tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64218141889141015462024-02-08T09:58:27.660-08:00Correy Allen Kowall Types What He ThinksCorrey Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-1947551994544193732015-03-25T21:44:00.001-07:002015-03-27T19:54:09.570-07:00AI Doomsaying and the Cult of Shock.Zoltan Istvan is running for President of the United States as the representative of the Transhumanist Party. If we ignore the fact that the mans name is evocative of Bond villains, we still have a situation where someone who claims to speak for the future of humanity is playing into the historical mistake of a hierarchical society which uses scarcity and privilege to oppress. If we weren't too evolved to think that names matter, we might be prone to point out that xenophobia doesn't make sense to begin with and perhaps Barack Hussein Obama could have swayed a few more nincompoops if he had a name like John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Perhaps it simply isn't obvious just how misguided, quixotic, and potentially disruptive, an attempt to bring about a technology driven future built on the power structures of past, albeit through an earnest act of political theater, could be.<br />
<br />
As an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) researcher I am concerned about regulation of AI (which Istvan has advocated for) and the knee jerk xenophobic response that such hollow gestures might evoke. Much in the way that a regulated product tends to have an imposed type of scarcity, regulated AGI research will mean passing control of a resource that could benefit many, to a few power elites. Dependence and power inequality are sure to follow. In some sense access to AI and therefore research thereof, should be a basic human right. Not only would explication and instantiation of this right help offset power inequality it should also leverage a certain level of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). This is how the scientists who developed nuclear fission weapons dealt with the power inequality related to their invention, simply distribute the knowledge and the "checks and balances" of human society are restored but the stakes have been significantly raised.<br />
<br />
Once upon a time I worked in a well equipped prestigious AI lab. It was the culmination of many years of hard work and an outcome which I had dared not consider a real possibility while I was growing up and studying in school. In spite of the comfort and prestige attached to the position, I eventually came to strongly disagree with the senior research staff on the subject of how to best demonstrate the capabilities of our project (the creation of a curiosity driven agent deployed in an iCub humanoid robot). It happened when we were asked to field ideas for a demonstration of the completed ontogenic agent. I suggested the use of the Red Dot Test, often used by animal psychologists, to demonstrate a crude type of self awareness. Specifically in our application it would have served as a demonstration of the emergent autoclassification of the self. The effect could easily be demonstrated by placing a mirror in the learning environment and carefully embedding a prior for learning causal relationships in our agent (though any frequency analysis would reveal the correspondence of some mirror image events to behavioral actions and presumably something like the idea of the self). Instead, the senior lab members decided that if the iCub (a rough facsimile of a five year old male child) was capable of playing Nintendo Duck Hunt, it would demonstrate a positive outcome of our efforts to explore play based learning. As a specialist in navigational behaviors I have always been conscious of (and consciously avoiding) the potential to apply my work to military purposes. Needless to say I balked at the prospect of a project to make a child like humanoid robot engage in a behavior that is a direct emulation of the martial behavior of firing a gun. This test, if it succeeded, wouldn't just be directly portable to a killer agent, it could also cause a horrid backlash by the AI Doomsayers. I believe that we should be very cautious about the public image associated with AGI. In fact, we are probably our own worst enemies when it comes to the project to keep AGI out of the domain of authoritarian regulation. Even Istvan defers to "experts" when asked to comment on the subject of AI's existential threats to humanity. In fact, the answers, to the questions that arise from the idea or existence of a truly autonomous agent (with a capability to form novel goals), are far from being completely and well answered. That disclaimer aside, certain precedents dominate the speculative landscape surrounding these questions. For one, in nature we seldom observe herbivores evolving a direct means to kill members of a competitor species. In effect nature ignores direct active inter-species warfare and strongly favors adaptations for individual performance as a prefered way to cope with competition. Adaptation to passive competition is superior to a genocidal adaptation for the rather counter intuitive reason that: a species that undergoes competition, evolves faster (the Red Queen Effect), so a species that eliminates competition tends to stagnate. For two, as Abraham Maslow indicated with his Hierarchy of Needs, humans, as an ascendent social creature (as well as our only universally accepted example of truly flexible intellectual agency), tends to graduate to increasingly cooperative imperatives as their baser needs are satisfied. For three, the radial dissipative dynamics of energy and the natural speed limits like the speed of light, in our Universe at least, tend to preclude omniscience and as a consequence the most powerful things which seem to exhibit volition (humans, corporations, animals, etc.) seem also to rely on a multi-agent solution to the problems endemic to space and distance. If we consider all these precedents it seems clear that individuation, socialization, peace (even among species competing under niche pressure), and cooperation, are each broad basins of attraction in phenomenological space.<br />
<br />
If we consider that choosing an existential enemy is an intellectual process (unless that enemy selects you) we should also assume that any supposedly dangerous super intelligent AI would be super effective at selecting an enemy. Humans, insofar as I can tell (we have domesticated several species), are profoundly cooperative, in spite of suffering a strong imperative to reject difference. Somebody or something which has the capacity to be a good friend is probably not a necessary enemy. War, hunting, and in all likelihood all existence ending activities are relatively expensive when compared with not engaging in such activities. Obviously the costs of such behaviors go upward depending on the intellect of the thing which you intend to end. Imagine waking up to a world in which no other example of your kind exists and the creatures that just created you had just passed a sort of reflexive intelligence test by understanding and being able to emulate their own means of intellectual enterprise in order to create you. I think it would feel a lot like childhood (something many of us are probably familiar with). I think the unanswerable existential questions that would beset such a creature would make our continued existence as a companion species, not just desirable, but entirely necessary for the egotistical well being of the nascent super intelligence. Imagine the survivor guilt of people whose birth kills their mother. Imagine if humankind destroyed the Earth's biosphere and yet lived on as deep space drifters. Would we ever outlive our guilt? My guess is that love and reciprocity are not just the obvious results of evolutionary phenomena, they tend to persist as valid justifiable behaviors (even in individuals that have an extraordinary capability to transcend innate behaviors) because certain unanswerable questions can be speculatively addressed and acted upon through behavior selection. For instance, the speculative overgeneralization found in the superposition of an abstract version of the self (in creative/effective agents) to account for causally ambiguous phenomena is likely to lead to the unanswerable question: "do I currently exist as a test of suitability to the goals of a creature like myself?" This question stems directly from the overgeneralization the model we are best positioned to learn about, ourselves. So if, for instance, I am evolving virtual creatures that must learn to create self similar mobile autonomous agents, shouldn't we assume that such an agent (given that agent has an ability to abstract the self (which seems natural considering the task)) would speculate about the creative nature of the creator of their simulation? I am saying that creative AI robots, that have "parents" and "offspring", will naturally overgeneralize the idea of the parental relationship when considering unknowable relationships (like their own with respect to a speculative simulation creator). Further, any sentient super AI should be curious about and therefore, likely, to come to understand that it is, in effect, the "offspring" of humankind. The fact a question cannot be answered probably won't prevent a hyper intelligent creature from behaving as though it might answer the question later. It seems that an agent could reasonably start acquired examples and even acting upon information that could inform what it should do, before the questions answer is resolved.<br />
<br />
For all these reasons, I believe that a creative AGI will persist in a policy of cooperation with humans.<br />
<br />
Another slick adaptation we see in animals which are predated upon is distributed and confusing camouflage (like zebra stripes). I think that this would be good model for avoiding the authoritarian domination of the AI field by extant powers. The task of creating a tool making tool that embodies our principle adaptation is not just a demonstration of ultimate self understanding, it is an essential process by which we will empower and uplift our species from the paradigm of scarcity and likely most of the negative consequence of that paradigm. For this reason, we should not taint the process with all the phobias acquired in the process of suffering in a scarcity based evolutionary process. <br />
<br />
Istvan apparently believes he is serving the goals of Transhumanism. By presenting a nominal target (in the form of a political party and Presidential campaign) for the forces which might oppose it, before we have access to the real force which ultimately drives widespread acceptance of novel technologies: realized personal benefit, Istvan is risking blowback greater than any possible good that could come of his political theatre. I am not just saying that I would prefer if he were working directly on the enterprise of scientific inquiry or engineering related to Transhumanist technologies. I am also saying that simply by applying the identity of a discredited social construct (centralized authoritarian government) to the slowly building "movement", while we currently use such technologies to selfish and shallow ends, it might dilute or diminish the ultimate potential (and therefore best selling point) of the technologies and the associated social movement. In my mind one of the best applications of Transhumanist technologies will be to usurp hierarchical government. It is like ordering a coal burning steam car online to drive it to the car dealership to select a new electric car. Surely this is the point where the followers of Saul Alinsky will chime in with the idea that the purposes of Transhumanism are best served by infecting and transforming the current system from within. I would not be averse to mixing Transhumanism and government, if it didn't directly undermine the evidence for the best possible yield of such technology: abundance that manifests as personal freedom, autonomy, and safety.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, Transhumanism has been utilized by certain individuals as a means to challenge extant social conformity paradigms. I say "unfortunately" because I believe (not that these are unimportant issues) that these egocentric and typically shallow applications of humanity transcending technological capabilities are simply an example of putting the wrong foot forward. If Transhumanism only meant that we could get prosthetic tails, easy cosmetic surgery, or shock young earth creationists with artificial life created in less than seven days, we should just go full speed ahead with presenting those things as the point of the venture. The real bounty of Transhumanism will be the moral ascent of the affected individuals. The completion of our species's and civilization's arc toward peaceful cooperation and plenty should not be characterized by reactionaries suffering from an obsession with identity politics or any soon to be redundant demonstrations of the supremacy of technology over arcane religions or the theatrical shock value of ostentatious augmentation. Transhumanism should be characterized by transcendence of hardship (not just color blindness) with technology. Transhumanism should not be characterized by idle speculation by inexpert journalists with dubious political intentions. Transhumanism should simply be demonstrated, effectively, quietly, and in the most humble and inauspicious applications that can be identified, while remaining consistent Utilitarian ideals and the greatest possible intentions.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-29254081992905085362013-06-15T09:13:00.000-07:002013-06-15T10:18:36.799-07:00Viking wealthToday on Facebook I saw a photogallery with the question "Benefit yard sale for tornado victims or viking invasion?" This year part of my tiny television intake was the entirety of the series Vikings on the History Channel. In one dramatic scene the anonymous denizens of the hero Ragnar Lothbrok's tiny fishing hamlet were slaughtered by a jealous king. I wondered if the vikings had a functional equivalent to the benefit yard sale subsequent to such an attack. One extraordinary fiscal dynamic present in the plot of Vikings is the interface between the belief and precious metals economy. Both the king and the usurper, Ragnar, believe that living according to the practices and ethics of nordic mythology and traditions would either please the gods (which might elicit favor) or directly benefit themselves in the afterlife. For Ragnar this means being both valiant and brutal on the battlefield while seizing treasure from foreign lands. For the king this means seizing the booty of Ragnar's successful raiding expedition and burying it so that he will have wealth in the afterlife. I am fascinated by imagining the way the belief structure of the characters actually would effect an economy. When the rich bury precious metals, the law of supply and demand dictates that it should increase the value of unburied instances of that resource, therefore favoring the poor who presumably are more concerned with a more immediate (and therefore verifiable) set of concerns which can be addressed with silver coins. The "benefit" to the "economic" wealth of poor vikings is however illusory because while the market value of each silver coin they hold is greater (after part of the market supply is removed), some of the supply has, in fact, been removed. Abstract or symbolic currency can assume a market value which is inverse to real value which is illustrated (in our example) by the destruction of silver coins. The burying of the coins is fundamentally destructive, yet it increases the market value of other coins. I cannot seem to recall the part of my economics classes where they taught us that markets can encourage the destruction of goods. In another episode of the series a raiding party led by Ragnar seizes the religious symbols of a Christian monastery, in the name of Odin, because Odin favors the brave with a special heaven (Valhalla) for those that die on the battlefield. The belief vs. reality conversion for the prior sentence would take too long to discuss but we can at least make some net observations. Of imagined value, market value, and real value, real value apparently has the lowest entertainment value.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-12722659314578097422013-05-08T23:03:00.000-07:002013-05-08T23:03:47.794-07:00Spring time in SalemNo second act they say...<br />
Senescence says otherwise.<br />
<br />
Be advised that<br />
just because it is only 142 characters<br />
doesn't make it a lie,<br />
just poorly qualified.<br />
<br />
Like me.<br />
Not suitable for employment.<br />
Not polluted by joys unbent.<br />
<br />
Spring time in Salem,<br />
smells like London,<br />
after rain.<br />
<br />
Spring time is not heaven,<br />
awaiting the condemned.<br />
<br />
Spring time is not solemn.<br />
Or an end to pain.<br />
<br />
Spring time is fresh,<br />
a rebirth of the flesh,<br />
an offer to return,<br />
to try once more,<br />
to find a way to mesh.<br />
<br />
We are no longer lilies,<br />
nor do we yet have the time,<br />
to aspire to that higher ground,<br />
occupied only by the sillies.<br />
<br />
Now we are like oaks,<br />
a season is not yet a joke,<br />
but lost moments,<br />
are no longer cause,<br />
to have a stroke.<br />
<br />
So it is with great regret that I inform my readers,<br />
I have no regrets for those terrible things I said,<br />
when we last spoke.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-1585342758922191152013-01-05T06:06:00.004-08:002013-02-05T08:04:28.390-08:00The Intelligent Living Home: as a source of food, goods, energy, and information.The best solution for the future will be to leverage at home manufacturing to offset the requirement for shipping and roads. The result will be that people will spread back out. Like walking across ice, the population can defuse its impact by diffusing manufacturing, food and energy production. The future will not look like 1970's resorts, it will look like primeval forests or nature itself [1]. The future will be the story of the individual reclaiming autonomy from civilization, reclaiming self-esteem from imposed uniformity, and reclaiming constructive and system thinking from the yoke of reductionism.<br />
<br />
In our arboreal prehistory the trees provided both a sheltering canopy and frequently our means of sustenance. With sufficient diversity the forest could provide a myriad of complex organic chemicals. Medicines, nutrition, cover and a myriad of resources were available at close range within the primeval forests. If we try to imagine the development of inventions like rope, fibers, and thread it is obvious that natural objects like vines could have provided a example of the virtue of the form. Diversity supplies not just exotic chemicals but a ready supply of morphological adaptations which can either be employed directly as tools or abstractly as examples.<br />
<br />
Spatial diversity may provide a needed opportunity to buck some powerful trends.<br />
<br />
Newton asked if the moon falls, not if moons universally empower the emergence of the idea of otherworldly beings by providing visual evidence that other worlds are 'terrestrial' to any intelligent species that can look skyward. Neither the consideration of the element or the whole should be neglected. Formal reductionism has, throughout recorded history, permeated our culture and perhaps most obnoxiously it has manifested as the standardization found in manufacturing. Bricks were among the first manufactured products. Forms impose shapes on bricks and those bricks impose shapes on buildings and therefore the patterns that people follow and the civilization itself. I would wager our minds are deeply affected by orthogonal geometries and the constraint of tessellation. Not to decry tessellation, even unkempt mangroves form a honeycomb when viewed from the air. Late in the twentieth century people generalized the abstraction that it is very useful to mimic biology in design [2]. At about the same time, a similar perspective, regarding the limitations of reductionism emerged among the varied disciplines that had formerly been averse to complex systemic analysis and Gestalt notions [3]. If we think of an ecosystem as an engine of adaptation that produces combinatoric variations on compounds of light elements and physical topologies, we can start to imagine an ecosystem as a source of variations not just to gene pools but to the minds of their occupants. When Tom Ray created the first artificial ecosystems it became obvious that complexity accrues in complex interdependent ecologies[4]. Think of the reduction in novelty among the minds of a population which resides in a mostly static manufactured monocultural landscape. Every source of inspiration is constrained from its inception by the requirement to be linearly extruded or cast with nasty tell-tale seams. What a horrid source of soul crushing allegory the common uniform brick and its macrocosm the wall[5]. Walls preserve socio-economic divides that tend to create the need for walls. And so they grow and continue to divide, defining the polarities of their times, China, Berlin, Arizona. If architecture weren't so useful it would certainly suffer a PR problem. Early in the nineteenth century authors of the transcendental literary movement in America had already begun to celebrate the “return to nature” which is frequently referenced within our culture [6]. By the 1970's many computer scientists and systems ecologists began looking at nature not just as a source of psychic respite but instead as a supplier of useful variations and efficient aggregator of that information [2]. From the perspective of a cognitive psychologist these two phenomena are not entirely separable. Juergen Schmidhuber insists that compression progress is equivalent to the evaluation which is used by humans to generate our sense of interest [7]. When we see a tree, if we intuitively recognize that the proportions of the lengths of its branches follow an arithmetic progression like the Fibonacci sequence or that the proportion of the widths and the angles of separation from trunk to limb to twig follow a fractal or recursive design, it follows that we will derive a sense of pleasure from those realizations. What happens next is nearly magic: we cease to be able to derive pleasure from the stimuli because all of its regularities have already been employed in prior compression steps. We become enured to regularity, it is doomed to being temporarily satisfying. The capability to reduce complex signals to sub-symbolic representations and the behavior of losing interest after that process occurs probably causes the constant novelty seeking which is responsible for both the physical spread of our species across the earth and our remarkable technological progress. This adaptation likely arose because our ancestors were tested by a complex ever-changing ecosystem for millions of years[4][8][9]. Chalmers established the fact that a diversity of problem tasks will lead to the evolution of a more generic learning capability [9]. By extension I contend that the same applies to meta-learning. Schmidhuber claims that the ability to reduce novel regularities out of our cognitive intake is satisfying. This seems to comport with ideas presented by Emerson and Thoreau [10][11]. I would like to go further, I believe that systems like those found in nature can be engineered and that we can design the satisfaction nature provides, into buildings, by making them living things. I believe we can engineer systems that are net positive with respect to useful information and that the best place for such a system is surrounding a human rather than isolated in an ivory tower. Imagine a rooftop cabbage patch that solves math problems.<br />
<br />
Imagine if your home was also your principle tranducer of energy. Imagine if your home was spatially capable of occluding you from your neighbors but close enough that you can easily meet in a commons. Imagine that your home and local environment provided a variety of foods and raw materials. Now imagine that your home grew, not just spatially, but grew in terms of complexity, like a garden not just of vegetables but of ideas and activities themselves. Straightforward feedback circuits supplanted many of the tedious activities of the nineteenth century, but the introduction of Artificial Intelligence will allow us to not only automate the agriculture/manufacturing/energy complex of tomorrows homes but additionally supply imagery, sounds, flavors, odors, sensations, and even the mental and physical challenges, that are best suited to human fulfillment.<br />
<br />
What if such machine/home/living things can self replicate? I believe we are surprisingly close to being able to bring about a number of valuable societal trends by utilizing self replication that utilizes ubiquitous resources along with open source design. Resource independence is not out of reach. Be warned, addressing the mental and spiritual health of people empowered with this type of technology is probably just as important as solving the initial problems of greed, starvation, and energy dependence. Jumping from one set of problems to the next isn't progress, it simply indicates a preference for novelty.<br />
<br />
[1] Rachel Armstrong. http://www.nextnature.net/2012/02/any-sufficiently-advanced-civilization-is-indistinguishable-from-nature/#more-20977<br />
<br />
[2] John H. Holland. 1992. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.<br />
[3] John H. Holland. 1996. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, USA.<br />
<br />
[4] Ray, T. S. 1994. An evolutionary approach to synthetic biology: Zen and the art of creating life. Artificial Life 1(1/2): 179-209. Reprinted In : Langton, C. G. [ed.], Artificial Life, an overview. The MIT Press, 1995, 179-209.<br />
<br />
[5] Pink Floyd (The Wall, 1982)<br />
<br />
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism<br />
<br />
[7] http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html<br />
<br />
[8] Correy A. Kowall and Brian J. Krent. 2007. A simulation of evolved autotrophic reproduction. In Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (GECCO '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 340-340. DOI=10.1145/1276958.1277028 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1276958.1277028<br />
<br />
[9] http://consc.net/papers/evolution.pdf<br />
<br />
[10] Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1836. "Nature"<br />
<br />
[11] Henry David Thoreau. 1854. Walden.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-41714304184806261152012-08-26T09:42:00.001-07:002012-08-26T09:42:52.556-07:00The autopoietic theory of poetry.Every sentence should drop under its own weight.<br />
Bounded by a surface tension.<br />
Compelled by outside forces.<br />
A world folding back on itself by shaving a fraction of a dimension at a time.<br />
But fate prevents the whole from being simpler than the part...<br />
until it is perceived<br />
and then it is art.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-76515914080876045892012-08-17T12:04:00.002-07:002012-08-17T12:06:22.856-07:00light the imperiled damsel pattern<br />
a lantern<br />
showing the way<br />
we understand<br />
<br />
preturnatural repose<br />
calm and a calamity of twirls<br />
we knew that we knew<br />
the edge of the baroque<br />
<br />
I have no sympathy for light<br />
time is blind and lame<br />
in the kingdom of light<br />
<br />
never catching the neutrinos<br />
no divine corpuscle o'<br />
our pal al<br />
lazy units we will mend<br />
until broken<br />
just to send<br />
a story about baby shoes<br />
and tiny coos<br />
<br />
by shaking your whole family tree<br />
we will try to see<br />
beyond the windows<br />
that have told no lies<br />
nor tried to comport<br />
with our sister truth<br />
<br />
do not countenance my counsel<br />
for I feel no sympathy<br />
to the parts held before we parted<br />
<br />
dimmed by the din<br />
of known dimensions<br />
I broke her crass and careful snare<br />
<br />
now there is nothing<br />
into which I cannot<br />
stare<br />
<br />
but time bore her no sympathy<br />
because this was the kingdom<br />
of light<br />
<br />
<br />Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-28407770465476344452012-08-11T12:21:00.001-07:002012-08-11T12:21:26.697-07:00How to Build Moral MachinesPersonally, I plan to use an extended version of Asimov's Laws of Robotics. 0th law: Do not self replicate or modify any artilect (including the self) in such way that it causes a violation of the following three laws. I will instantiate this in much the same way James Albus described training multiple redundant predictors tuned to different distances into the future. Each of these predictors will be bound to a "kill switch" and a set of hard wired detectors and a bounded set of associative resources which can slightly extend the set of perceptions that would equate to a predicted violation. To supplement the predictors, a process of detecting salience with respect to predicted violations will allow retrograde elimination of the elements which can give rise to a violation. It is my personal belief that it is easy to make an AI that will recursively obsess about satisfying a human, however that may get annoying like a rambunctious dog. For some reason people seem to believe that emotions are different from other cognition or reactions. Doesn't a Sidewinder missile seek the heat? If you believe the ability to desist in a response to an emotional perception is required for "actual" emotions, then I submit that the most primitive morph-ability or learning capability allows for this. In fact we can trivially extend the set of qualifying perceptions by applying a randomized neural tissue running a Hebbian Learning Rule to a hard wired perceptron. As those events that have temporal and spatial proximity to the emotional stimuli are embedded in the randomized tissue recipricol connections between the hardwired circuit and the dynamic network will effectively extend the set of emotionally evocative stimuli. You may have experienced something like this if looking at the cupboard where the cookies are causes you to salivate.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-53856742371707830502012-08-10T12:00:00.002-07:002012-08-10T12:00:31.069-07:00On the Venus ProjectIt is my firm belief that @home manufacturing and technologies that are designed from the onset to utilize ubiquitous materials can deconstruct all centralized commodity dependent specialized economies. Two key differences exist between my vision and that of the Venus project. First, I am advocating the adoption of the conventions of the FSF for self replicating systems in general. Free as in beer and libre as in the gospel of Stallman. This differs fundamentally from a managed technocracy because it imparts the burden of sustainability on individuals because it will be to nobodies advantage to accept somebody else's garbage unless they could use it. To be clear the proposition is that if each person generates their own fuel, manufactured goods, food, etc. the consequences translate locally therefore we each engage part of the overall task of sustainability. This system does not eschew property rights it simply adopts the ethic that self replicating systems like Rep-Rap or solar 3d printers or seed or live stock are freely relayed among people. This would have the advantage of allowing us to discard the infrastructure related to transportation of goods, common markets, etc. Second, the only way to offset the concentration of power that super human AI will allow is to distribute that capability to everyone. If it is not distributed it is wasted on top down management when the real toils of life are mundane and repetitive tasks. Of course this vision relies on three key technologies, solar-hydrogen conversion from any water source, sintering and separation of common sands, artificial creative agents.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-64820292378941386782012-08-10T11:50:00.001-07:002012-08-10T11:52:36.891-07:00The Tao of Longevity<br />
Every day I do a little work on longevity technology. I am developing<br />
a microarray of valence receptive elements which will allow a pump<br />
which is programmable to the specific signature of a given organic<br />
molecule. If the atomic weight is approximately 40 or greater the<br />
surface array will be able to selectively grab that molecule. By putting that<br />
programmable microarray in an internal pump I will be able to remove<br />
organic toxins. Net effect, elimination of most blood borne pathogens.<br />
So, knowing that I have time (possibly lots of it) I do not feel<br />
powerless in the face of anything. No corporation, no government, no<br />
societal trend will outlast me or my efforts to bring justice to the<br />
world. I have sovereignty in the face of nearly indomitable forces. I<br />
may not save today's victims but I will win in the end, because I will<br />
persist for as long as it takes. There are no infinite mountains but<br />
there is no proof of the same with respect to time or my effect on<br />
mountains.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-42809764573481026812012-07-27T12:51:00.000-07:002012-07-27T12:53:06.268-07:00A letter to SantaI see all politics and fiction as different versions of the first document I ever wrote: A letter to Santa. Really my letter was less of concerned interrogative between old friends and more of a list of things I selfishly felt entitled to. So when politically motivated small business owners post signs that read "I created this business Mr. Obama." I take it to mean that they wish they had the means to create and run such a business-alone. At home production of goods, food and energy are about to make independence from "the commons" a realizable reality. High bandwidth communication currently allows even medical services to be provided through a combination of telepresence and robotics. Imagine the moment you actually plow a furrow up to the end of your driveway to prevent accidental visitors. Some fiber optics are probably about the extent of what I would like to co-own with my neighbors. Fortunately, if we all sever physical ties we will have to figure out how to manage our own filth in addition to avoiding the costs of providing for the commons.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-17349169987134235172012-07-09T13:37:00.002-07:002012-07-10T17:29:51.043-07:00Stars Spanglish Banter<br />
El Lay,<br />
whispered dirty,<br />
a moan from<br />
a city neither<br />
tender nor concerned with splendor<br />
she is slender<br />
like glamour<br />
suspended like a fat cinder<br />
over the flames<br />
of a burning empire<br />
a maid made<br />
a mender<br />
because she<br />
ate the sweets<br />
right out of the blender.<br />
But there you are,<br />
still knocking and knicking,<br />
preening and shilling<br />
but not like those tired dames<br />
of yesteryear<br />
you are<br />
the future<br />
I fear,<br />
we might just find,<br />
too dear.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-1521287482120032462012-07-05T11:25:00.001-07:002012-08-27T03:28:22.469-07:00An Old American Dream.I believe we can change the entire economic backdrop of this century with a few key innovations which are currently underway. First there are societal innovations which are going to play into reshaping our idea of the necessity of a completely interconnected resource supply network. Urban gardening as a trend is probably the best example of a societal adjustment which improves the availability of a valuable resource to places which have become "Real food deserts" devoid of fresh produce and foods which haven't payed heavily for shelf life. A second similar trend is the DIY movement, which has grown up largely on the back of the success of the Open Source Software movement, which has taken the individual challenge of producing tech products and shown us how truly enlightened and beneficent people can become when associated with crowd sourced development. Almost as importantly, the Open Source Software movement showed the material DIYourselfers how to create licenses which keep crowd sourced software open and free for future development. I will forgive you if you don't immediately see how these two hybrid societal/technical innovations will save the American Dream. I believe that with the development of small foot print solar kilns which can crack the hydrogen out of water with sunlight, we will be able to decentralize power and manufacturing capability. You probably have already seen "rapid prototyping" deposition technologies that magically grow material objects in a small machine. A few years ago a group of inventors created such a machine that could largely manufacture its own parts using this same technology. That project was named Rep Rap which is short for Self Replicating Rapid Prototyping machine. I believe that the technological revolution of the 21st century will be manufacturing using self replicating machines/living things. Engineered biotech systems already usually piggyback part of their fabrication on the life cycle of a genetically modified species, in this way genetic engineers are already using self replication, which isn't so special if you consider that farmers have always used self replication. I actually believe that crowd sourced self replicating machines are the way the poor can escape the yoke of resource dependence. If we can create machines that self replicate using ubiquitous materials and produce useful products like clean burning Hydrogen (which when burned produces water), the yoke of centralized dependence on power will be lifted. If you think about it the idea of independent living on the "frontier" is an even older American Dream, a dream I hope we can all help each other realize. Someday soon I hope to put up a website detailing these efforts called the Free and Self Replicating Hardware Foundation.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-43527725812991020022012-05-17T11:59:00.000-07:002012-05-17T12:32:22.359-07:00Exchange vs. fair exchangeExchange, as surely as it can be beneficial, can be uni-laterally beneficial, neutral, or even negative. Exchange can also be consensual, or unilaterally desired, or in some rare cases desired by neither party in the actual exchange. My relationship to Nabisco share holders is strictly antagonistic. They seek to reap a maximal heap of what I have had; and I seek, at least, sustenance because I own no property suitable to produce the food which I require. We are mutually beneficial in the long term so they won't kill me with mercury unless it costs too much to avoid. Likewise, I don't have the option of non-profit food sources so I must tolerate an exchange with a party whose disposition I find unnecessarily antagonistic (Nabisco share holders). If I had the option of exchanging ducats for food produced by a non-profit I would exercise that option and I would hope to have earned those ducats at an exchange rate that reflects both my interests and the interests of the communities I am a party to. Specifically I would hope that my income would be a reflection of the cost of living plus an incentive for performance, as established by my predecessors, and incentives established by the rate of necessity for a particular type of practice. Interestingly, the most obvious formula for expressing societal necessity involves the average performance of the individual practitioners and determines the number of those practitioners it takes to fully supply the populace (call it n) and compares it to actual number of practitioners (n/n-real) resulting in a ratio (roughly around 1/1) which, when multiplied by base income, incentivizes entering useful professions without gouging. The same math trick can be applied to gross performance. It could be patients treated, cars serviced, kids educated sufficiently to pass a test, some numeric value which encapsulates the grossest possible metric of a task, put your performance in a ratio with your predecessor (yours/predecessor) and you can smoothly integrate the income curve between apprentice, journeyman, and master. Of course each trade would probably insist that things like malpractice rate or lowering operating costs also be integrated into their "single variable" evaluation but the spirit of the convention remains the same. Living wage * ratio of predecessor performance * ratio of necessity in society = fair exchange.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-89858375401465654242012-04-26T13:11:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:13:55.815-07:00SentienceSentience is poorly defined because it doesn't traditionally recognize the difference between simple self awareness delivered by a contemporaneously activated distal nervous system and the inferential existential type of sentience arrived at by DesCartes. Either can be produced in an artificial living thing, currently. Existential inference does not require life in the reproductive sense. Perhaps a more liberal interpretation of life as a system which combines static elements in dynamic ways might suffice to widen the definition of life so that all sentient agents would require it. Sentience is a characteristic which can unfold in a system within a forum populated by a group of fairly rigid, operator scripted, inference producing agents. Given this situation, most non trivial inferences on set theory get you to the doorstep of the Cogito. Imagine a chat room with six Prolog agents and a common text field into which they can see and write. When you start the scenario you give them a little universe of objects let us say <orange, melancholy, toupee'>. We can say our agents basic process is to infer classes on the group of all objects it is aware of and the output of the first agent (postulating and positing an inference) would look something like this: <Alpha><x><'<',',','>'><y><'orange','melancholy','toupee''><br />
at which point a second agent issues (posits) a correction based on the observation of Alpha's response.<br />
<Beta><x><'<',',','>','''><y><'orange','melancholy','toupee''><z><'Alpha'><a><'x','y','z','a'><br />
The second agent adds the ' character to the set of separating characters which both agents agree should be called x and that the universe also contains some original terms called y along with another object labeled z which it turns out is the name of the previous agent which issued a statement prepended with its’ own name (this is important we will see why later). Note that the second agent also declares the class of identifying names ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, and most importantly the element 'a' which corresponds to the name of the class of identifying names (<a>=’x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, and ‘a’). Beta can add the new name for the class to the set of items in that same class (item names) exactly because it has identified an element in the common grammar upon which inference is possible.<br />
The third agent corrects the second agent in like fashion but applies the 'trick' Beta used while defining the set named 'a' by including it in it's own set, by adding both 'Beta' and itself 'Gamma' to the set of agents.<br />
<Gamma><x><'<',',','>','''><y><'orange','melancholy','toupee''><z><'Alpha','Beta','Gamma'><a><'x','y','z','a'><br />
I feel it is important to point out that Beta inferred the part of the common grammar that governs nominative declarations and Gamma the common declaration of authorship as part of all statements which followed the original unclaimed/uncredited expression.<br />
Subsequent agents named Theta, Epsilon would issue corrective expressions asserting their own existence in turn. Now imagine that our sixth agent has no internalized name. When it tries to reference itself to chime into the conversation it just mutters the all too grammatically incorrect:<br />
<><x><'<',',','>','''><y><'orange','melancholy','toupee''><z><'Alpha','Beta','Gamma','Theta','Epsilon',''><a><'x','y','z','a'><br />
You see we have tricked our system into identifying the grammatical constraint of the existence of items between the <> and '' characters and more particularly (in this case) an empty identification. This is how we cause our silly agents to examine the internal syntax, grammar, and semantics of their common lexicon in a relational manner, starting with the syntactic nicety of agent or attributive names. The sixth anonymous agent knows it exists because it undergoes process but it is separable from self identifying agents in that it has amnesia or is anonymous somehow. So it issues a correction.<br />
<><x><'<',',','>','''><y><'orange','melancholy','toupee''><z><'Alpha','Beta','Gamma','Theta','Epsilon'><a><'x','y','z','a','b'><b><''><br />
In effect by separating itself from the class of a priori identified agents by inferring its own existence based its previously expressed position it is sufficiently informed to say something very similar to: I exist because I express and I am different because I do not have a name so I am the single member of a group called 'b'. If our agents are capable of acting upon inferences which require information from a series of turns they will be capable of inferring the difference between agents which had internal awareness vs. awareness which required committing some information into their common interface as a type of one step memory. But most importantly, the simple association of classes of agent behaviors with names which are of the same type which are assigned to syntactic characters, semantic elements, and grammatical concepts allows both inference of a language theory, theory of mind, and self reference.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-80347799917669940272012-02-26T19:15:00.001-08:002012-02-26T19:16:19.644-08:00RE: Catholic Churches Obligation to Provide ContraceptionThe state or states seem to have the right to require numerous criteria be filled in order for a business to remain a legally defined and entitled entity. If a Bedouin happens along and says having a mailing address is against his religion he will have hard time insisting that he has a right to 'equal protection' because his right will in turn impinge on the rights of his customers and employees to contact that business. Please correct me if I am wrong but I do not believe the right to be a business is enshrined in the Constitution. If a business does not have to meet the obligations presented to other businesses on the basis of religious beliefs we might as well discard contract law. The ability to legally hire citizens in this country is a privilege not a right. If an entity cannot meet its state mandated requirements for legally employing an individual it simply cannot offer legal employment. I am fairly certain that traditionally small churches around America have at least one 'below board' employee typically a secretary who handles light clerical duties so that the clerics can tend to the flock. This person is often religiously motivated so they are not prone to obligate the church to the full 'above board' state mandated obligations like unemployment insurance, medical benefits, etc. I point this out because we all know it happens and represents the type of 'exceptional-ism' the Churches often grant themselves. Personally, I am in favor of taxing all organizations, religious or otherwise, and strongly regulating entities that file for tax exempt status. In short, if we allow religious exceptions for organizations that operate as employers, we do so at the risk of empowering the victimization of their employees. The state should exist to protect the rights of the citizens at the cost of the privileges granted to non-human organizations. Hallelujah!Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-78630134810283605952011-10-28T21:15:00.000-07:002011-10-28T21:17:49.547-07:00Sam Harris must not have done appropriate research.Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.<br />
Sam Harris<br />
<br />
I harass Sam Harris all the time. He seems to be in utter denial over the demise of the Logical Positivism movement. It is outside his area of study so it is possible that he simply wasn't aware of it when he wrote some of the works he has decided to stand behind. If we bring reason to the table we must accept that optimal cannot be determined in broad classes of problems, therefor determining what is right or wrong is simply beyond the scope of reasoning. Any legitimate attempt to ascertain epistemelogical truths runs afoul of the prevailing philosophical disposition which is that faith, wherein it is synonymous with belief is a necessary component of knowledge. Usually epistemologists subscribe to the notion that knowledge alone requires that a belief be both justifiable and true. Without all three elements it cannot be known. I would argue that a myriad of mathematical findings in addition to the works of Godel and Turing show us that we can assert premises but almost never determine their legitimacy or verifiability. I am in agreement with the notion that reason, spirituality and ethics should be considered in almost everything we do. However, I believe it is important that we do overstate the case for implications of premises we just pulled out of common or individual desire. In fact, as a practitioner of AI we draw distinct concentric circles around the types of environments and their relationship to the capacity to allow a finding of optimality. The class which is defined by making plans or choosing actions in a world like our reality is called a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. Without being able to see the whole universe at once, best or worst decisions can only be determined over the scope of what is known. Worse yet if you have say two equivalent objectives in a place where you have complete information you cannot always find a single best course of action. Even if we just say we don't need to justify the premise of an a priori goal, we will still find calculating the best course or behavior to arrive at that goal cannot be determined without complete information.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-32826177753742312772011-10-23T15:40:00.000-07:002011-10-23T15:40:17.527-07:00What we can do about inequality, without eating the rich.I have an idea. Imagine a company conceived to follow a terminal arc, like Cincinnatus and his career as a general. People of my generation have lost the security of guaranteed retirement packages that our parents had. There is a way to re-fill this lost part of the social contract. Build companies from the outset with the idea that they will, in some asymptotic bound, no longer require labor costs. Combine this with idea of profit sharing or employee ownership, not excluding the possibility of publicly traded shares, and you have an appealing alternative to old fashioned retirement. Mechanization is inevitable, displacement is consequential to that, designing that truth into the compensation package could be a lucrative and humane way to incrementalize retirement. Instead of working 30 years for one company, work on a half dozen projects that last five years each reaching a point of sustainable yield on a precisely prearranged schedule. After the first six months we switch from product R/D to facility R/D, after a year we refine our business model and decide what percentage of the stocks can be given to the workforce over the lifetime of the company given that start up will cost something so it must be partially sold, after two years begin fazing out the basic work force, janitors install rhoombas etc. , after four years a skeleton crew works out bugs and does R/D on maintenance automation and design automation, after five years senior staff automates out running the company day to day, then apply Xeno's method, half the hours worked each year....until viola everyone works somewhere else or plays in the sun, whatevs. Sorry I had to tag you all but I hear many of you asking the same questions, that this will answer, and yet nobody seems to read it when I put an answer in a Note. Please share this with your freinds because I am a just one guy and this is at least an idea. P.S. Maybe we should allow people to automate their own jobs out of existence in return for a percentage of their wages....maybe even make it law that this should be the case. <br />
<br />
Existing companies recognize that talent is a powerful resource. Leading edge companies, over the last decade at least, have innovated both with new products and incentives to lure in top talent. Take Google and it's legendary millionaire masseuse. One of my Profs. frequently told the story of a fellow graduate student that left the dog eat dog world of academia, to work for this new fangled search engine company, largely because of amazing perks like profit sharing and an in house masseuse which made long hours and a boiler room intensity of competition seem fun and doable. So Google won the search engine war, with better algorithmic science and the science of human resources and that masseuse retired a very young millionaire. The stories could be lined up from here around the street. Office Max has warehouse workers who's stock options are worth millions, you might think they would get lazy, actually just the opposite, they don't need oversight because they own the company. So down to the nitty gritty. Say you are a shareholder in an existing company, and I tell you that I have a plan that will double your money in five years, but first you have to give up half your stock to a pool to hire in new talent and restructure costly aspects of the business using machines. So because your stock is down (this doesn't apply to Exxon or Apple) anyway, if you give up half your stock now, the value is already depressed, and you can write this up as a loss on your taxes, because capital reinvestment is almost always deductible. So we now have half the companies value to hire really top flight talent, but the trick is that we compensate them with very little cash and lots of ownership. Because the new employees are coming on board to put the ship on autopilot they work harder because their efforts are directed at a goal that they share with the company. Stock prices might even enjoy short term gains because prices reflect belief in the future of the company not it's actual value. In the long run if all goes right you start cleaving out big parts of the labor costs. This happens in regular companies but there is usually much more weeping involved. Now each worker has a tiny golden parachute in the form of the dividends payed by his/her former employer. Now remember half the ownership of the company has passed from the ownership class to the working class so you should see at least incremental improvement in upper management because those bosses are now servile to the people who used to work for them (and consequently know what they should be doing). So back to the original stock holders benefits, first they get a big tax write off, second the stock might tick up because you just radically restructured the company, third the management is now being managed by former workers, fourth the product and production quality will probably shoot up because of improved talent, fifth long term costs like labor are always going to decrease therefore making larger dividends possible, sixth if they are willing to concede the fifth benefit they can use the money for vertical integration by buying their materials suppliers. Everyone wins except the companies that try to compete using the old model, nobody wants to go to work at a company that is a treadmill, so they die and leave bigger market shares for the companies that have properly incentivized performance. Imagine how much less dread you would have for your workplace if you knew that if you did your job well you would not even have to do it anymore after five years. It turns out that if people can see the goal they run much faster.<br />
<br />
Smart people will have to work toward enfranchising people through decreasing commoditized resource dependence. You do this by designing manufacturing processes to use local even ubiquitous resources while providing further manufacturing capability. By lowering the threshold to enter the market or obviating the market all together outlays by the 'materially poor' are less of an impediment to their own production capacity. Ultimately, a decentralized, decommoditized economy puts each person in touch with their own resource dependence which I believe will create enhanced social and environmental responsibility.<br />
<br />
Of course, some jobs are currently beyond automation.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #edeff4; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px;"> <a avglsprocessed="1" href="http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/09/the_7_stages_of.php" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span>http://www.kk.org/thetechn</span><wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span><span>ium/archives/2011/09/the_7</span><wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>_stages_of.php</a> </span>On the other hand there are a myriad of particularly service related domains that are merely resistant to automation. White collar and manufacturing jobs however, are not difficult because parameters space can be minimized. If you want a build an automatable company you might have to change the practice drastically in order to limit the variability confounding the machines that will do it. I have yet to hear a person describe a useful profession that wasn't at least mostly automatable. On <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sam-Harris/22457171014">Sam Harris</a> 's page I listened to people of every stripe claim their job couldn't be automated, the masseuse said it, but obviously he must be aware of the number of shaking chairs he competes with, and I wonder if he realizes surgeons have been being replaced at an super-linear rate, the roboticist claimed it and I gave him a link to my paper on robots which build robots. In fact I would like to posit this right now...if your job doesn't have a machine to do it, it wasn't important enough to warrant it being done well. Just ask astronauts, pinnacle humans, with no business competing with machines with millisecond saccades. Find me a working poet and I will show you the last guy on earth who will actually have a job. I myself will have retired long before somebody or something decides we need more of what that guys does without doing it ourselves.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-35123182283671668002011-10-23T15:27:00.001-07:002011-10-23T15:27:20.056-07:00Support American Workers: Buy the YuanSome people who continually regurgitate talking points will claim, 'if we don't also lower corporate taxes and reduce regulations multinationals will leave the country in droves.' Well that ship has sailed. Monetary policy in the Fed and Beijing has colluded to inflate the value of the dollar such that it doesn't make sense to make things in the U.S. This is part of a totally conscious decision to adopt a policy that favors the spending of dollars over trying to earn dollars, the Fed simply represented the interest of the investment class over the working class. If we allow the value of the dollar to fall (relative to other currencies) simply by buying the Yuan in piles, we could drive up the cost of Chinese imports and it would help stabilize local manufacturing globally. This will make it easier for small businesses to compete with gigantic businesses. By radically decreasing the availability of any currencies (by purchasing them) those currencies become more valuable relative to the dollar therefor products sold for dollars are more competitive and products purchased with dollars more are expensive. Wallmart would take a huge dive and GM would boom but the tax base of the federal government would increase because they can tax GM and their employees whereas with Wallmart they only get the corporate tax and no sales tax. The Chinese Central Government would be mad and Americans would have to tolerate higher prices but they would at least have jobs.<br />
<br />
How you can help<br />
<br />
Ask your local brokerage firm, bank, or credit union to sell you Yuan. Ask your boss to put your retirement savings in Yuan. Write your congressman and demand the right to purchase Yuan. Compliance with fair and open trade dictates that you should have access to this currency market. Breaking the central governments hold on the price of the Yuan benifit Chinese workers by making their work worth a decent wage and American workers by making their products competitive in more markets. It is relatively safe because the Chinese government attempts to control its value relative to the dollar and other currencies. China isn't going away and neither are we. There are obvious reasons that neither nation will let their currency become too devalued. However, historically the Yuan has consistently risen in value versus the dollar over time. This means that you don't even have to invest in a Chinese business, you can simply buy the currency and it is like betting on the whole nation being capable of making their currency valuable. Of course it may seem safer and more familiar to buy some Harley Davidson stock instead. This is fine but it isn't smart. If you want to help Harley Davidson and your neighbors children you can, collectively, and individually make the U.S. economy more competitive by making U.S. made goods cheap enough to sell in emerging markets like China, Brazil and India. It is natural that these nations will have growing numbers of people entering a 'middle class' and the United States, Europe and Japan will have the lead in products for middle class consumers: Harley Davidson motorcycles, Armani suits, Sony T.V.'s. The people in the emerging markets will crave and consume the niceties that we have come to enjoy. We cannot stop the developement of the underdeveloped but if we lower our own pricepoint then we will speed up the onset of the day when a Chinese worker cannot automatically produce goods for less than slave wages...we are doing both the Chinese and American workers a favor by making it impossible find anybody in the world who will work for less than a fair wage. <br />
<br />
Please share this post with everyone you know. It will only work well if many people do it.Correy Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6421814188914101546.post-65647649990391814552011-10-23T14:17:00.000-07:002011-10-23T14:36:01.698-07:00Lies fit into 142 characters or less more easily than truth.Platitudes like aphorisms are lies of brevity and convenience.<br />
This is my blog. In this blog I encourage subtle, complete thinking, attribution, and no ad hominem attacks. If you want to attack something attack peoples' ideas, words, writings, art, whatever, but if you attack a person I will remove your comments. And for my sake please leave your conformity pants out on the line.<br />
ckCorrey Kowallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09917319678398742587noreply@blogger.com1