One point I’d like to add, especially in relation to Will Brown’s insightful blog post, is that I feel what sort of world we have in the future does depend a lot on how social issues connect to what sorts of technologies we chose to invent and how exactly we link them together (Langdon Winner talks a lot about this). I feel this will apply all the way up to the point of any Singularity (which might act like a mirror of our virtues). So, I feel the kind of choices we make now will affect what kind of Singularity we get, whether they are choices about universal health care and a “basic income” for all globally as a basic human right, ending rankism and emphasizing human dignity, working towards aspects of both egalitarianism and meritocracy as opposed to reinforcing a social pyramid based on other factors including control of artificial scarcities, trying to move beyond competition (as Alfie Kohn suggests) and towards more cooperation, and so on for a whole host of social issues. So, how we approach these issues that are in our lives now may very well affect the future of humanity (and any spinoffs) for a long time to come. One thing that has concerned me is that many people working towards a Singularity or any sort of high-tech future are often doing so within a competitive commercial context as opposed to a free and open source context. This worries me, for exactly the sorts of reasons that Will Brown suggests. I wrote elsewhere that I feel humanity needs to get to “100 social-technical points” to have a post-scarcity society and that these points are multiplicative (social points times technical points), in the sense that better technology makes it easier in many ways to be generous despite a crowded planet, but likewise a compassionate crowd makes it easier to use what technology we have to bring about abundance instead of scarcity for all:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en

Any hope for a transcript of these conversations? I never seem to manage to listen to them, but I would love to read through them at a later date. If not, I understand, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSp2kAQzPUk