More Science, Less Engineering

I've always said that neuroscience will likely figure out consciousness/generalized intelligence before the AI engineers do. There is something fundamental to letting facts and data lead you rather than working from a conclusion or goal and trying to fill in the gaps with brute force or intuition. That said, if history is any indication, I'm sure it will be tech engineers who profit on any discoveries first...because 👉 greed/capitalism.

Whether or not history unfolds this way, it's a lesson we should consider; that we spend far too much time trying to create "products" (i.e. Business/Engineering) without sound conceptual models or understanding of the repercussions (i.e. Science). Using technology before truly understanding it, has been the cause of just about all modern material problems.

This is not a call to ludditism, but a warning that we are not intelligently creating/managing human civilization. At this point in time, our "system" is thrashing out of control, and we are just desperately clinging to its ankles. We must be wise, we must slow society down, build understanding, take care of our people, and take care of our environment.

Economic Gamification

Capitalists constantly say they believe that capitalism generates so much "innovation" or something similar. It is true in one sense, capitalism is the gamification of economics. Elements of it are used for incentivization, elements of it are used to keep a symbolic score, etc. The problem with all this is it is no longer economics at this point...we are not "economizing" anything, that is we are not conserving resources or making their distribution and utilization more efficient. We have enhanced the "game" aspect and lost all the "economic" aspects of our "system." I hate to tell you if you don't already know, but capitalism is a really crappy economic "system."

Sure, we should take note of what elements we might be able to salvage regarding incentivization, tracking of transactions, transactional group collaboration, etc. BUT we definitely need to realize that the system we have now is a really bad game...a game that has dire consequences for the environment and all the players. We need to build a new economic system, FIRST on principles of actual economic sustainability and efficiency. Then, if we are still bored and require a layer of amusement, add some game layer separate and largely inconsequential to our overall environmental sustainability and human flourishing.

Mood Altering Plastic

I've recently been hearing more about the chemicals in plastics that that affect everything from cancer chance to mood. It makes me wonder, if we ever realize our folly about how we are living and our relationship to our evolutionary development, and get over our fossil-fuel addiction (hopefully forcing a heavy reduction in our use of plastics)...we may wake up one day and realize that some of our neurotic behavior was environmentally induced. What if half of what we think are psychological or personality problems are externally caused...I mean even if we know that someones hormones or neurotransmitters are off balance...we don't always know what caused those to get off balance. I'm really not trying to sound "hippy-ish" but as we reconsider how we treat our environment, we may also want to seriously rethink what conditions our bodies are historically/naturally adapted to and restructure society and our behaviors accordingly.

Artificial Scarcity Of Vaccines

You are going to get a lot of reasons why there isn't enough vaccine in the coming months. Yes, I get it, rolling out billions of doses of vaccines is a logistical nightmare, but when we want to roll out troops or steal resources, we got boots on the ground in seconds. Maybe it's the cost you say...the cost of these vaccines is NOTHING compared to the damage COVID-19 is doing to the world, even from just a short-sighted financial view. It must be a supply thing, you say...but when we want to manufacture single use plastic or even sophisticated (yet planned obsolescent) electronics, we find ways to make PLANET POLLUTING amounts of stuff. No, the reason we will likely be in perpetual need of vaccines is Intellectual Property. While we rejoice for the medical science that can design a vaccine, we also bathe in our ignorance and apathy about inequality and the sharing of knowledge...we still haven't matured enough as a species to recognize that information should be free, open, and shared. We haven't learned, as a species, that we'd gain more by nurturing, uplifting, educating our population than by neglecting it. We haven't learned that we are ALL more healthy when the least among us is healthy.

So let us burn this lesson into our brain now while it's in our face, Intellectual Property is anathema...the concept of owning ideas has always been a grave mistake and it is no less abhorrent now.