Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 76, Issue 8

[Thaths]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 4:36 AM Dave Long  wrote:

> * oddly enough, the soviets, who should have been really into pushing
> computer technology to aid in central planning, seem to have been
> drastically behind ARPA in this department.  Predictions are
> difficult, especially about the future.
>

Speaking of the Soviets and Cybernetics... I highly recommend Spufford's Red
Plenty . A beautiful mixture of
 fact, imagination and fiction set in the Khruschev era.

Thaths

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 76, Issue 8

[Dave Long]

Assuming there is a straightforward way of figuring out the number of
humans needed to perform the same work at comparable quality and  
speed,

taxing your way out of this is an obvious solution.


I was slightly amused to see that an example in a mid-XX paper on  
linear programming (might even have been one of Dantzig's) had an  
industrialist on one side and a government minister on the other,  
attempting to calculate the factors/prices involved to determine  
where their negotiation should end up.  Now that we have several more  
decades of experience, and at least million-fold cheaper  
computation*, one might think this process would be even simpler.  On  
the other hand, GIGO, and maybe people have mostly used the interim  
to learn to better fudge the factors...



Might work for large
developed economies, but developing economies like India would find it
difficult to counter more advanced high quality products from  
developed

nations.



Strikes me that this scenario has played out in India before, when  
woven fabric went from something (with modest capital investment in a  
loom) that could be a substantial factor in household production, and  
one signalled one's social capital by being able to wrap a non- 
rectangular human body in different ways with large rectangles of  
highly valuable cloth, to woven fabric as something flooding the  
market from british factories (requiring much-more-than-modest  
investment), after which one had to signal one's pecuniary capital by  
chopping up and throwing away large amounts of cheap cloth, then  
paying a tailor or seamstress wages to re-sew the pieces back  
together in order to fit.  Did we learn anything from that last  
experience that might well be applied should we encounter similar  
scenarios in the future?


-Dave

* oddly enough, the soviets, who should have been really into pushing  
computer technology to aid in central planning, seem to have been  
drastically behind ARPA in this department.  Predictions are  
difficult, especially about the future.

Re: [silk] The Need for Guaranteed Basic Income or why Kiran is worried sick

[Vinay Rao]

Few of many 'Future of Work' articles that is centred around creating a
universal basic income. Considering that 70% [Unsure of source, but I have
read this somewhere] of 'workforce' anywhere are 'disengaged' (bored, for
one. Tired, for another) or 'actively disengaged' (walk in to a government
office :)), maybe it is time bots and smart contracts put them out of their
disengagement misery.

Is it erroneous to think that people cannot be 're-purposed' to life and
 perform in the modus of their time, to participate in their contemporary
world, having been released from antiquated tasks, and monotony and the
meaningless? Once we're removed from mundanities, will the future of work
be derived from our barely tapped wells of creativity? At the same time we
would still need super-specialist developers to create and maintain the
(march to) technological singularity, and several more to regulate and
sustain life in the eco/bio/sphere.

The concept of a Universal Comfortable Life (as an inference from Universal
Basic Income) is interesting. I'm reminded after long, of this - now old -
initially dystopian, and then hopeful story from Marshall Brain.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm





:: Vinay Rao

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Kiran K Karthikeyan <
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Posting this [1] on the only place I know where there are better minds than
> mine who can tell me not to worry so I can sleep better at night.
>
> Kiran
>
> [1]
>
> https://medium.com/basic-income/deep-learning-is-going-to-teach-us-all-the-lesson-of-our-lives-jobs-are-for-machines-7c6442e37a49#.4mn452rn9
>
> --
> Regards,
> Kiran
>