The Underpopulation Bomb

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Kevin Kelly on what we should be worried about:

The picture for the latter half of this century will look like this: Increasing technology, cool stuff that extends human life; more older people who live longer, millions of robots, but few young people. Another way to look at the human population in 100 years from now is that we’ll have the same number of over-60-year olds, but several billion fewer youth.

Here is the challenge: this is a world where every year there is a smaller audience than the year before, a smaller market for your goods or services, fewer workers to choose from, and a ballooning elder population that must be cared for. We’ve never seen this in modern times; our progress has always paralleled rising populations, bigger audiences, larger markets and bigger pools of workers. It is hard to see how a declining yet aging population functions as an engine for increasing the standard of living every year. To do so would require a completely different economic system, one that we are not prepared for at all right now.

Consciousness

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Conscious book cover“The idea that humans are special, that they are singled out by the gift of consciousness above all other creatures, stems from the deeply held Judeo-Christian belief that we occupy a privileged place in the order of things, a belief with a biblical but no empirical basis. We are not special. We are just one species among uncountable others.”

“Imagine a construction set of a thousand different types of LEGO bricks of distinct colors, shapes, and sizes. The human cerebral cortex has sixteen billion bricks chosen from these types, assembled according to fantastically elaborate rules, such as a red 2×4 brick is linked to a blue 2×4 but only if it is near a yellow 2×2 roof tile and a green 2×6 piece. From this is born the vast interconnectedness of the brain.”

“It is not the nature of the stuff that the brain is made out of that matters for mind, it is rather the organization of that stuff – the way the parts of the system are hooked up , their causal interactions.”

— Consciousness by Christof Koch

Django Unchained

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From Bob Cesca’s review of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained:

“The abomination of slavery in the United States and especially the psychopathy of slave owners is what will lastingly stick with me about the movie, and I’m strangely grateful for it. I’m grateful to have been reminded of the shocking truth that half of this nation as recently as 150 years ago treated African Americans as livestock to be abused and exploited however they pleased, and why, until 1861, the other half did nothing to stop it. In the end, perhaps Tarantino sought to make us all want to be Django and Dr. Schultz — to inflict justice and retribution upon the purveyors of that loathsome, nightmarish endeavor.”

I felt like I was watching something more than a gory western but would not have been able to explain why. Mr. Cesca’s review captures what I was thinking and feeling about this movie.

Twitter Radio

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Twitter is my first source for breaking news. If anything big (that I care about) happens, it will show up first in my Twitter feed. I guess a cable news channel might come close or a good all-news radio station (do those still exist?) but my Twitter stream is non-stop in my pocket. Smart news organization (NPR and Reuters, for example) know they need to have their stories where I am, rather than try to get me to come to where they are.
twitter-radio

Keep the channel open

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“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” — Martha Graham

Scott Adams: Robots

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“I predict that someday robots will have superior rights to humans in specific areas of life because robots can be trusted (programmed) and humans cannot. … I will go so far as to predict that someday it will be illegal for a human to practice medicine because robots will be so much more reliable. In the long transition period, which has already started and will last another twenty years, humans will be in charge of what the technology does. Eventually those roles will reverse because technology will be so much more reliable than humans. Future generations will be appalled that humans were ever allowed to perform invasive surgery on other humans.”

“At some point the real cost of healthcare, energy, construction, transportation, farming, and just about every other basic expense will fall by 90% as robots get involved. It would be absurd to assume we know anything about the economy in thirty years. Nothing will look the same.”

Floating in Extraordinariness

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Kevin Kelly thinks we’ve reached a point where “rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we’ll float in extraordinariness.”

“The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.”

“That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.”

Day One

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Feels like I’ve been “retiring” for a long time. Months. Didn’t plan it that way but it sort of dragged out. I grew weary of talking and thinking about it and assumed others did. But a few people have asked about The First Day of the Death of Your Life so here’s a brief run down.

Got to the Soldier of Fortune Command Center (Coffee Zone) around 8:00 a.m. Shot the shit with my buddy Clyde for a couple of hours until he had to go to work. He’s supposed to be retired, too, but “doing nothing” is not an option for him.

Ran some errands and then drove to nearby city to have lunch with one of my house-mates from college. Back home for some (daylight!) fetch with Lucy and Hattie (the Golden Retrievers). A little meditation then off to the gym for 45 min. Really didn’t have much trouble filling the day but there was a noticeably different tempo. Almost anticipation. Probably what dogs experience when they find themselves on the other side of the “invisible fence.” Waiting for that shock that never comes.

Stay tuned.