Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Don't Turn off the Projector!

In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen poses as fantasy a question that we are likely to confront in real life in the near future. The question is, what happens when individuals from one level of reality meet up with individuals from another level of reality?

In a Woody Allen movie, what happens is that romance, highjinks, and some pointed philosophical discussions ensue. We get to see what happens when a character from a 1930′s screwball comedy is dropped into real 1930′s New Jersey. He quickly discovers that the fake wad of money he’s carrying around is no good and that cars don’t just automatically start when you need them to. Later we get to see what happens when a real person from 1930′s New Jersey gets dropped into the movie world; she laments that the “champagne” served at the Copacabana is just ginger ale.

Some of the movie’s most interesting dialog occurs among the characters stranded on screen after one of their number departs — there’s no way to advance the story without him. One is a committed communist who argues that the movie stars exploit the labors of the characters on screen, who night after night do all the real work. Another fears the blackness into which they are all plunged each time the projector is turned off. Each of them is convinced that the movie is “really” about him or her.

An intriguing question that gets raised is whether these characters are the creations of the actors who portray them or the screenwriter who wrote them in the first place. The world they live in is apparently the joint creation of the screenwriter, the producer, and the director of the film — all of which leads to some interesting discussion about God.

Of course, projected images on a screen are not people. They don’t think or feel, nor do they inhabit a “world,” other than the one we construe out of the combined images. However, we are fast approaching a day when created characters will have behavior, feelings, and intentions of their own, and who will be as convinced of the reality of their world as we are of the reality of ours. In fact, we can’t rule out the possibility that we ourselves are such “characters,” and that our world may be a simulation.

So what happens when we meet up with the designers of our world, or when characters from one of our simulations meet us? Will we find that our money is worthless in the real world, or that all their champagne is ginger ale? What will we have to say to each other about the meaning of existence or the nature of identity? And what kinds of relationships might we have with one another?

Don’t Turn off the Projector!

In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen poses as fantasy a question that we are likely to confront in real life in the near future. The question is, what happens when individuals from one level of reality meet up with individuals from another level of reality?

In a Woody Allen movie, what happens is that romance, highjinks, and some pointed philosophical discussions ensue. We get to see what happens when a character from a 1930′s screwball comedy is dropped into real 1930′s New Jersey. He quickly discovers that the fake wad of money he’s carrying around is no good and that cars don’t just automatically start when you need them to. Later we get to see what happens when a real person from 1930′s New Jersey gets dropped into the movie world; she laments that the “champagne” served at the Copacabana is just ginger ale.

Some of the movie’s most interesting dialog occurs among the characters stranded on screen after one of their number departs — there’s no way to advance the story without him. One is a committed communist who argues that the movie stars exploit the labors of the characters on screen, who night after night do all the real work. Another fears the blackness into which they are all plunged each time the projector is turned off. Each of them is convinced that the movie is “really” about him or her.

An intriguing question that gets raised is whether these characters are the creations of the actors who portray them or the screenwriter who wrote them in the first place. The world they live in is apparently the joint creation of the screenwriter, the producer, and the director of the film — all of which leads to some interesting discussion about God.

Of course, projected images on a screen are not people. They don’t think or feel, nor do they inhabit a “world,” other than the one we construe out of the combined images. However, we are fast approaching a day when created characters will have behavior, feelings, and intentions of their own, and who will be as convinced of the reality of their world as we are of the reality of ours. In fact, we can’t rule out the possibility that we ourselves are such “characters,” and that our world may be a simulation.

So what happens when we meet up with the designers of our world, or when characters from one of our simulations meet us? Will we find that our money is worthless in the real world, or that all their champagne is ginger ale? What will we have to say to each other about the meaning of existence or the nature of identity? And what kinds of relationships might we have with one another?

Friday Videos — Man Shopping

A funny story submitted by my friend Justin. This may or may not have relevance to the ongoing discussion about abundance. I’m not sure.

All I can say is that I’ve pulled some boneheaded stuff while out shopping, but never anything quite this bad. But then, I don’t have a doctorate.

FastForward Radio — Acceleration, Convergence, and Human Destiny

The World Transformed, Part 10

Our landmark 10-part series concludes with an exploration of two key driving forces behind the amazing era of transformation in which we find ourselves, acceleration and convergence, and a look at where the human adventure might ultimate be leading us. Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talk with futurist John Smart about where humanity is heading. Will we be sexy immortal billionaires with super-powers? If so, where do we go from there? And what do black holes have to do with it all?

WorldTransformed4.jpg

Archived recording available here:

Listen to FastForward Radio... on Blog Talk Radio
John Smart Interview Part 1

Listen to FastForward Radio... on Blog Talk Radio

John Smart Interview Part 2

About our guest:

John Smart is a futures scholar and systems theorist who studies science and technological culture with an emphasis on accelerating change, evolutionary development, computational autonomy (human-independent machine learning) and the technological singularity. He is the founder and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. johnsmart.jpg

The Coupon Queen, the Safety Net, and the Future of Free

A couple of weeks ago I went grocery shopping at a small international market in an area of town that is home to a number of Indian and middle eastern shops. I was accompanied by my Malaysian father-in-law who had come to town to visit the new baby. As we were checking out, he pointed out a sign next to the register:

THIS LANE ACCEPTS FOOD STAMPS

He asked me what that meant.

Great question. Food stamps, I explained, are coupons, redeemable for food, issued by the government to people with a low income (or no income.) I went on to tell him that they are a key part of the economic “safety net” that the US provides to its citizens and non-citizen residents, with public housing being another part. I added that the current health care debate has to do with whether we will add universal health care insurance coverage to the safety net and, if so, how that will be implemented.

It turns out that my description of the Food Stamps program was wrong on one not terribly important, but still interesting, point. It seems the actual “stamps” or coupons were replaced quite a few years ago with a much handier debit card.

I was reminded of this conversation earlier this week when I came upon the story of the Coupon Queen. The Coupon Queen has an amazing skill:

A Boxford mother has earned the title of “queen of coupons” by learning to feed her family of six for less than $10 a week.

Kathy Spencer told WCVB-TV the trick is buying in bulk when items are on sale and using coupons to bring down the cost.

The station accompanied Spencer on a shopping trip to a Shaws grocery store. Spencer bought $279 in groceries for 39 cents.

Spencer spends about one hour a week collecting online coupons and scanning circulars and then four hours a week in grocery stores.

It’s a lot of planning, but Spencer said it certainly pays off.

I have been hearing about the Coupon Queen for years now. She shows up in the media when economic times are tough, and then seems to fade into obscurity during good times. But she’s always there. And she isn’t any one particular person. There are apparently any number of pretenders to that particular crown. (You can see video of one of the other claimants to the title here.)

Now here’s the interesting thing about the Coupon Queen. She and her sisters (as well as any would-be Coupon Kings out there) have implemented their own do-it-yourself food stamp program. Now they would probably argue that what they do is nothing like going on food stamps, but I’m not so sure.

The big differences:

1) There is no government involvement in being a Coupon Queen.

2) Being on Food Stamps is relatively passive compared to living the Coupon lifestyle. Once you’re approved for the Food Stamps program, the government starts charging up your card. All you have to do is go spend the money. Whereas it looks like the Coupon Queen has to put in something approaching a 40-hour work week to maximize the benefits of her homemade program.

The big similarities:

1) A family on Food Stamps can get up to 100% of its grocery bill covered by the program. Most probably don’t get everything covered, though. Let’s just say that for most families on the program, Food Stamps account for about 75% of their grocery bill. In the stories we see, the Coupon Queen generally gets somewhere north of 90% of her family’s groceries covered. However, that might not take into account all the extraneous expenses such as buying multiple newspapers, fuel costs, postage used to write manufacturers for additional coupons, etc. So let’s say the typical Coupon Queen also gets about 75% of her family’s grocery bill covered.

2) Both Food Stamps participants and the Coupon Queen are subsidized by the rest of us. Every time we pay full price (or even a lesser discount) for the products that the Coupon Queen is getting at 90% off, we help fund her lifestyle.

Both the Coupon Queen and her Food Stamps counterparts are enabled by the fact that we live in an age of relative abundance. But there is a major difference between these two manifestations of abundance: one is a carefully implemented and managed government program; the other is spontaneous, wholly unintended phenomenon wherein significant economic power (for a limited a number of individuals) emerges from the froth of retail marketing efforts.

And here’s the most interesting difference between the two. My conservative and libertarian friends have major philosophical issues with welfare programs in general and the Food Stamps program in particular, but I doubt many of them would object to what the Coupon Queen does. Nor do I think most of my friends on the left would have a problem with it. Everybody admires the Coupon Queen for her economy and resourcefulness.

Okay, not everybody. In the comments thread of this Boing Boing story about yet another coupon queen, several of the readers take her to task. Even so, at best a typical Food Stamps recipient can expect to be told by the rest of the population that it’s “okay” to use food stamps, that “there’s nothing wrong,” with doing so, that there’s “nothing to be ashamed about.” Contrast that with the Coupon Queen who is widely celebrated as an economic heroine.

I am convinced that we are rapidly approaching an era in which new technologies will eliminate all forms of material scarcity and want. (More on that here.) It’s not clear what stepping stones will get us from today’s scarcity-driven economy to one in which unlimited availability of…everything…is the fundamental economic assumption. And while I don’t think that the coupon lifestyle (per se) can be scaled to become one of those stepping stones, I think the Coupon Queen is a harbinger of things to come.

The question we need to ask is this: what other models of abundance — more robust and scalable than clipping coupons and yet just as widely approved of — might we tease out of today’s marketplace as well as the marketplace of the near future? One thing is for sure, as those stepping stones to post-scarcity begin to emerge, we will be dealing with something very different both from Food Stamps and from coupon-clipping. The time to start imagining that reality is now.

Friday Videos — Coupon Lady and Political Commentary

From MD we get this very interesting tidbit:

I think the coupon lady experience has something very interesting to say about our future in a post-scarcity world. I’ll be posting some thoughts on that later this weekend.

Next, we have the following, submitted by my mother. While we normally eschew political diatribes at The Speculist, this little lady is able to articulate so much of what I would like to say. It’s quite refreshing.

Life Lessons from Baseball

I went to bed. Couldn’t hang in for the bottom of the 14th after the Giants went up three runs. The Rockies were clearly tired and I just knew how it was going to end.

Okay class, what does this tell us about trying to predict the future?

To Serve Man

Continuing to read Accelerating Future, I note this snippet of a quote from Nick Bostrom:

I would argue that at least all humans, and probably many other sentient creatures on earth should get a significant share in the superintelligence’s beneficence. If the benefits that the superintelligence could bestow are enormously vast, then it may be less important to haggle over the detailed distribution pattern and more important to seek to ensure that everybody gets at least some significant share, since on this supposition, even a tiny share would be enough to guarantee a very long and very good life. One risk that must be guarded against is that those who develop the superintelligence would not make it generically philanthropic but would instead give it the more limited goal of serving only some small group, such as its own creators or those who commissioned it.

Michael proceeds to comment on that last bit about the dangers of a superintelligence that serves the interests of only a limited numer of people. Such a scenario is undoubtedly a significant risk which needs to be addressed. However, even if everything works just right and the superintelligence is keen on helping all of us, I think that promises to be a lot more disruptive than we might expect.

For example, there are certain cultures in the world that continue to regard women as little more than chattels — sub-humans who can be ordered around, beaten, or even killed as the man (owner) see fits. Children face the same treatment, but at least they get to grow out of being children. Unless it is really just interested in serving “man,” I don’t think a truly empathetic superintelligence is going to be satisfied with giving women in such circumstances a longer life and greater material abundance without addressing the underlying injustice. To do so would be to spruce up the cell while extending the prisoner’s sentence indefinitely.

And speaking of prisoners, wouldn’t the superintelligence be inclined to free all prisoners of concscience everywhere? And it might go further than that if it concluded that most or all incarcerations are a violation of human rights.

But it can’t just declare all of these individuals to be free. The suerintelligence would have to be prepared to intervene to protect these individuals’ new-found freedoms. Assuming it has the capacity to do so, the superintelligence will then — for good or ill — become the de facto government of the world.

Would a friendly, caring superintelligence really take over? If it really cares, it seems to me that it has no choice.

So yeah, we’re going to need to be sure that the superintelligence truly is friendly and nice and wise. Because I don’t think it will be handing the reins back over to us until (unless) we are able to demonstrate that we’ll do roughly as good a job taking care of each other as it can do.

(Oh, please excuse the title of this post. How often do you have the opportunity to provide an established ironic title with a third, equally ironic meaning?)

Boring

Michael Anissimov is having a disagreement with “Dale Carrico, Mike Treder, James Hughes, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Jones, Charles Stross, Kevin Kelly, Max More, David Brin, and many others.”

But no big deal. It’s boring.

Friday Videos — It's Hot

An anonymous reader (who happens to work for Microsoft) sends us this, with this comment:

“They finally got it right.”

Come to think of it, I haven’t heard word one about MIDI support on the iPhone…