From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Nov 03 2002 - 04:46:58 MST
On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 07:49:36PM +1100, Brett Paatsch wrote:
>
> I guess it shouldn't be too surprising if most attempts to found
> virtual nations fail. I think the democracies that are today the
> USA and France would have seemed like pipedreams at one
> stage too. I don't presume a virtual country would be easy to
> create but I do presume it would be possible.
The nations we see today are the ones that won over the
alternatives. Who remembers Gran Colombia or the independent
Västergötland? http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/misc/balkanus.htm
shows just how many potential nations existed in North America,
which doesn't really have that much history. Chance and happenstance
have determined quite a few borders and nations.
> (Anders)
> > I am a firm believer in spontaneous order, but usually the
> > spontaneous order has to be created by someone :-) What I
> > mean is that organic emergence of organisations is an enormously
> > powerful process where different approaches can compete and
> > interact, allowing the best to grow and learn from the failures of
> > the others. But each organisation in this soup of hopeful
> > institutionlets is the creation of somebody. I don't know if there
> > are optimal design principles that work for organisations (my
> > hunch is that they only work if you have clear and simple goals),
> > but it might be worth a try.
>
> I think your probably right about clear and simple goals. But not
> all organisations are equally complex or ambitious. One possible
> clear goal for a virtual country might be to work towards a world in
> which all people, or at least all it's citizens, could reasonably expect
> to live a radically longer life. This goal seems clear enough but
> achieving it in my life time seems to me to be anything but simple.
The problem is that it is not sufficient to determine policy. As an
example, consider the current socialist-capitalist debate thread.
The socialist side would think that a socialist solution would be
likely to achieve life extension - by distributing resources towards
this specific goal and then distributing the results to everybody
they would achieve it more efficiently. The capitalists would also
have reason to think they have a better solution - capitalism
promotes faster economic and technological growth for what people
want (and life extension belongs to that category), and once the
technology is there it will rapidly become cheaper due to
supply/demand and competition, while the population is becoming
well-off due to the prosperous economy. My point here is that basing
a country only on "we want more life!" is not enough, since it
leaves the "how" part entirely undetermined. It is better to try to
define some higher-level goals where the life extension part is a
natural consequence.
> I can't see that any existing national democratic structure would be
> able to credibly undertake such a goal, or that any politician would
> dare to articulate it. Indeed, with the possible exception of Mike
> Perry ("Forever for All") I don't think I have heard any
> transhumanists talk about the conquest of aging for *everybody*.
Hmm, maybe because most take it for granted? Even if life extension
technology appears entirely within a pure free market context it
would tend to spread - people want it, so there will be an incentive
to find ways of selling it cheaper, and that will drive the spread
to lower and lower income levels. Eventually there might be a price
limit, but at that point it seems reasonable to expect that various
charities could help. And this was assuming 100% capitalism, with no
trace of national health care systems and similar things (actually,
I expect that such systems might slow the spread and to some extent
exacerbate social differenses contrary to their intentions, but that
is another thread).
While there are transhumanists who doesn't care for anybody but
themselves, there are also plenty of transhumanists who do.
Remember Greg Buch's text about extrosattvas
(http://users.aol.com/gburch3/extrostv.html)
> Which raises the questions for me, is it implicit to the thinking of
> most transhumanists that large numbers of citizens in western
> democracies, or people in the world in general, will simply miss out
> on and accept missing out on radically longer lives? And if so, do
> transhumanists really believe that the general population and existing
> political structures progressing at their current rates will permit the
> conquest of aging in their lifetimes? If so, (and I don't know that it
> is so), perhaps there is a need for some group reality checking here
> too.
Permitting is not an issue. The current demographic change is
looming above many planners and is regarded as a major national
calamity in many countries - why did they permit it? Because
promoting or trying to prevent something doesn't work well when that
something is a complex issue involving lots of people and economies
with individual goals. The planners/political structures can help
and hinder, but they are not the only relevant players.
I personally think that the *current* structures both hinder the
development of life extending technologies and won't be able to
handle them. But it is unlikely that they will persist as they are
in the face of a changing world. The issue is rather how we want
them to change, and how to avoid too much blood on the streets in
some places. I think both the assumption that it up to us, the
transhumanist avant garde to lead the glorious transformation, or
the assumption that things will work out because it is the
inevitability of history/technology/the market are wrong. The truth
is a complex mixture between these forces - ideas matter, because
they affect what people dream about the future and set out to
implement - institutions matter, and they can be created not just
politically but privately too. It is all very interactive and
interesting, but it is not neat.
> I think that realistic design principles for a virtual country would
> involve at least three aspects.
>
> First it would involve articulating a clear vision of what the virtual
> country might do that existent countries cannot. This vision would
> need to be sufficiently compelling that it would grab the interest of
> and be attractive to a wide group of people.
Note that you don't need to satisfy everybody, just plenty of
people. Normal countries have to satisfy most people.
> Second the design principles would need to be firmly grounded in
> a realistic appraisal of the strengths and limitations of existing
> democratic countries, institutions and systems. This is perhaps
> harder to do than observing, researching and extrapolating the
> trends in developing technology.
You might want to look at what people have been writing about
demarchy (http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/92kio.html,
http://www.globalideasbank.org/showidea.php?idea=3052) - I don't
know if it would work, but it shows that there is room for
creativity in democracy design.
> Third, the design principles would need to address in a practical
> way how we get from here to there. What is the critical sequence
> of bootstrapping steps? How could a virtual country best be rolled
> out, being born, as it must be, from within the jurisdiction of
> existing nation states?
This depends a lot on what you want to achieve with it. The Vatican
does an admirable job for its purpose "maintain the Roman Catholic
Church", but is useless as a research powerhouse (actually, per
capita it is not bad, but it is still too small on its own). Some
goals might just require a slip of paper saying that a small piece
of ground is soverign, others require a major continent.
> 1) National democracies are poorly equipped to manage things such
> as the environment and to civilise global financial systems. Quite
> naturally as part of the political process they also favour the interests
> of their own nationals over foreigners to the extent that they can
> influence such things. Foreigners don't vote and only the elected
> politician can implement policy. Further pollies must work to electral
> cycles which can be relatively short.
The problem here seems to be that the countries themselves exist in
a situation with no property rights or other rights. International
treaties and international law are attempts to handle this, but
recently there have been some notable setbacks. Another way of
dealing with it is of course to create metanations like the EU, but
it doesn't seem to be particularly effective in the above issues.
> 2) Human rights are at various stages of development in various
> countries. Obtaining cheaper labour draws multinationals to the
> underdeveloped world not because multinationals are evil but because
> investors like superfunds quite reasonably want the best returns on
> investment (to be competitive) and so companies have to compete as
> best they can in the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Note that things are not as simple as that; if the cheapest labor
possible was the issue, then Haiti and Belize would be booming. Many
companies cannot relocate because they require employees of a
certain level of education. The only international businesses that
really work in the worst parts of the world are mining simple raw
materials like oil. Improved human rights tend to lead to a
bootstrapping effect, which is quite good for the economy (just look
at India), but there are many structural problems to deal with.
Multinationals are just part of the equation.
> 3) The processes of technological innovation for all its promise is
> nonetheless undermining the basis of employment and the potential
> livelihood for large numbers of willing and capable workers, not just in
> developing countries, but also in developed ones. This increasingly,
> includes highly skilled knowledge workers such as those in IT. I further
> argued, picking up a point raised by Hans Moravec in "Robot" that AI
> will accelerate this trend and that the smartest thing for people to be
> holding on to is not their job (which for many will be impossible) but
> their vote. With their vote they can at least vote for a redistribution of
> wealth. Provided of course the national tax systems can still collect it.
I think Hans Moravec is economically naive, he doesn't see economy
as a dynamical system but merely as production and consumption.
Why are we not seeing out-of-work stable boys due to the car?
Because they got other jobs, including the new jobs (mechanic, gas
attendant, autodesigner etc) the car created. If nanotech makes
manufacturing less labor intensive, people will (with a certain
painful delay) move to other jobs like designing the nano-templates.
There might be an upper limit due to human intelligence limitations,
but I doubt it - the space of possible jobs is many dimensional.
If technological progress was leading to unemployment we would see a
strong trend towards this across the last century, but to my
knowledge there is no such thing. We would also see more of it in
well developed nations compared to less developed, but that does not
occur.
> 4) Even strong countries like the US cannot stop the wealthy from
> using tax havens, and the wealthy can't be blamed for acting in their
> own interests, so democracies leak the money that their very openness
> and stability provided the opportunity to create.
There is a difference between democracy and taxation. There are
low-tax democracies like the US and Luxenburg that attracts
more investors than Cayman islands and similar places. The reason is
simply that the growth is better and you can spend your money more
freely.
>
> These points may well be simplistic or wrong. They are not original to
> me. I think I picked up most of them from a book I read a couple of
> years ago by William Greider. "One World Ready or Not: The manic
> rush to global capitalism". But if they are right then what is suggested
> is a global financial system that is spirally out of control in a way that
> no
> country, politician, business conglomerate, NGO, union or currently
> existing institution is able to control or to easily break out of. What is
> suggested a systemic problem arising as a result of a global financial
> system that is not underpinned by a global society. This appears to be
> a problem that has no simple solution and is not readily solvable by any
> of the majors stakeholders themselves. Any stakeholder that does
> attempt to change the system stands to take a substantial hit. It is also
> worth noting I think that it is not a cycle for which one can
> meaningfully talk of blame.
As you might see, I disagree with many of these points; things are
not as simple. But even if they were right, it seems that the above
view would invalidate any new nation scheme since it could not work
without fitting into the cycle (it is roughly the same problem as
deep greens have, when they claim human activity is basically
destructive - it makes their own attempts to fix things suspect).
> I agree they are not machines. And they are not *merely* solutions
> to particular problems. But I think they are *importantly* and
> *partly* solutions to problems. Societies afford their members a
> better chance in the struggle for survival and for resources. It seems
> the simplest form of a society is a family and as human beings are
> born dependent (unable to even lift their heads) we are predisposed
> to be social as naturally and necessarily as we are predisposed to eat.
>
> I think societies are at least partially a solution to our
> inabilities to satisfy our needs and desires alone. I think the
> ancestors of homo sapiens were social before they were rational,
> but this doesn't alter that we now can rationally recognize that
> collectively we may each do better, sometimes.
Sure. I have no disagreement with that, despite my libertarian
leanings. What I think is problematic is to try to construct a
society as a solution to a particular problem. Optimizing one thing
usually means sacrificing other things, and such lopsided societies
tend to produce nasty side effects if they hold together.
As I see it the only problem a society can legitimately be said to
solve is "allowing its citizens to live a good life". A society with
space colonisation as a goal would start making a trade-off between
the good life and space. On the other hand, a society where many
people wanted to go to space and set out to implement the project,
there space would go hand in hand with living the good life.
> I do think the rich, or more specifically the powerful, are an important
> factor. In any systemic change they rightly fear they have the most to
> loose. They are therefore the ones most likely to oppose change
> sometimes perhaps simply because it is change, and possibly, without
> even bothering to take the time to understand it. I think there are
> plenty of precedents for this.
Some, but remember who also wants the most return on investments?
The rich have sponsored the move to the information society, despite
its drastic social and economic changes.
I actually consider the idea that conservative rich hold us back to
be a Hollywood meme, at least here in the developed world. They are
quite adaptable and know they are placed where they can take
advantage of changes.
> Perhaps the hardest cohort to persuade are the affluent religious who
> sense they have it pretty good in this life and believe that immortality
> is coming to them automatically in the next one.
Do you need to persuade them? I think you are seeing things in a bit
US-centric way. Think about the highly secular (by US standards)
Europe with its aging boom, or the Japanese - there you have huge
markets with vested interests in the biomedical industry. If the US
slacks in developing life extension, watch Roche, Ciba-Geigy and
Astra jump on it.
> I think the market for life extension technologies has been historically
> quite strong. Its the products that have been weak.
Exactly. Unfortunately they still are.
Worth thinking about: if radical life extension takes ten years to
diffuse through society to anybody who wants it (seems to be a
normal diffusion time for new inventions and medicines these days),
only the oldest will be seriously hurt by missing out on the
diffusion from the original expensive elitist treatment to the
drugstore version. While sad, it is a small group. Even a far slower
diffusion would have a relatively small effect due to the already
long human lifespan. It is only if costs are held artificially up
(for example by vested interests in the medical profession limiting
the number of doctors that can provide a treatment) it becomes a
serious class issue.
> (Anders)
> > If we can show people that we are approaching a cooperation
> > revolution where a great deal of desirable, practical and moral
> > achievements are possible, then we are going to get the social
> > mechanisms we need to support this.
>
> But are we in fact approaching a cooperation revolution? I'd like
> to think so, but I thought that particular point was still to be
> determined. I think that humanity in the aggregate *is*progressing
> but I am not sure there is any evidence of an imminent
> cooperative revolution in the same way as there are indications of
> a technological one.
Me neither. But in order for it (or a cooperation increase, at
least) to happen clear and appealing visions have to be presented.
Progress is not something that just happens, it is the result of
people doing things.
> PS: Perhaps the good thing about posts with gloomy aspects
> going to the extropian list is that if poor prognoses are justified
> corrective action is better able to be taken, if not, education is
> a likely result for someone. I can stand it :-)
I think you raise a great deal of issues we have to deal with. I
think a lot of the gloom is wrong, but that means we have to show it
to be wrong and do it to a lot of people too. Very useful, and
educational for all of us.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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