Comment by lhh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lhh | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed this - really energizing and inspiring. It's always great to get that jolt once in a while.

>> "We now, for the first time ever, have the technology and resources necessary to make the world a great place for everyone. We can provide adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare for everyone, using only a fraction of our labor and resources. This means that we can put an end to wage-slavery. I don't have to work. I choose to work. And I believe that everyone deserves the same freedom I have. If done right, it's also economically superior, meaning that we will all have more wealth."

This is some deep stuff. This would really change everything, and mark a major turning point in human history I think. And the statement that providing these things to everyone would only require a fraction of our resources I think is actually true. The capitalist in me feels that this could never happen, but the pragmatist in me feels there's nothing better we could do to dramatically improve the lives of just about everyone on the planet.

There are so many questions though... forms of collectivism have been tried and have failed many times. Are things different now?

All society is some form of collectivism :)

As is often the case with disruptive innovation, I think the solution is something non-obvious and non-coercive, more bottom-up than top-down.

My fear is these kind of "disruptive innovation" will cause violence.

That would definitely be bad and certainly not qualify as "better for everyone". It's important to have inspirational visions of the future, not just nightmares.

I think VR could be one of these bottom-up forces of transformation. There is no fundamental limit on virtual lands and goods. In VR, every person could have his/her own virtual palace without imposing burdens on other humans (except for maybe on the sysadmins running the VR servers). Even if your physical surroundings are modest, your virtual surroundings could be breathtaking.

With more of our lives occurring in the inexpensive digital world, perhaps we'll be less concerned with the expensive physical one and thus less concerned with working for money.

Still gotta stay alive in your base reality. Most of the world's problems aren't going to be solved by the tech sector - the tech sector depends on a stable and reasonably managed, non-corrupt government.

The exact thing missing in pretty much all the worst parts of the world.

Dominant assurance contracts might be interesting here. It's a mechanism like Kickstarter, but if a project can't reach it's funding goal, the entrepreneur pays something the people who tried to support it. This makes waiting for others to fund a project that would benefit you as a side effect an inferior strategy to joining to fund it yourself. It would also make marketing the project (to the people that would benefit from it, in order for them to fund it) easier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_ass...

Imagine a consultancy that organizes this type of deals. Identify projects worth doing with well defined and easy to reach beneficiaries and offer them this kind of contract. If that's properly done, they would want in and fund it. Then hire someone to execute. Repeat.

Perhaps this would be easier to do with geographically local projects first. Also it seems like the expertise required to organize this type of deals would be very different from the expertise required to execute them when they are funded, hence the separation of jobs. Fortunately, the projects don't have to be very sophisticated, they can be something as simple as a playground in an area that needs one.

Whether you approach society from a primarily cooperative (collectivist) approach or from a primarily competitive (capitalist) direction, both angles eventually have the same problem: over-centralization, which stifles the freedom and diversity necessary for a system to evolve. Or, they may have a different problem with too much fragmentation and lack of coherence.

What we need is a system that is both holistic and coherent but also componentized and diverse.

There is quite a lot of techno-communist thinking going around that fails to recognize this problem of over-centralization which has numerous times in the past shown how dangerous and repressive it can be. A hierarchical system, like a tree, has vulnerabilities and entrenchment in each root or branch.

The last time I said something like this, a Marxist just told me I was asking for two contradictory things that was impossible, and implied that the answer was Marxism.

How can we have a system that is well-organized, with different parts that are aware of eachother and the big picture without a lot of redundancy and waste or counter-productivity, but at the same time is set up in a way that makes it free to experiment and form new directions and even refactor old ones?

I think that is actually a very hard problem, but one that can be solved. If anyone knows of a good approach let me know.

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