Good News! As I announced earlier this year, I have been working with William Shanley and Eudald Lerga since February to create a working prototype for a synergic help exchange using the mechanism of GIFTegrity.  Our gifting commUnity will open to the public on July 4th 2006. Please join us in offering Gifts to others in need, or in seeking to meet some of our needs through the Gifts of others. –Timothy

Happy INTERdependence Day

William Shanley

Reposted from the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Accelerating Acceleration

Buckminster Fuller

And we’re at a point where I now have what would seem absolutely incredible to generations before. I’ve now completed thirty-seven circuits of our Earth–kind of zig-zagging circuits, not straight around. Not tourist. Just responding to requests to appear here and there, to lecture at universities or design some structure, or whatever it may be. So that is in the everyday pattern, that I am circuiting that earth. Certainly makes evidence that we are dealing in totality of humanity not the–up to my generation–completely divided humanity, spread very far apart on our planet.

My father was in the leather importing business in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and he imported from two places, apparently–Buenos Aires and India, for bringing in leather for the shoe industry, which was centered in that time in the Boston area. His mail, or a trip he would like to make to Argentina, took two months each way. His trip to India, or the mail, took exactly three months each way. It seemed absolutely logical to humanity when early in this century Rudyard Kipling, the English poet, said “East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” It was a very, very rare matter for any human being to make such a travel as that, taking all those months. There were not many ships that could take him there.

All that has just changed in my lifetime, to where I’m not one of the very few making these circuits of the Earth, but I am one of probably getting to be pretty close to twenty million now who are making, living a life like that around our planet. And very much the whole young world is doing so. I keep meeting my students of various universities from around the world half way round the world again. They’re all getting to be living as world people. This is a very sudden emergence of some new kind of relationship to our Universe being manifest. None of it was planned. There was nobody in the time of my father, my mother, in the time I was brought up, prophesying any of the things I just said.

The year I was born, Marconi invented the wireless, but it did not get into any practical use until I was twelve years of age, when the first steamship sent an SOS, when it was in distress, by wireless. Think of it. Great many miles–and the world began to know the ship was in distress, and a ship then rushed to its aid. Absolutely unexpected. My father and mother were saying, “Wireless? Nonsense!” And, when I was three the electron was discovered and nobody talked about that; it wasn’t in any of the newspapers. Nobody was interested in the electron, they didn’t know what was the electron or whether it was discovered. I was brought up that humanity would never get to the North Pole. Absolutely impossible. They’d never get to the South Pole. On Mercator maps, it didn’t even show anything up–the northernmost points were a very rugged kind of a line, if you see it, with nothing beyond that. When I was fourteen, man did get to the North Pole. When I was sixteen, he got to the South Pole. The “impossibles” were happening.

Like all other little boys, I was making paper darts that you make at school–boys must’ve been making them for a very long time. And we were hoping it might be able to get to flying. Parents would say, “Darling, it’s very amusing for you to try that, but it’s inherently impossible for man to fly.” So when I was seven, the Wright brothers suddenly flew, and my memory is vivid enough of seven to remember that, for about a year, the engineering societies would try to prove it was a hoax, that it was absolutely impossible for man to do that.

So then, not only was there radio, but when I was twenty-three–which I guess many in this room are not twenty-three yet,–when I was twenty-three, the human voice came over the radio for the first time. That’s an incredible matter. I was forty-five when we had our first television. It couldn’t be a more recent matter, and yet, nobody thought at that time, they didn’t know you were going to have transistors. They didn’t know man was going to have satellites going around the earth, they didn’t know we were going to have radio relay satellites, with programs coming out of any part of the Earth to any other part of the Earth. Not one of these steps was ever anticipated by any of the others.

So having experienced that, I also experienced living with my fellow human beings who, I find, no sooner does it happen, says “I knew it all the time. I’m not one of those to be surprised; I was totally in on it, you know, I was a little bit responsible.” There’s a strange vanity of man, I think the vanity that he has was essential to his being born naked and helpless and having to make the fantastic number of mistakes he had to make in order to really learn something. I think he is so disgruntled, so dismayed by the mistakes and the errors that he would never have been able to carry on–would’ve been absolutely discouraged. So he was given this strange vanity to say–to continually make himself exempt, that he was some kind of privileged and always in, and he is able to quite clearly deceive himself a great deal. So I find everybody today–let anybody do that unless it is absolutely simple and logical.

The first census of the population of the United States was taken in 1790, just after the war was over. In 1810, the United States Congress decided we ought to have a census of the wealth of America, so the Treasury Department had a very large survey made of people to determine their wealth. In 1810, there were a million families in America. In 1810, there were a million human slaves in America. It’s a very sad and very dramatic fact to be revealed if you go back into the records. It looks like every family having a human slave; that was not correct. Very few families owned a slave, comparatively. But the point is that kind of a figure.

So I found that in 1940, in contradistinction to that kind of condition, there were a number of energy-slaves working in the economy rather than human slaves. And I found that–you can go back and look at Fortune Magazine 10th Anniversary Issue, 1940, and you’ll find the number of energy slaves operating per each person, per family. The number of energy-slaves operating in the United States per person was thirty-nine energy slaves per person. Every individual, if you have a family of five, you come pretty close to two hundred slaves working for each family. But energy slaves are really inanimate, in contradistinction to a million–one slave per family–of human slaves. Suddenly you have two hundred non-human slaves doing the work. An enormous step up in the standard of living is represented, as well as doing away with the inhumane idea of the human being being the muscle machine to be commanded. That that change had taken place in such a short period of time–about a hundred and thirty year change–I felt I was discovering something very, very dramatic.

And now I went into the figures in 1940 even more deeply because by then World War II was thoroughly looming, and a great deal of the energy being generated in the United States was going toward war production. So I deducted from the total energy that I would be considering any energy that could be identified as going toward anything that had to do with war. To see then how much energy was actually benefiting the family, the human beings; if the energy was producing a highway for them to go on, I made that primarily for them and not for the war, whatever that might be. I made as strict an accounting as I could to see what was really benefiting the family. So then, I found out how many net energy slaves were really supporting a peaceful life of human beings in America. What I found was one hundred energy slaves per family, approximately–I came to two hundred at the time, and about half of them were really working for the human family itself; the other half were getting ready for war.

I took the criteria of a hundred energy slaves per family as being the criteria for what I call a “have” family. This represented people who were enjoying a really comfortable standard of living. So my criteria for a “have” family: a hundred energy slaves per family.

Now in 1900, taking the total human population, far less than one per cent were in what I called “industrial have” family. So less than one per cent of humanity in 1900. As a consequence of World War II, and the technology I spoke about that was introduced in World War II, it came out four per cent of all humanity were suddenly “industrial haves”which was a very big jump from nothing. In 1951, I was taking a new point on the curve, and I found we’d gotten up to twenty eight per cent of humanity.

I now had enough points on my curve–I had three points–to be able to discover, there’s a radius of change, so I made a constant radius of change, and I extended that radius. And I found that curve was increasing so rapidly that the curve in exactly 2000 AD, we came to 100% of humanity would be enjoying a high standard of living. I saw that that curve could be accelerated, so I made an acceleration curve on my 1951 publishing of this curve and when I took the slower rate, the constant rate of radius, and I found that (this 1951), as of 1970, the curve went through fifty per cent of humanity.

Historically, ninety-nine per cent and more of humanity were
“have-nots’” they were in dire need, and revolution was really rampant. The many would say the fewer are enjoying unfairly, and we have to get up and do something about it. When you go by fifty per cent, I saw for the first time in history, the majority begins to be “haves”, rather than “have-nots.” This would bring about a different way of looking at things. Those who were “haves” would probably find much more information than they ever had before, found they really couldn’t enjoy that “have-ness” as long as they had awareness of the dire
“have-not-ness” of the others. At any rate, this would be a critical point where, for the first time, you would not have the majority rising up to pull down the top. You might really have, then, the tendency of the majority, being on top, to pull the bottom up. This seemed to be, probably, a very new relationship.

In 1951, I marked on my chart, the critical year would be 1970. Using my acceleration it could be somewhere between 1970 and 1975 The most accelerated point would be 1970 and the least accelerated would be 1975. This is the critical period and the curve really did get exactly there at 1970. So we crossed, we’ve been going through a very, very critical time right now. Because this is the point where, I say, it is now being clearly demonstrated to humanity that something is going on, if he is not so myopic and shortsighted as not to really look at such curves. I am really astonished at how little people will look at them.

This kind of awareness that made me want to develop what I called a World Game to try to make it as quickly as possible to make it clear to all humanity what its options were, that changes are going on. There are very big things going on in nature here. I spoke to you about our all coming out of some common womb of permitted ignorance, with enough cushion of resources by which, by trial-and-error to make mistake after mistake, to learn what we’re learning. And this is a very extraordinary moment, I find; suddenly there is–all around the world–literacy. This wasn’t there when I was young.

Win Wenger is a good human. He is always seeking to help his fellow humans solve their problems. The following article was first written in 2004, and then revised in December 2005. 

The Ideal School

Wen Wenger

Throughout the past century, schools have not been willing to accommodate change and meaningful reform. This is partly due to lack of incentive. Bureaucratic structures are not well noted for being results-oriented. Any change represents also change in power relationships, by definition. Those currently at advantage in power relationships can be understandably less than enthusiastic about such changes. There is little in the incentive structure of bureaucracies to offset that factor. The powerful have strong incentive to cling to the status quo.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the results — and the costs — of schooling, all levels public and private, has placed strong pressure on schools to improve. Throughout modern times, however, this has merely resulted in widely ballyhooed “reforms” which were window-dressing only and changed nothing substantial, even though each of those window-dressing “reforms” was hailed at the time as the salvation of education.

These conditions are not expected to change in the near future, except for the worse — as public support erodes and schools begin to break down. We can expect no substantive new reforms to succeed, though a few more window-dressing reforms, each hailed as the salvation, might cycle through before the end.

When sufficient outside pressure is brought, schools do change. Witness the effect of technology giving rise to distance learning though this, in turn, could be made far more effective. Once distance learning is made more effective, existing schools will face severe Darwinian-type pressures, in addition to their self-inflicted difficulties.

Or, we can turn some effort toward creating alternative educational programs and schools, alternatives which model a far better way of educating. One may create the examples to which people can turn. With live alternative examples visibly in place, when the sudden startling collapse of American public education comes, people can jump to the alternative models instead of panicking and making matters worse.

Let us sample some of the options from among the various proposed alternative educational models —

Improve existing systems

1. Improvements in input to the learner
   
   1. Intellectual improvement —
      • Jerome S. Bruner’s “Spiral Curriculum” and the integration of knowledge. See our summer school proposal.
      • General systems theory as a “Rosetta Stone of Knowledge.”
      • Sequencing issues, e.g., the Waldorf schools of Rudolph Steiner (see also “Models of Human Development, below).” Specifically, the issue of matching style and content of instruction to specified stages of human development and functioning.

   2. “Wholistic” improvements to the learner —
      • Summerhill didn’t produce any leaders — did its program eliminate drive?
      • Attempts to emulate Walden Two have run into serious psychological problems.
   3. Specific curriculum goal reforms —
      • Schools and proposed schools based upon environmental learning.
      • Schools and proposed schools for peace, for social reform, for other specific social aims.
      • Religious and “new age” and/or revealed knowledge schools and proposals.

2. Improvements in the learner
   
   1. Models of Human Development — enhance learner’s ability to learn and to get value from the learning.
      
   2. Modern, Project Renaissance, methods for improving learner ability.
      
   3. Special disciplines, especially physically-based, such as oriental Martial Arts.
      
   4. Proposals for wielding incentives to higher performance.

   
   

3. Improvements in Method
   
   1. “Learn by doing” (John Dewey) and feedback (Montessori, O.K. Moore, S. Ramon y Cajal, Marion Diamond).
      
   2. Learn by output from the learner — Socratic Method.
      
   3. Learn by observing sensitive-to-data inner imagery (Einsteinian Discovery Method).
      
   4. Learn by observing “strays” and “sidebands” of awareness.
      
   5. Bodies of specific techniques, such as Georgi Lozanov’s Suggestopedia or Luis Machado’s Emotopedia.
      
   6. Cooperative and team-learning systems.
      
   7. Technology-assisted instruction, including AV aids and computers.
      
   8. The solution to all school problems is to go over entirely to phonic reading — or — The solution to all school problems is to go over entirely to “look-say” reading methods. (This is “the Hundred Years’ War” in American education.)
      
   9. Aiming instruction to individual learning styles and to Gardner’s various multiple intelligences, not only educational levels. These differentiated needs are all too real, but can any teacher, much less teachers generally, serve them by present didactic methods?
      

4. Improvements in delivery
   
   1. Various mixes of human and technology-based instruction.
      
   2. Automated learning systems.
      
   3. Are schools really the best delivery system for education in the first place? What are all the possible alternatives we can think of? Which of them might be interesting?
      
   4. The Home Schooling Movement
        Pros and cons
      • conditions in the schools
      • uncontrolled conditions at home
      • compared costs for the results gotten
      • intellectual advantages of the students
      • social development issues
      • moral development issues
      • safety and security
      • citizenship issues
      • costs to parents, including opportunity costs

       Possible ways to facilitate

      • Possible ways to collaborate between schools and home-schools, to the learner’s benefit.
      • Are there ways everyone can come out ahead on this?

What level school?

1. The younger the child, the greater lifetime difference the intervention will make.

2. For historical reasons, Project Renaissance methods are presently best developed for older children and adults, though their principles apply at all levels. Some existing methods would have to be interpolated and adjusted for use with younger students.

3. Graduate schools have the advantage as regards the convenience of having your alumni graduates reporting back immediately from science, the professions, and commerce into which they recently graduated.

4. If the new school is a university, it can serve all other levels of education by building “lab schools” at those other levels. It also makes sense for a university-based lab school system to test out more than one model for whatever level, even though no university lab schools to date appear to have done that, only rarely testing even specific methods or techniques side by side. Multi-model testing would be a basic feature of the lab schools created by the proposed Renaissance University, itself a proposed alternative model new school.

Strategies for getting an ideal school going …(subject of a later article)

Alternative Models

1. Discover your own system and/or method and/or basis for an alternative model school. Set up specifically for this purpose is the procedure that is posted on a self-taught basis for Toolbuildering. To succeed in inventing your own powerful basis for an improved way of educating, training, or childraising, let yourself be surprised by the experience you find there in “Toolbuilder.”
2. Select which model(s) you want, and the strategies for bringing them into being.

This has been a partial listing of various proposed ideal educational models, some of them desirable/workable/do-able and some of them perhaps not so. The need of a preferred ideal alternative model school is highlighted by the continued self-inflicted difficulties of the present school system, which are not expected to change for the better. This writer’s strong preference is for the proposed Renaissance University, whose preliminary draft prospectus is cited, but other models are also possible and desirable. An even stronger preference would be for existing schools to examine and test out some of the many various Project Renaissance methods, saving us the arduous labor of creating schools, but thus far that has not happened.

We also seek allies and partners — preferably with their own strong clear vision of an ideal school — together with whom we can co-create something much better for our children than the existing schools. And we need to create something much better for ourselves as well, not only for our children, in a changing world economy where the average American adult has to change careers every few years, learning a new field or profession.

Distance Learning

1. The main change needed to make distance learning far more effective, is
   1. to require several students together at each terminal, and
   2. to cue them to “buzz-group” prior to answering on the chief points of the lesson — points which have been made into questions.

   Students need to interact with each other for all the same reasons as they need to interact with lesson context, only more so and face-to-face. Keyboard and screen are too narrow a context — interaction with fellow students broadens that context greatly, rendering much easier the transfer of learning from initial context to other situations. Motivation is also a key factor, in an industry where the rate of drop-out exceeds 90%.

2. Some various of these are on display, in self-taught form, throughout much of this website.

3. Can, however, most teachers — or even any teacher — really do that? On the other hand, with Socratic drawing-forth, each student comes from his or her own strengths, reinforces these and builds around them, with no special effort required on the teacher’s part. Thus, modern Socratic Method is a much easier answer to this consideration.

4. Please see the very preliminary prospectus for Renaissance University posted here for comment.

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An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the 2004 annual conference of Project Renaissance, Double Festival XIII, Pasadena, Maryland.

©2004-2005 Project Renaissance

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Visit Wen Wenger’s website.

From the SynEARTH Archive – I have written elsewhere about my belief that humans could form the thinking cells for GAIA. Think a moment of how our brain functions — the neurons of our human brain focus entirely on the needs of the whole body, and in turn discover the whole body takes care of them.  They have no concerns and give no attention to maintaining their own temperature, to acquiring their own nutrition, to oxygenating themselves, or even in protecting themselves from bacteria or virus.

The neurons place their trust in survival of the whole.  By making decisions which keep the body healthy and safe, they  insure the body is capable of meeting all the needs of the neurons.  By serving the whole the neurons find themselves served.

I have taught that humanity is evolving. We evolved from the animals. Animals are space-binders. Their lives are dominated by adversity. Early humans lives were dominated by adversity. Humans who commit to adversity could be called Adversans. I explained to escape the Adversary world, humans invented Captitalism and the Great Market. This is a Neutral mechanism. Humans who commit to Capitalism and the Market could be called Neutrans. I have explained that if humanity is to have a future that we must give up the hurting of Adversity — give up the ignoring of Neutrality, and embrace the helping of Synergy. Humans who commit to Synergy could be called Synergans.

Now imagine that the Earth including all of life is a single organism — GAIA.  Further imagine the entire humans species  —  all of humanity — organized in a single organizational tensegrity. This evolved form of humanity could be called Synerganity.  Synerganity then could be the brain of GAIA.  Each human being functioning as a neuron within GAIA’s brain.

Synerganity could care for GAIA — care for all of life on and of the Earth—You, Me, Others, Plants, Animals, Natural Resources, and the very Planet itself.  We humans could function as neurons.  We could care for the whole and discover ourselves to be cared for as a part of  that whole—GAIA.  If Synerganity makes the choices that protect GAIA, then those decisions will meet the needs of all of life including us humans,  just as now our brains make decisions that meet the needs of all the forty trillion cells contained in our bodies.

We Earth Neurons

Daniel Dennett

Some years ago a friend of mine in the Peace Corps told me about his efforts on behalf of a tribe of gentle Indians deep in the Brazilian forest. I asked him if he had been required to tell them about the conflict between the USA and the USSR. Not at all, he replied. There would be no point in it. They had not only never heard of either America or the Soviet Union, they had never even heard of Brazil! Who would have guessed that it is still possible to be a human being living in, and subject to the laws of, a nation without the slightest knowledge of that fact? If we find this astonishing, it is because we human beings, unlike all other species on the planet, are knowers. We are the ones–the only ones–who have figured out what we are, and where we are, in this great universe. And we are even beginning to figure out how we got here.

These quite recent discoveries are unnerving, to say the least. What you are–what each of us is–is an assemblage of roughly a trillion cells, of thousands of different sorts. Most of these cells are “daughters” of the egg and sperm cell whose union started you (there are also millions of hitchhikers from thousands of different lineages stowed away in your body), but each cell is a mindless mechanism, a largely autonomous micro-robot, no more conscious than a bacterium, and not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

Each trillion-robot team is gathered together in a breathtakingly efficient regime that has no dictator but manages to keep itself organized to repel outsiders, banish the weak, enforce iron rules of discipline–and serve as the headquarters of one conscious self, one mind. These communities of cells are fascistic in the extreme, but your interests and values have almost nothing to do with the limited goals of the cells that compose you–fortunately. Some people are gentle and generous, others are ruthless; some are pornographers and others devote their lives to the service of God, and it has been tempting over the ages to imagine that these striking differences must be due to the special features of some extra thing (a soul) installed somehow in the bodily headquarters, but what we now have figured out is that there is no such extra ingredient; we are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all. The differences between people are all due to the way their particular robotic teams are put together, over a lifetime of growth and experience. The difference between speaking French and speaking Chinese is a difference in the organization of the working parts, and so are all the other differences of personality–and knowledge.

Four and a half billion years ago, the earth was formed, and it was utterly without life. And so it stayed for perhaps as long as a billion years. For another billion years, the planet’s oceans teemed with life, but it was all blind and deaf. Simple cells multiplied, engulfing each other, exploiting each other in a thousand ways, but oblivious to the world beyond their membranes. Then much larger, more complex cells evolved–eukaryotes–still clueless and robotic, but with enough internal machinery to begin to specialize. So it continued for more than two billion more years, the time it took for the algorithms of evolution to hit upon good ways of banding these workers together into multi-cellular organisms composed of millions, billions and, (eventually) trillions of cells, each doing its particular mechanical routine, but now yoked into specialized service, as part of an eye or an ear or a lung or a kidney. These organisms (not the individual team members composing them) had become long-distance knowers, able to spy supper trying to appear inconspicuous in the middle distance, able to hear danger threatening from afar. But still, even these whole organisms knew not what they were. Their instincts guaranteed that they tried to mate with the right sorts, and flock with the right sorts, but just as those Brazilians didn’t know they were Brazilians, no buffalo has ever known it’s a buffalo.

In just one species, our species, a new trick evolved: language. It has provided us a broad highway of knowledge-sharing, on every topic. Conversation unites us, in spite of our different languages. We can all know quite a lot about what it is like to be a Vietnamese fisherman or a Bulgarian taxi driver, an eighty-year-old nun or a five-year-old boy blind from birth, a chess master or a prostitute. No matter how different from one another we people are, scattered around the globe, we can explore our differences and communicate about them. No matter how similar to one another buffalos are, standing shoulder to shoulder in a herd, they cannot know much of anything about their similarities, let alone their differences, because they can’t compare notes. They can have similar experiences, side by side, but they really can’t share experiences the way we do.

Even in our species, it has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we’ve known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we’ve understood in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings. We are outnumbered on this planet by our distant cousins, the ants, and outweighed by yet more distant relatives we share with the ants, the bacteria, but though we are in the minority, our capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf the powers of all the rest of the life on the planet. Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future–a comet on a collision course, or global warming–and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us.

We may not be up to the job. We may destroy the planet instead of saving it, largely because we are such free-thinking, creative, unruly explorers and adventurers, so unlike the trillions of slavish workers that compose us. Brains are for anticipating the future, so that timely steps can be taken in better directions, but even the smartest of beasts have very limited time horizons, and little if any ability to imagine alternative worlds. We human beings, in contrast, have discovered the mixed blessing of being able to think even about our own deaths and beyond, and a huge portion of our energy expenditure over the last ten thousand years or so has been devoted to assuaging the concerns provoked by this unsettling new vista. If you burn more calories than you take in, you soon die. If you find some tricks that provide you a surplus of calories, what might you spend them on? You might devote person-centuries of labor to building temples and tombs and sacrificial pyres on which you destroy some of your most precious possessions–and even some of your very own children. Why would you want to do that? These strange and awful expenditures give us clues about some of the hidden costs of our heightened powers of imagination. We did not come by our knowledge painlessly.

Now what will we do with our knowledge? The birth-pangs of our discoveries have not subsided. Many are afraid that learning too much about what we are–trading in mystery for mechanisms–will impoverish our vision of human possibility. This fear is ill-considered. Look around at those who are eagerly participating in this quest for further knowledge and embracing the new discoveries; they are manifestly not bereft of optimism, moral conviction, engagement in life, commitment to society. In fact, if you want to find anxiety, despair, anomie today, look among the undereducated young people scavenging their dimly understood heritages (or popular culture) for a comfortable identity. Among intellectuals, look to the fashionable tribe of postmodernists, who would like to suppose that modern science is just another in a long line of myths, its institutions and expensive apparatus just the rituals and accouterments of yet another religion. That intelligent people can take this seriously is a testimony to the power that fearful thinking still has, in spite of our advances in self-consciousness. The postmodernists are right, of course, that science is just one of the things we might want to spend our extra calories on. The fact that science has been the major source of the efficiencies that created those extra calories does not entitle it to any particular share of the wealth it has created. But it still ought to be obvious that the methods and rules of science–not just its microscopes and telescopes and computers–are the new sense organs of our species, enabling us to answer questions, solve mysteries, and anticipate the future in ways no earlier human institutions can approach. The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become. We Americans have long honored the “self-made man” but now that we are actually learning enough to be able to re-make ourselves into something new, many flinch. Many people would apparently rather bumble around with their eyes closed, trusting in tradition, than look around to see what’s about to happen. Yes, it is unnerving; yes, it can be scary. After all, there are many entirely new mistakes we are now empowered to make. But it’s the beginning of a great new adventure for our knowing species–and much more exciting, as well as safer, if we open our eyes.

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This essay was originally published as an academic paper on August 15, 1999. It was reposted on KurzweilAI.net  on September 18, 2001.

More about Daniel Dennett

From the SynEARTH Achive — This morning, I repost another article from KurzweilAI.net. There is something missing from the discussion of the technologic singularity, says James Bell: the true cost of progress will mean the unprecedented decline of the planet’s inhabitants — an ever-increasing rate of global extinction, some warn.

Technotopia & the Death of Nature

James John Bell

There is no question that technological growth trends in science and industry are increasing exponentially. There is, however, a growing debate about what this runaway acceleration of ingenuity may bring. A number of respected scientists and futurists now are predicting that technological progress is driving the world toward a “Singularity” — a point at which technology and nature will have become one. At this juncture, the world as we have known it will have gone extinct and new definitions of “life,” “nature” and “human” will take hold. “We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth,” San Diego University Professor of Computer Science Vernor Vinge first warned the scientific community in 1993.
“Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will end.”

Some scientists and philosophers have theorized that the very purpose of life is to bring about the Singularity. While leading technology industries have been aware of the Singularity concept for some time, there are concerns that, if the public understood the full ramifications of the Singularity, they would be reluctant to accept many of the new and untested technologies such as genetically engineered foods, nano-technology and robotics.

Machine Evolution A number of books on the coming Singularity are in the works and will soon appear. In 2003, the sequel to the blockbuster film The Matrix will delve into the philosophy and origins of Earth’s machine-controlled future. Matrix cast members were required to read Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s 1994 book Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization. Page one reads, “The realm of the born – all that is nature — and the realm of the made – all that is humanly constructed — are becoming one.”

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers has embarked on the most expensive film of all time — a $180 million sequel called Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The film is due out in 2003; a good decade before actual machine evolution is predicted to accelerate “out of control,” plunging human civilization towards the Singularity.

Central to the workings of the Singularity are a number of “laws” — one of which is known as Moore’s Law. Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon E. Moore noted that the number of transistors that could fit on a single computer chip had doubled every year for six years from the beginnings of integrated circuits in 1959. Moore predicted that the trend would continue, and it has — although the doubling rate was later adjusted to an 18-month cycle.

Today, millions of circuits are found on a single miniscule computer chip and technological “progress” is accelerating at an exponential rather than a linear growth rate.

Stewart Brand, in his book The Clock of the Long Now, discusses another law — Monsanto’s Law — which states that the ability to identify and use genetic information doubles every 12 to 24 months. This exponential growth in biological knowledge is transforming agriculture, nutrition and healthcare in the emerging life-sciences industry.

In 2005, IBM plans to introduce “Blue Gene,” a computer that can perform one million-billion calculations-per-second — about 1/20th the power of the human brain. This computer could transmit the entire contents of the Library of Congress in less than two seconds. According to Moore’s Law, computer hardware will surpass human brainpower in the first decade of this century. Software that emulates the human mind — “artificial intelligence” — may take a few more years to evolve.

Reaching Infinity The human population also is experiencing tremendous exponential population growth. Dan Eder, a scientist at the Boeing Artificial Intelligence Center, notes that
“human population growth over the past 10,000 years has been following a hyperbolic growth trend … with the asymptote [or the point of near-infinite increase] located in the year 2035 AD.” An infinite number of humans is, of course, impossible. Scientists predict our numbers will hover around 9 billion by mid-century.

Eder points out that the predicted rise of artificial intelligence coincides with the asymptote of human population growth. He speculates that artificial life could begin to multiply exponentially once biological life has met its finite limits.

Scientists are debating not so much if it will happen, but what discovery will set off a series of Earth-altering technologic events. They suggest that advancements in the fields of nanotechnology or the discovery of artificial intelligence could usher in the Singularity.

Technologic Globalization Physicists, mathematicians and scientists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have identified through their accelerated technological change theories the likely boundaries of the Singularity and have predicted with confidence the effects leading up to it over the next couple of decades.

The majority of people closest to these theories and laws — the tech sector — can hardly wait for the Singularity to arrive. The true believers call themselves “extropians,” “post-humans”and “transhumanists” and are actively organizing not just to bring the Singularity about, but to counter what they call “techno-phobes” and
“neo-luddites” — critics like Greenpeace, Earth First! and the Rainforest Action Network.

The Progress Action Coalition (Pro-Act), which was formed in June 2001, fantasizes about “the dream of true artificial intelligence… adding a new richness to the human landscape never before known.” The Pro-Act website features several sections where the strategies and tactics of environmental groups and foundations are targeted for “countering.”

Pro-Act, AgBioworld, Biotechnology Progress, Foresight Institute, the Progress Freedom Foundation and other industry groups that desire accelerated scientific progress acknowledge that the greatest threat to technologic progress comes not just from environmental groups, but from a small faction of the scientific community — where one voice stands out.

The Warning In April 2000, a wrench was thrown into the arrival of the Singularity by an unlikely source — Sun Microsystems’ Chief Scientist Bill Joy. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems, helped create the Unix computer operating system and developed the Java and Jini software systems — systems that helped give the Internet “life.”

In a now-infamous cover story in Wired magazine, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Joy warned of the dangers posed by developments in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. Joy’s warning of the impacts of exponential technologic progress run amok gave new credence to the coming Singularity. Unless things change, Joy predicted, “We could be the last generation of humans.” Joy has warned that “knowledge alone will enable mass destruction” and termed this phenomenon “knowledge-enabled mass destruction” (KMD).

The Times of London compared Joy’s statement to Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, which warned of the dangers of the nuclear bomb.

The technologies of the 20th century gave rise to nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) technologies that, while powerful, require access to vast amounts of raw (and often rare) materials, technical information and large-scale industries. The 21st century technologies of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (GNR) however, will require neither large facilities nor rare raw materials.

The threat posed by GNR technologies becomes further amplified by the fact that some of these new technologies have been designed to be able to “replicate” — i.e., they can build new versions of themselves. Nuclear bombs did not sprout more bombs and toxic spills did not grow more spills. If the new self-replicating GNR technologies are released into the environment, they could be nearly impossible to recall or control.

Globalization and Singularity Joy understands that the greatest dangers we face ultimately stem from a world where global corporations dominate — a future where much of the world has no voice in how the world is run. The 21st century GNR technologies, he writes,
“are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.”

Joy believes that the system of global capitalism, combined with our current rate of progress, gives the human race a 30 to 50 percent chance of going extinct around the time the Singularity happens. “Not only are these estimates not encouraging,” he adds, “but they do not include the probability of many horrid outcomes that lie short of extinction.”

Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen contends that if chemists earlier in the last century had decided to use bromine instead of chlorine to produce commercial coolants (a mere quirk of chemistry), the ozone hole over Antarctica would have been far larger, would have lasted all year and would have severely affected life on Earth. “Avoiding that was just luck,” stated Crutzen.

It is very likely that scientists and global corporations will miss key developments (or, worse, actively avoid discussion of them). A whole generation of biologists has left the field for the biotech and nanotech labs. As biologist Craig Holdredge, who has followed biotech since its early beginnings in the 1970s, warns: The science of “biology is losing its connection with nature.”

Yet there is something missing from this discussion of the technologic singularity. The true cost of technologic progress and the Singularity will mean the unprecedented decline of the planet’s inhabitants — an ever-increasing rate of global extinction.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN), the International Botanical Congress and a majority of the world’s biologists believe that a global “mass extinction” already is underway. As a direct result of human activity (resource extraction, industrial agriculture, the introduction of non-native animals and population growth), up to one-fifth of all living species — mostly in the tropics — are expected to disappear within 30 years. “The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we’ve seen in the past — including those related to meteor collisions,” University of Tennessee biodiversity expert Daniel Simberloff told the Washington Post.

A 1998 Harris poll of the 5,000 members of the American Institute of Biological Sciences found 70 percent believed that what has been termed “The Sixth Extinction” is now underway. A simultaneous Harris poll found that 60 percent of the public were totally unaware of the impending biological collapse.

At the same time that nature’s ancient biological creation is on the decline, artificial laboratory-created bio-tech life forms — genetically modified tomatoes, genetically engineered salmon, cloned sheep — are on the rise. Already more than 60 percent of food in US grocery stores contain genetically engineered ingredients — and that percentage is rising.

Nature and technology are not just evolving: They are competing and combining with one another. Ultimately there could be only one winner.

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James Bell is a writer for Sustain, a national environmental information group based in Chicago.This article is excerpted from his forthcoming book. For more information visit www.technologicalsingularity.info or contact jamesbell@sustainusa.org. An earlier version of this article was published in the Samhain (November/December 2001) issue of the Earth First! Journal. (c) 2001 by James Bell.

From the SynEARTH Archives.

Synergic Trusting & Synergic Trusts

Timothy Wilken, MD

Trusting is not a new behavior for humanity. It was invented long ago when the world was dominated by the adversary way. Trusting meant that I could rely on you not to hurt me. Trusting meant it was safe to assume that you were not my enemy.

Synergic trusting means means more. It means that while I can rely on you not to hurt me, I can further rely on you to help me. It is not only safe to assume that you are not my enemy, but I can count on you as a friend.

Synergic trusting is a behavior that is required for a time-binding class of life.

What is meant by Time-binding?

The most unique fact about humans, from a scientific perspective, is our ability to understand and to transfer our understanding to each other. This unique ability is what distinguishes us from all other forms of life. Alfred Korzybski coined the term Time-Binding as the human ability to understand and to transfer that understanding to other humans.

Time-binding is that unique human ability to pass that ‘knowing’ from one generation to the next generation. Both animal and human offspring begin their lives in nearly total ignorance. The differences that exist between them are small, but what advantage in knowing that does exist belongs clearly to the animal.

While the animal seems to begin life with a greater store of inherited knowing, it possesses little ability to learn from its parents. The animal is condemned to rediscover over and over, every generation must discover anew the knowings of its parents. The wise old owl may know a great deal, but he has no way to pass what he knows to his offspring and they have no way to receive it.

We humans are very different in that respect. We can and do pass our knowing from one generation to the next. As Alfred Korzybski explained:

“Human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them—I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the inheritor of the bygone ages and the trusteeof posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define humanity, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the Time-binding class of life.” ¹

What do I mean by a Synergic Trust?

The collective term we humans use to describe what we value is “wealth”. I define Synergic Trust as wealth that comes to us as a gift. Synergic Trust can be divided into three categories.

1) The Life Trust –which is life itself, and the plants and animals which are gifts from God, and Nature. And, our human bodies which are a gift from God, Nature, and our Parents.

2) The Earth Trust–the sunshine, air, water, land, minerals, the earth itself all of which come to us freely. This wealth is provided to us by God and Nature.

And, 3) The Time-binding Trust — the accumulated “knowing” from the time-binding of all the humans who have ever lived and died. Our inherited Wisdom, Knowledge, and Information including Architecture, Art, Literature, Music, Science, and Technology. It is the Time- binding Trust that forms the basis of all human progress.

We humans are beneficiaries then of three major trusts–the Life Trust, the Earth Trust and the Time-binding Trust.

Trusts are not Property

We, humans can not and do not own these trusts. They are not derived from our lives. They are not the product of our mind or labor. We have not paid for them. There is no moral or rational basis for us to claim ownership. They are not property.

Therefore, if we wish the privilege to use and control these trusts, we must act as trustees, and act responsibly for the benefit of all humanity. As responsible trustees, we must preserve and protect these trusts. We must act as conservationists.

“Conservation is the sustainable use of natural resources–soils, water, plants, animals, and minerals. The natural resources of any area constitute its basic capital, and wasteful use of those resources constitutes an economic loss. From the aesthetic viewpoint, conservation also includes the maintenance of national parks, wilderness areas, historic sites, and wildlife.

“Natural resources are of two main types, renewable and nonrenewable. Renewable resources include wildlife and natural vegetation of all kinds. The soil itself can be considered a renewable resource, although severe damage is difficult to repair because of the slow rate of soil-forming processes. The natural drainage of waters from the watershed of a region can be maintained indefinitely by careful management of vegetation and soils, and the quality of water can be controlled through pollution control.

“Nonrenewable resources are those that cannot be replaced or that can be replaced only over extremely long periods of time. Such resources include the fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, and natural gas) and the metallic and other ores.” ²

The Life and Earth Trusts are perishable. They must be protected for our children, and for all future children.

The Time-binding Trust is less susceptible to damage by the user. Using knowledge or technology designs does not diminish their future value, but they must be used responsibly. We must not hurt others with any trusts that we control.In fact, we should help others to whatever the extent we are capable.

All humans are trustees. We are of course the Life Trustees of our own bodies. We should take good care of ourselves. Take care with our health and nutrition. We are also the Time-binding Trustees of all the knowledge and skills that we personally have mastered from our study of the past. We must strive not to hurt others with this knowledge and skill. We should try and help others to whatever extent we are capable. For while Time-binding grants us humans the power to understand, it does not insure that we will use our understanding wisely.

Much of our knowledge is embedded in our tools. Human knowledge grows continuously and without limit. As we incorporate evermore powerful knowledge into artifacts, we create evermore powerful tools.

When we use tools to hurt others, they are called weapons.

If we incorporate evermore powerful knowledge into the tools we use to hurt others, we will create evermore powerful weapons. This pathway leads inevitably to the destruction of all humanity.

We humans have a choice. We can choose humility with our gift of Time- binding. We can choose responsibility as the moral requirement for using our power of understanding. We can choose to join together and protect our Synergic Trusts. Only this pathway will guarantee us a future.

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¹ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 1921 

²Microsoft Encarta 97 Encyclopedia. Microsoft Corporation, 1963-96

The Give Help to Get Help Wheel was developed after an original concept of Daniel Quinn’s first presented in his book My Ishmael.