, more importantly, no reason to steal, so while the computer's sensors might get tripped from time to time, items leaving the premises wouldn't be one of the reasons for this.
Temporary residence would be encouraged, as exploration, innovation, and creativity would be valued in the place of self-indulgence, material excess, and expectation. The people within a particular housing unit's major lounge areas would likely be entirely different from one month to the next, with those bored of the area or finished with a particular project moving on to see the rest of the world, and newcomers (or past frequenters returning for one reason or another) constantly stopping by to relax and enjoy themselves.
Entertainment would vary, and would likely depend on the technology available per the time period. Modern examples might include fully immersive video games and other kinds of audio/visual simulations, Internet access from major kiosks for learning and interacting with content, mood lighting, and replicas of outdoor locations. Social activities would also be available, such as story-telling, game-playing (including physical games, though video games are already becoming increasingly physical), teaching, humor, etc.
Walls would, in many cases, be transparent; this would discourage privacy in public (i.e. the way that we treat places of work and cars today), promote open communication among everyone (e.g. if you're gay or really into Satanic heavy metal, you'd tell the middle aged woman sitting in the lounge area and never think anything of it), and increase the vitamin D intake for the population. The exception to the transparent walls rule would be private rooms, for the sake of allotting some amount of time for both personal contemplation and sleep.
Although such private areas would be available, when it would come to sleeping, they would be built to accommodate only one person, as group formation would be discouraged. Of course, it would be acceptable for a group of, say, four people, for example, to seek out a quiet room for planning an activity or working on a project, but each room would probably have one bed in order to both discourage the development of special needs (i.e. cutting down on pointless customization of infrastructure while in the process standardizing room sizes) and promote social transparency among the populace.
Rooms would be checked out by a user who would manually change the status of a door's computer from vacant to occupied, with additional settings including a "Please don't just barge in, but I'm open to talk if you need me" setting and a "Do not disturb" setting; the latter would call a computer-authenticated lock, and would also be monitored by the central computer in case the sensor ever remained flipped for substantially longer than is required by humans for sleep -- a sign of someone hiding something, in many cases.
There would be no need to "check out" a room the way that you do at a hotel, as the computer would handle everything by automatically updating the database to reflect room status changes. Check-out times would also be nonexistent, as the number of rooms per living area would always exceed the average population traffic size; where the main computer for a given population center detected that the average number of tracked people within the defined boundaries of the center was encroaching on an arbitrary maximum, an alert would be generated for someone to initiate a new building project for a separate housing unit.
So what about going places? The above description might be fine for a place to live, but what about the exploration that would allegedly be promoted by this model? Isn't what I've just written about the same as what we have today, only larger in scope and more socially open?
Well, no, it isn't. Remember that point two was that there'd be no occupations. Let's run through an example.
I, along with five people whom I've never met before, am a de facto overseer of a research project aimed at developing a way to clone organs. For convenience purposes, our research team has unanimously consented, without intervention from a third party or "leader," to meet at a specific population center designated on our communications devices' maps by an ID number (everyone would have a handheld computer that would provide him or her with names, IDs, and contact information for everyone else).
Perhaps we've chosen the population center based on the recreational activities available there. In any case, we convene at one of its living areas with tentative dates for when we'll be finished our research; there are no deadlines. To get to the population center, we take the public transportation system -- a series of interconnected, centrally managed, and automated vehicles tracked by the GPS. Once we arrive, we live there for about three months, often checking out local places of entertainment or enjoying time at the beach, but never really needing to go anywhere substantially far away. Remember: Every time that anyone in the society needs to commute to a new place of work, he changes where he "lives" to match.
My associates and I become close friends over the three months that we work together, sending our progress to the central computer for anyone in the entire society to read and add onto at any time. Once we've determined that we've made a substantial amount of progress and have heard back from a few interested individuals who want to pick up where we left off (without needing to preserve some profit-generating model, we'd have no reason to shun those interested in temporarily taking the reins), we part ways to relax or work on another, unrelated project elsewhere on the planet -- even if the latter project has nothing to do with medical science.
Contractors, freelance artists, and Wikipedia editors already do this; with the right amount of granular control, central management, and redundancy, real work can get done much faster in this model than it can in our current society -- especially given that there are no CEOs to demand that we manufacture the right amount of basketballs by a certain date or show up at exactly 9 AM every morning to begin scanning papers that are perfectly readable in their non-digital forms. The bottom line: Most "work" today is unnecessarily pushed into arbitrary time slots with pointless deadlines, all because the impetus is personal enrichment and not the betterment of society.
Alternatively, perhaps most or all of the research that I just outlined is done remotely, meaning that my imaginary team and I merely communicate via email and video chat, and are free to move around the world as we please. Maintenance and technical jobs might require physical meetings and close proximity to something in case it breaks, but again, as soon as someone else came in to take my place, I'd simply leave to do something else at another location on the planet.
So, there you have it. No ridiculous commutes, no traffic jams, no preposterous amounts of gas wasted every day. If you want to commute to a place and do work there, you go once, live down the street, and leave when your project has been completed. Even if the project takes years to complete -- an unlikely scenario in a sane, granular society with a socialistic bent -- there would never be a physical place of work without some living space within proximity, available to anyone free of charge. Really, if we can do it for libraries, we can do it for our homes.
Want to save gas? Don't do less; change the locations of your activities.
Let's get started with the following two premises:
1. Our entire infrastructure is out of whack.
2. This is caused by bad values.
We waste things. A lot. The environmentalist movement seems to be aware of this, but in their quest to find a bad guy to blame, they've neglected the vast majority of the waste that humans produce in this society; perhaps one of their biggest blunders has been their blatant disregard for how we manage oil. Sure, there's lots of talk -- some of it legitimate -- about alternative energy, but what never gets discussed is that we could have continued to use oil for far longer than we will if we'd only structured society itself in a more rational, efficient way.
Let's pretend that society as we know it doesn't exist. If humans were to be dropped onto the Earth today, with big brains, language, and a need to understand whether the universe has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, how would their society (or societies) be structured in the ideal scenario?
For one, there'd be no suburbs. For two, there'd be no occupations.
Something that people generally don't seem to realize about jobs is that, in addition to being nauseatingly bureaucratic in nature, they're usually designed only to help someone else do his job; furthermore, for some reason, they don't really end.
Curious, isn't it? If jobs actually accomplished something, wouldn't they end at some point? If you need to paint your house, doesn't the need terminate once the house has been painted? You don't devise new ways to paint the house just to keep your family on the payroll, do you?
You might bring up more indefinite chores, like taking out the trash. To this, I say:
1. We already have the technology available to us to automate the majority of modern jobs. The only reason for why 90% of our jobs haven't been taken over by machines is that people need to make money in order to live. If we didn't need to make money, then machines would already be doing most of our menial chores.
2. Menial chores do not require that you hop into a car and drive for two hours to an entirely different building every day at a set time which cannot be violated. This is because menial chores are not enough work to constitute a true occupation, generally; they can be done by anyone whenever they're required to be done without forcing someone in particular to be "the guy" who does them at the same time every day. In short, while the chore of taking out the trash may be indefinite, my role as the person who handles the chore needn't be.
Number 2 takes us to the first assertion above: that the suburbs are a pathetic waste of resources.
Here's how our living spaces should be structured instead:
Housing units as large as one entire neighborhood -- or at least as large as some substantial portion of one, depending on architectural technicalities -- would exist all over the Earth. These units would look something like shopping malls in their openness, though they'd probably be much more aesthetically pleasing, given that no money means no capitalistic concerns over architectural parsimony. They would also contain individual quarters. There would be no leases, no deeds, and no mortgages, just as there are no leases, deeds, or mortgages for those who routinely and lawfully enter shopping malls all over the country every day today; if you wanted to take up residence within a housing unit, you'd simply walk inside at your leisure, just as you do today in parks, malls, libraries, and other public places where accommodations like benches and water fountains already exist.
For our ideal living quarters, though, the difference would be that, instead of mere water fountains and benches, you'd have access to cushioned resting areas, computers, pleasing scenery, and food kiosks. The analog to mall security in this scenario would be a centralized computer, complete with a camera system, alarm system, and connection to the main global network, where all information regarding individuals and material resources would be tracked (everyone would be monitored by a GPS in orbit around the planet). Of course, without money, there'd be no reason to hoard items and, more importantly, no reason to steal, so while the computer's sensors might get tripped from time to time, items leaving the premises wouldn't be one of the reasons for this.
Temporary residence would be encouraged, as exploration, innovation, and creativity would be valued in the place of self-indulgence, material excess, and expectation. The people within a particular housing unit's major lounge areas would likely be entirely different from one month to the next, with those bored of the area or finished with a particular project moving on to see the rest of the world, and newcomers (or past frequenters returning for one reason or another) constantly stopping by to relax and enjoy themselves.
Entertainment would vary, and would likely depend on the technology available per the time period. Modern examples might include fully immersive video games and other kinds of audio/visual simulations, Internet access from major kiosks for learning and interacting with content, mood lighting, and replicas of outdoor locations. Social activities would also be available, such as story-telling, game-playing (including physical games, though video games are already becoming increasingly physical), teaching, humor, etc.
Walls would, in many cases, be transparent; this would discourage privacy in public (i.e. the way that we treat places of work and cars today), promote open communication among everyone (e.g. if you're gay or really into Satanic heavy metal, you'd tell the middle aged woman sitting in the lounge area and never think anything of it), and increase the vitamin D intake for the population. The exception to the transparent walls rule would be private rooms, for the sake of allotting some amount of time for both personal contemplation and sleep.
Although such private areas would be available, when it would come to sleeping, they would be built to accommodate only one person, as group formation would be discouraged. Of course, it would be acceptable for a group of, say, four people, for example, to seek out a quiet room for planning an activity or working on a project, but each room would probably have one bed in order to both discourage the development of special needs (i.e. cutting down on pointless customization of infrastructure while in the process standardizing room sizes) and promote social transparency among the populace.
Rooms would be checked out by a user who would manually change the status of a door's computer from vacant to occupied, with additional settings including a "Please don't just barge in, but I'm open to talk if you need me" setting and a "Do not disturb" setting; the latter would call a computer-authenticated lock, and would also be monitored by the central computer in case the sensor ever remained flipped for substantially longer than is required by humans for sleep -- a sign of someone hiding something, in many cases.
There would be no need to "check out" a room the way that you do at a hotel, as the computer would handle everything by automatically updating the database to reflect room status changes. Check-out times would also be nonexistent, as the number of rooms per living area would always exceed the average population traffic size; where the main computer for a given population center detected that the average number of tracked people within the defined boundaries of the center was encroaching on an arbitrary maximum, an alert would be generated for someone to initiate a new building project for a separate housing unit.
So what about going places? The above description might be fine for a place to live, but what about the exploration that would allegedly be promoted by this model? Isn't what I've just written about the same as what we have today, only larger in scope and more socially open?
Well, no, it isn't. Remember that point two was that there'd be no occupations. Let's run through an example.
I, along with five people whom I've never met before, am a de facto overseer of a research project aimed at developing a way to clone organs. For convenience purposes, our research team has unanimously consented, without intervention from a third party or "leader," to meet at a specific population center designated on our communications devices' maps by an ID number (everyone would have a handheld computer that would provide him or her with names, IDs, and contact information for everyone else).
Perhaps we've chosen the population center based on the recreational activities available there. In any case, we convene at one of its living areas with tentative dates for when we'll be finished our research; there are no deadlines. To get to the population center, we take the public transportation system -- a series of interconnected, centrally managed, and automated vehicles tracked by the GPS. Once we arrive, we live there for about three months, often checking out local places of entertainment or enjoying time at the beach, but never really needing to go anywhere substantially far away. Remember: Every time that anyone in the society needs to commute to a new place of work, he changes where he "lives" to match.
My associates and I become close friends over the three months that we work together, sending our progress to the central computer for anyone in the entire society to read and add onto at any time. Once we've determined that we've made a substantial amount of progress and have heard back from a few interested individuals who want to pick up where we left off (without needing to preserve some profit-generating model, we'd have no reason to shun those interested in temporarily taking the reins), we part ways to relax or work on another, unrelated project elsewhere on the planet -- even if the latter project has nothing to do with medical science.
Contractors, freelance artists, and Wikipedia editors already do this; with the right amount of granular control, central management, and redundancy, real work can get done much faster in this model than it can in our current society -- especially given that there are no CEOs to demand that we manufacture the right amount of basketballs by a certain date or show up at exactly 9 AM every morning to begin scanning papers that are perfectly readable in their non-digital forms. The bottom line: Most "work" today is unnecessarily pushed into arbitrary time slots with pointless deadlines, all because the impetus is personal enrichment and not the betterment of society.
Alternatively, perhaps most or all of the research that I just outlined is done remotely, meaning that my imaginary team and I merely communicate via email and video chat, and are free to move around the world as we please. Maintenance and technical jobs might require physical meetings and close proximity to something in case it breaks, but again, as soon as someone else came in to take my place, I'd simply leave to do something else at another location on the planet.
So, there you have it. No ridiculous commutes, no traffic jams, no preposterous amounts of gas wasted every day. If you want to commute to a place and do work there, you go once, live down the street, and leave when your project has been completed. Even if the project takes years to complete -- an unlikely scenario in a sane, granular society with a socialistic bent -- there would never be a physical place of work without some living space within proximity, available to anyone free of charge. Really, if we can do it for libraries, we can do it for our homes.
Want to save gas? Don't do less; change the locations of your activities.
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