originally posted @Ntegrationalism

This past week I was at the Canadian Consulate General in New York for their Celebration of Innovation in Financial Technology, which featured 10 start-ups or early stage companies from the most robust nation in financial terms, according the IMF & World Bank stress tests. I’ve been thinking about fintech and the use of technology to better distribute wealth via identifying the value that individuals possess for some time. The meeting hosted by @miriam_leia CanadaNY’s chief innovation officer compelled me to start piecing some of the writing that I’ve done on the topic of value. I’m unsure how to summarize things enough for a quick read, hopefully this isn’t too choppy.

Great Automation

We find ourselves at the beginning of a somewhat great automation. While formidable arguments exist from every political faction on the potential for job creation and depletion, forecasters can confirm that the growth trends of technology show no signs of slowing; continued automation of tasks in business services for enterprise are on the horizon.

·Demand side: Restore public-sector jobs and invest in infrastructure for immediate jobs and long-term growth.

·Supply side: Extend Bush-era tax cuts to spur economy. Cut spending to curb growth-crushing debt and deficit.

·Another way: Invest in community-based, member-owned cooperatives and reduce the workweek.

Even as the world economy reacts to the automation of the its most affluent and technologically advanced nations, we find ourselves unable to distribute vales well for physical laborers.

At McKiney & Company, David Fine quotes: Africa’s workforce, young and growing quickly, will be the world’s largest by 2035. Unemployment stands at just 9 percent, but two-thirds of the labor force are in vulnerable, non-wage-paying jobs.

I wrote to the IEET a few years ago to provoke some discussion on the ethics of automation from an information technology standpoint, as the ethnography behind automation has been a large focus of mine over the past decade with corporations as a consultant. According to ContactHMRC.com, “Even as resistance was futile the protests continue at each firm I visited. It seems that the exponential growth of technology, not only from a hardware standpoint (via Moore’s Law), but also from a methodological and software standpoint, requires a new method of distributing values.” Jobs are difficult to generate in this great automation. Further, if our labor culture is changing for goods and services, I’m not aligned with the idea that we can restore historical methods. We must innovate out of joblessness.

Our inability to quantify the toiling of the individual and even the institution has hampered our ability to sustain gainful employment (jobs) during the accelerating changes. Note: I am not referring to sustainability, as it is illogical to seek, but to state that we are not agile. In the modern world individuals and institutions are participating more than ever in the process of development of goods/services through passive means. They are influencers. Specifically I mean: we are performing the act of development of goods and services without being compensated for it or even realizing our participation. Consider a long being in empty space, worthless. While human-kind can’t have inherent value, community can. We all generate values at the point we can interact with another.

In business CRM (customer relations management) and UX (user experience) are examples of how we leverage a consumer to be their own discoverer, developer, and deploy-er of solutions to problems. Via a conduit (profit seeking institution) as a platform, we interact. Sure there may be a single or group of experts monitoring the feedback, but the fact that feedback exists warrants some nominal indemnification other than the creation of new products for consumers, no? Figure 1. Represents a crude the CRM input process.

While the system is still new, culturally, functionally, and technologically – we’ve managed to build and identify better sensors for data points on participants in the crowd. Our ability to evaluate systemic risks and opportunities is actually an older statistical science that mathematicians and economists have been tinkering for decades. The fact that entrepreneurs who develop software solely based on customer reviews in the Salesforce.com AppExchange to then distribute as an added service is justification enough to consider how we indemnify a society for its knowledge and experience as a user. Is it valuable to seek more useful or even intuitive experiences? Companies have dedicated efforts to understanding sentiment on news by consumers and reactors to information regarding their enterprise. Firms like, Finmaven: Tool for publicly traded companies to monitor, publish and analyze social media…or, Market IQ: Analysis of unstructured data such as social media to provide real time insights to traders.. Automation is much broader than marketing and customer relations; however, the processes around relations are at the core of automation.

Too Connected To Fail

Our relations in our close and extended networks are what provide the tangible value that other individuals and institutions derive from us. As social beings we are somewhat obligated to interact well. While this sheds no light on egalitarian ideals, it does provide an opportunity for less-introverted individuals and institutions to be indemnified for participation. For example, at HBS participation often accounts for 50% of the total course grade. That method is good enough to start with, no? Lowering our degrees-of-separation from our peers and attracting new connections is what elects the people at the top of the classes at Harvard Business School. People learn how to communicate more effectively through the rigor of participation, and their value sky rockets relative to the rest of the business community.

In the past decade the global “great recession” exposed our systemic vulnerability and ties to each other at the micro and macro scale. Financial innovations have enabled risk transfers that were not fully recognized by financial regulators or by institutions themselves, complicating the assessment of a “too-connected–to-fail” problem. Companies in FinTech are closing the communication gap like Quantify Labs: CRM and Content Platform for Institutional Finance. In plain English they show all communication between bank’s customers and vendors. Scenarios like, who checked which communications and the supply-chain of communication. Anyone who has ever watched a movie about finance and trading of equities knows that traders and brokers mostly talk to each other to buy and sell stakes in equities for mutual benefit. Expanding communications or even knowledge of existing communications on creates more threads to an ever-expanding web of connectivity. As an evolving species, we need our web to continue to grow in order to support our initiative for growth, or creating technologies on a more grand scale.

The mentioned initiative can be found in every facet of our lives. Form the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Figure 2. A diagrammatic depiction of co-risk feedbacks, presents the conditional co-risk estimated between pairs of selected financial institutions. In plain English, the numbers on the diagram are communication linkages between people/assets at these banks.

While there is some debate on exactly what the framework should be to quantify co-dependence or co-risk, the best solution should be a growing group of qualified rating methods and agencies evaluating data differently as it changes and expands, as it does. Similar to this type of co-dependence our civilization’s most important institutions, our most important individuals are also co-dependent on a group of near and distant peers. We are all dependent on other to discover, develop, and deploy solutions to problems of a more personal kind.

Software services like Klout, Kred, Peer Index, and at least a dozen more are making efforts to mine through the data that we communicate to influence, in order to deliver a score with regards to our varied value (depending on their methodology and focus). Similar to the IMF individuals need to evaluate co-dependence and influence on their peers but also on institutions. Applying Klout-like methods to measure our value will enable us to make formidable legal and political arguments for out just due. And perhaps a more manageable transition through structural unemployment and globalization is possible via what’s due. Note: I am using influence and co-dependence to reference social value on entities. We all play a role in the negotiation that is life’s happenings but those of us who aren’t entrepreneurs rarely know that we’re a part of the conversations affecting decisions.

Connectivity is starting to span beyond social connections and socialization in general. It is starting to be quantified in new ways, as there are no shortages in places to install sensors and things to understand. Physical sensors that help us recognize, colors, odors, heat, distance, sounds, etc are all being created as devices that empower an application programming interface (API), which is another way to allow information technology to quantify how we engage sensors. The appification of sensors like Node or Canary or Leap Motion are the next generation of sensors that we’ve used on watches and cameras. Looking forward to days where nanorobotics can monitor mitochondrial stability to forecast and avoid apoptosis to help cells cheat death, of course, we still have a long way to go. Today, the case can be made to spread some of the abundant wealth by validating the abundant value each individual creates through info tech.

Technoprogressivism

From a political standpoint a new debate needs to be had around how we react to the types of joblessness that results from rapidly changing technology, as the rate of changing is seemingly increasing. In regards to technoprogressivism and structural unemployment via automation and other methods; it is ideal to embrace the end of work: meaning that there should be some equitable distribution of the leisure created by automation.

While ideas on the end of work have been around for centuries, the distribution of leisure within or succeeding a capitalistic system is quite new. The innovation in distribution of social values that needs to occur is separate from welfare. It is understandably just to enforce a pervasive welfare state for our inability to distribute value; however, it is not an adequate remedy to the wealth gap and technologies effort to quantify all things. The root of our problem is our inability to distribute values among those who actually participate in creating it, while managing risk (or insurances). A guaranteed basic income and/or a shorter work week are not elaborate enough to compel an agile system of developments in compensation, even while they are necessary.

Information technology and the manipulation of BigData, are enabling us to understand who is influencing which changes, even at a nominal rate. Incentivizing individuals and institutions to interact in a more transparent way is important in evaluating new ways to indemnify them for their participation in society. It helps them learn and others to learn about them. This may read invasive and unethical from a privacy stand-point. While that debate should be had, my stance in short: is that human-kind cannot achieve the interconnectedness it requires for distributing our relatively abundant resources through complete privacy or conservatism. Going forward, the next wave of value to exploit it not material but portable. Figure 3. Shows my Klout rating of 60/100 for influencing my social network. The question should be asked: who have I influenced? What decisions have they made based on my influence? Have they contributed to any gross domestic product (GDP)? Is that value portable?

Portable Value

In a short essay I wrote called “Portable Value”, influenced by Hernando de Soto I channeled his ideas that “adequate participation in an information framework that records ownership”, can spur economic growth. History shows that coinage in the exchange of good in local/international trade made portable wealth possible. The more transparent information-collection of purchase, stake holdings, and ownership of goods from legal-documentation to land to human-slaves made our modern economies grow. While I don’t agree with de Soto’s position on land titling and side with a more communal and democratic systems of collective land tenure because this offers protection to the poorest and prevents ‘downward raiding’ in which richer people displace squatters once their neighborhoods are formalized, I am aligned with the idea of an individual titling.

Neither de Soto nor his opponents wrote about individual titling specifically, and I’m not very fond of the phrase, but it’s fitting nomenclature assuming that they would have called the distributing of ownerships outside of land specifically some version of “individual titling” considering their democratic capitalism alignment. The significance here rest with ownership and the individual. The phenomenon of private ownership has pervaded and propelled the growth of humans and our technological extensions which make life more livable. Capitalism is the term of choice for the private ownership and trade of things. Per my views (@Ntegrationalism), Capitalism is merely an economic manifestation of human-kind’s technological evolution. While I’m aware of the rigid opposition to my last sentence, I’ve written it under the assumptions that

• All things in existence are physiologically connected.
• Humans cannot have nature.
• Technology is deterministic when applied to the human condition.
• Individualism spawns competition resulting in arbitrage.

Regarding information on ownership, economic growth requires a growth in participation of owners to in-turn expand the amount of wealth or wealth opportunities in the collective (system). Nostalgic and conservative ideas of constricting the potential growth of human-kind and the institutions that we’ve built is futile and unwise, as we live in a dynamic realm (world, galaxy, universe, multiverse) which renders life as we know it, unsustainable by definition. Even the home planet (Earth) warmed by the nearest star (Sun) will be an unsustainable body in due time. We need to be more agile in how we adapt to change.

As a species or parent of species, human-kind should be encouraged to compel as many participating owners of physical-properties (land) and nonphysical-properties (intellectual property, digital, and other) as possible to create a web of interconnected and integrated interest, per our vigilant growth. While land is scarce and in de Soto’s day, it was the end of the titling arguments, our ability to create valuable information and intellectual property has surpassed that of land property. The individual must be able to own the information that they distribute and monetize it. There is a firm called 4pay in Canada that aims to create the beginnings of a “data locker” by creating mobile applications that allow consumers to control transactions without giving personal or financial data to creditors or retailers. Knowing that this will be a heavy blow to the advertising industry and could hinder individuals from accessing valuable information on goods/services that they actually want and need, the delivery model may be flawed. While innovations away from the existing supply chain may prove formidable, I think that some legal and financial incentives to provide individuals with their own information footprint have to be implemented at the local and international scale not to protect the individual, but to empower them. Individuals have to know when they are being used as insights to make decisions about their peers lives.

- From Integrationalism

In April of 2010 the Library of Congress announced that it will acquire all of the public tweets for future generations to review. It’s quite the ambitious effort from a technological standpoint, considering all of the data migration and storage as the micro-blogging social network grows. The initiative also has some uncovered ethical and democratic potential that are currently being overlooked.

Twitter as a platform is empowering the creators of the world to understand how their co-conspirers and consumers are affecting the discovery, development, and delivery of new goods & services to be brought to market. For instance, Marketing and other R&D departments across the globe at the enterprise scale are using social networks like Twitter to monitor and improve their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) processes. These aren’t rigid customer service initiatives, but also customer discovery initiatives. Social networking is giving new meaning to the idea that supply & demand are never ending sphere of interaction; further, confusing the philosophical ideal of who might our creators and consumers be.

This is important because ownership is allocated to creators of sorts, regardless of initial or latter impact.

At current, the world is enduring a series of spiking economic crisis, and as the engineers and economists try and root-cause to remedy our problems, the political conservatism that we all possess at some extent is making it difficult to justify spreading the wealth. Moral and Political arguments haven’t been working over the millennia or most recently. The books/rants/calls for gifting larger amounts to working-poor, nor distributing wealth at high rates to compensate the lesser valued have yielded a change in the gap between those with an immense value and those without. This crisis is not one of lost value, or population growth, or technological change. It is (and has always been) one of poorly allocated ownership. Those causes can be debated separately.

Ownership is paramount in distributing value to individuals and institutions, outside of charity. I don’t think it necessary to elaborate on how miniscule charity is in the known world. It’s legally defensible and mathematically quantifiable. One of the missions of the Library of Congress is to log intellectual property; further, so that it may (if necessary) be defended on the behalf of stakeholders. The initiative to capture tweets for the future generations should not only be technologically charged, but it should be economically charged to assign ownership to authors. This effort would assist greatly in identifying the degrees of separation between the various stakeholders in the discovery, development, and delivery of things.

I’ve spent some time thinking about what the #Occupy movement is really representing. I’ve tried to attend the camps as I’ve traveled and interview the people in the camps; as well as, their formidable opponents in the ownership positions of the respective societies that Occupiers exist.

I think that I’m comfortable echoing the analysis in that Occupiers have done a good initial job in comparison to similar movements around the world and in the United States in particular. They’ve caught the attention of the masses, in that everyone knows what #Occupy means. Of course the problems of any fledgling movement are that its priorities aren’t hashed (#) out. While everyone knows what #Occupy is; no one has any idea of what it wants, or rather, needs.

Every movement-struggle-jihad, has is a battle of philosophy on how a society should exist versus how it does. Based on the consistent and more frequent collapse in the economic system, it is evident that we are due for some structural change in the modern world. When I listen to the rhetoric of this movement and the defense of its identified opponents, I think the following apply. There is a clash of ideals on whose altruism is not only virtuous but most beneficial. On the one hand we have that of the individuals, formally represented by the #Occupiers. On the other we have that of the institutions, formally represented by their owners/stakeholders. While individuals (humans in this case) can allocate a moral regard to their fellow man/woman based on their acknowledgment of his/her intrinsic or extrinsic value, institutions do not. Yet some individuals can advocate the virtues of an institution because for their holding that the institution’s incentives to take action better the society as a whole.

Institutions were created by individuals to protect the discovery, development, and deployment of technologies (methodologies, hardware, & software) that help individuals control what would otherwise be a chaotic environment. Who wants to live in 3000 B.C.E.? I’d doubt any of us could enjoy limiting our communication to a distances less than 20 feet. While institutions have served individuals well over the millennia their control mechanisms have the potential to run-a-muck. Their primary control mechanisms are related to their extrinsic value, or ability to generate revenues above the costs to exists. Controls validate the existence of each institution (for-profit & not-for-profit alike), but individuals don’t regard themselves as having extrinsic value alone (at least not all of them), per this on-going survey that I’ve been taking with some backlash about the use of language on “value”. Problem comes into play when those who are still benefiting from the existing operations of institutions clashes with those who are no longer benefiting. As institutions trying to sustain existence, they actually have incentives to suppress markets to indemnify stakeholders, per their understanding of who is most valuable.

Regarding the Occupy movement and its potential participants, the progress will occur when and if the most radical of the bunch agree that the contrast of values between individuals and institutions is infringing on their civil or even human rights and is in fact stifling their ability to live productive lives. Regardless of how they derive their understanding of the modern economic situation, they’ll have to hold it as dear and urgent as their more radical predecessors of the last past successful liberal movements. I’m not referring to MLK’s boycotts or the freedom riders, or the Jewish resistance in Europe, or the Mandela’s political activism. I’m referring to the immediate threat that militant groups like the Black Panthers, or the onslaught of the Allied Forces, or the provocative military growth of Umkhonto we Sizwe and the many like groups respectively per each struggle. The laws of arbitrage are clear and animalistic. Incumbent leadership, ideals, and conservatism can only respect some formidable opposition.

The incumbent power in 1950’s United States and 1980’s South Africa only yielded because they perceived an inevitable destructive threat; any rhetoric that suggests otherwise is misleading. It would take years to list all the martyrs from every movement who gave their lives to inspire the few, and were willing to take other’s lives for their cause. The pathology of pacifism is a failed effort when it does not inspire an aggressive colleague. Occupiers are going to have to figure out what in the world they can do to change the way institutions and individuals agree on human value. Although they were arguing slightly different causes, the incumbent powers decided to oblige Lyndon B Johnson immortalizing Martin Luther King in order to nullify the slogan “black power” and its author Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). It seems as though it takes a guilty old man faced with the passions of an aggressive young man, to make any incremental change..

-          Originally at Integrationalism

“As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized under a past North Carolina program should be compensated $50,000 each, a panel voted on Tuesday, the first time a state has moved to pay victims of a discredited human selection program.”

There approximately 2000 living victims of the eugenics experiment conducted between 1929 and 1974 in the State of North Carolina. The short report released at a late hour of the business day (3:26PM) in a non-graphic format only commanded ‘24’ tweets by the time that I wrote this article some 24 hour later. These are extremely small viewership numbers for the magnitude of this article.

Governor Beverly Perdue provided political backing for the aforementioned compensation derived by a five member task-force. While this information may just seem as common as Interpol discovering some Waffen SS General in his late 90’s, it is not. The political and legal implications of this executive decision are wide spread. It is not the normal protocol of any government to give legal and financial incentive to its constituencies to demand (and receive) any type of indemnification. A greater question for the NC-Governor and the task force is: Why? While I’d expect to see some District and possibly even the Supreme Court push back on this legislation, there is a real opportunity posed to the pseudo-democratic body that is the United States from a legal, socio-cultural, and technological standpoint. Of course there is a real threat posed from an economic standpoint. Every affected entity (individual or institution) seeking reparations for their abuse, from slavery to agriculture subsidies, has some new grounds for argument; and further, in the fashion of capitalistic we should assume that every ambitious attorney is paying attention.

Pandora’s passions for chaos provides all the incentives that federal, state, and local governments need to keep denying the need to even consider reparations for the many socio-cultural, ethnic, gender, and preference groups that are deemed “undesirable” by the most conservative and elitist of us all. Transhumanists have long had ties to eugenics,but ideas on how to improve the genetic composition of a population have to ensure that individual choice to (or not to) participate at their own risks/reward.

The lack of ethics that human-kind has witnessed by technological elites will over the others has been consistently dangerous to the optimal operation efficiency and effectiveness of our species. While it is likely impossible philosophically for human’s to actually have a nature about themselves, the one thing that we’ve always tried to do is control our situation to better manage the risks of uncertainty. It’s not an ill mission, but the pathology of our altruism often shows that it is our most stifling virtue. Projecting our idea of greatness onto the entire population is not progressive, even as technology progresses. As we merge away from the socio-cultural conservatism of the past century(s) and our diverse preferences become cliché, let’s be conscious to honor and protect choice, and continue to scale the distribution of information to individuals and institutions alike.

– originally from Integrationalism

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Wednesday on the Opinion Pages of the NY Times the renowned Vinton Cerf “father of the internet” published an article titles Internet Access Is Not A Human Right. It could be argued that the key word here is “access”, but before I address access again, I should start with the definition of the internet. I had this debate while at Michigan State in October of 2010 with the philosopher Andrew Feenberg. I’ll do my best not to be redundant while everything is still live via the links in this article.

Perhaps the internet requires much more definition, as the roots of the word can be confusing. Inter: situated within – Net: any network or reticulated system of filaments or the like. Its terminology is synonymous with the “web” or a web, which requires multiple linkages to points of initiation in order to exist well. If this is the internet that Feenberg is referring to then I’d think it accurate. However, the internet is not actually a web of ever connected points. Information destinations are not required.

The internet is analogous to space. Regardless of whether or not we access space, its potential exists – we can access or insert entities of sorts into the space regardless of, if another user were present to receive information of sorts from the distributed. Space is a dynamic system of expanding material potential as is the internet’s material potential. The potential of the internet expands as users (or rather, potential users) access to the internet expands – access could come in many forms including, user population(s) growth or by computing speed or by computing power… The internet, regardless of the constraints of the word, it cannot be identified as a specific technology.

While visiting MSU, Feenberg uses a “ramp” as analogous with the internet, which was at the center of his mistake. I don’t mean to read gerontophobic, but based on the pervasive analysis that I’ve witnessed from Feenberg and Cerf’s generation; I’d have to accredit their perspective to the relatively similar changes in technology that they’ve seen during the 20^th century. The difference in composition and utility of a technology (hardware, software, methodology) and that of the internet are synonymous with that of an air-craft and the expanding celestial matter beyond earth’s ionosphere (that’s a sufficient analogy).

Cerf wrote “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right.

He is correct! The problem exists when he identifies the internet as a technology, which it cannot be (to be redundant). This is in fact a human rights issue. It is perhaps the most significant human rights issue of our time, because of the internet role in providing the potential for transparencies in the public and private sectors. The deterministic nature of our technologies is bridging the cultural, political, legal, and economic GAPS of all our societies today, and if we as individuals allow a few mistaken “leaders” or the interests of institutions to control our ability to access a space, because of their resume, then we are all doomed. The implications of the masses adopting Cerf and Feenberg’s view on space are tremendous in building an ethically sound environment for human development.

Regarding Cerf’s word “access”, it may provide him an out from his varied rhetoric in the article. Near the end he transitions to civil rights where he writes “the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights” suggesting the internet hold egalitarian virtues. I’m no egalitarian, as it just doesn’t prove feasible in a world of, even, hyper-connected individuals.

While the ability to access an open space should not be prohibited, the technologies of certain kinds could be. Reference weapons of sorts. I’m no advocate for government supplying all of their citizens with camera phone (although it would be great idea for the individual and institution), but I am against governmental and other agents making efforts to restrict the individual’s ability to populate space with their entities aside from the technologies that one would hold on his/her person.

When the United Nations declared the Internet as a Human Right (PDF), they weren’t necessarily evaluating its full potential, but they were stressing that individuals should have the ability to be transparent and review information of all kinds as they so pleased, catering to the collective knowledge of the species and everything it supports. The problem with this article are the future implications of its rhetoric, even as he means well.

Tangent: Cerf having studied math, computer science, and IS for decades; knows as well as anyone that it is virtually (pun intended) impossible to prohibit internet expansion as small pockets of those educated in the knowledge community of development can find a way. Any computer (which would the blockage point) can be hacked its just a matter of time and will. I spent the last year consulting with Hewlett-Packard Global Info Security on multiple acquisitions of competitive companies and security tool providers, and as anyone in the IS/IT security industry can tell you, there are no solutions, only active management of incidents and problems. This is why methodologies are as (if not more) value than hard/software in modern business transactions. So then why wouldn’t Cerf think more thoroughly about this before publishing in the NY Times? Could it be because he has an equity stake (as an employee of multiple firms) in a less open space (internet). Speculation aside, I’m in the business services industry, I studied “control” specifically. Business is about control, which is the value proposition in establishing institutions virtues as separate from those of the individual. We can only forecast and manage risks well in areas that we can define and control. Business itself doesn’t require an suppressive type of control to make good calls on risks. A more transparent world could tell us all (individuals and institutions alike) more about the types of decisions that benefit the most in a society.

In the future let’s all make a conscious effort to keep spaces open and hope that the benefits incentivize philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and governments to provide technology to the masses at a rate that enhances the human condition.

–Originally at Integrationalism

The Journal for Biological & Health Innovation is accepting papers for peer review now. This journal is specific to Africa and our thoughts, theory, research, practice could have a huge impact on the expeditious development of the rest of the world technologically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMDSzYZxh6I&feature=player_embedded

Last week I switched to the Facebook Timeline feature and the first thing that I did was stop and gasp about what my life was like in 2005. I was in the second batch of facebook-ers after it initially left the Harvard-Yale scene. I was a recent graduate working in the real world to design vehicle interiors, but my life style was still very undergrad-centric…LOL…it was actually undergrad on steroids because my income changed drastically.

I think that the generations that were far past their undergraduate experience were received the social networking revolution differently than those of us who are 30 and under. Friends that I went to undergrad with who are in the 30–40 year old range continue (6 years later) to say that they are “too old” for Facebook, reluctant to use it as a tool.

But I see something much different when I talk to the second half of the millennials (people born between 1980 and 2000). In my experience they feel as though they should be able to post whatever they want on the web, to express their individual selves. Of course the adults of the world understanding the pending politics of elitism, pushing the inherited social normative, try our best to censor their individualistic virtues. As far as Integrationalism goes, I think that this type of self-actualization through the vetting of peers is healthy in forcing an identity on the individual that it recognized by the group (which is sometimes different than what the individual initially thinks of themselves).

A healthy argument could be made that we are all just Zombies giving Mark Zuckerberg enough information to enslave us, or that the establish social normative doesn’t break down in the virtual space, because those with information about the etiquette of modernity will conform and outcast the ignorant or unsavory. But I think that if we really want to see some potential of harmony in human interactions, whether physical or virtual, we should make an effort to be more transparent with our individual lives. The emergence of Big Data as a tool that we can use to create knowledge of the vast amount of information that social networks and other virtual domain are generating is not something that should be taken lightly in from an ethical technological innovation standpoint. For the sake of avoiding being a hypocrite I’ve upgraded (yes, I consider it an upgrade) to Facebook’s Timeline.

- From the Integrationalism blog

After posting a few weeks back on a Richard Dawkins article specific to Jesus and Atheism, I was responded by Lincoln Cannon a post called the New God Argument. I first heard this argument at the University of Utah from Lincoln while visiting the area for a conference.

Its logically sound, when the faith position is adopted. The argument is a derivative or rather an advancement on Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument and and Robin Hanson’s Great Filter argument, as the links above will tell anyone is much more detail. I’ve even sited Bostom’s 2003 paper in my own defense after being wrongfully labeled as an atheist. Its one thing to state that there is no God (atheism) or that we cant know if there is a God (agnosticism), and quite another to state that we could create or evolve into one or a vast many.

I think that Lincoln’s argument progressive and may provide the next wave of theology arguments in their defense this century. It’s fascinating to see how far the modern human mind can go in its extrapolation of our exiting technological potential. As Lincoln puts it, the logical truth that post-humans have a probability of.….……

[from Lincoln’s — angel argument, benevolence argument, and creation argument]
posthumans probably already exist
AND posthumans probably are more benevolent than us
AND posthumans probably created our world

After reading the argument I’m compelled to revisit my previous writings on spirituality. When I wrote that I was NOT and atheist I was leaving open the possibility (because of the probability) that we, as the new God argument reads, wont become extinct before becoming post-human. I was also relying on the probability that we could potentially create civilizations, worlds, galaxies, universes, multiverses, with humanoid or homo sapien like individuals. Having stated that I think that Lincoln and my definition of the God figure are much different.

When I reference the term God I’m only meaning to represent a creator figure; I am however, excluding the potential for this figure to intervene in those created lives/world/simulation. I cant find rationale that suggests the creator figure would have any incentive to intervene to interact as benevolent or otherwise.

Physics dis-Incentives: I think that there would first exist some very rigid code (computer language) that manifests in what we understand as our physical laws. Plenty of traditional atheists have identified the inconsistencies in physics as a cornerstone in their rebuttal to the spiritual realm. Their point being, physics is the great divide between what we are/can-be and what we cannot.

Management dis-Incentives: I don’t think that the creator figure would have the incentive to modify imperfections that it sees in its creation, because of the potential to recreate duplicates to modify with a searchable history for analysis are so attractive. We see these types of practices happening currently in the Information Technology (IT) industry becoming more common as computing power/speed/space become greater/faster/more abundant respectively. While There is the potential for the multiple creators in different places and times during a continuous evolution of (what some would call) our current transhuman being, to create existences like our own, they would all be quite different depending on the technology available, and unlikely curated to take advantage of the latest technologies available because of the obsolescence that exponential technological growth provides.

Economics dis-Incentives: Similar to the argument that I made in 2010 at Transhumanism & Spirituality the context in which individuals identify with “their own” spirits and a “supreme” spirit are inconsistent with the spirit having any potential actually interact on the individual’s behalf, in where, it connects the individual with physical being. The arbitrage or competition phenomenon in a competitive situation would create definite dis-incentives for benevolence.

To go a bit further, I would like to take a tangent from Lincoln’s progressive Mormon Transhumanist philosophy and bring into consideration the ideal that some Christian’s subscribe to regarding the tangible or physical creations by spiritual beings or God (see page 3); and further, spirituality being a tangible phenomenon.

Simply, there would be physical traces of spiritual activity if at any point there were any other-than-physical interactions in our physical realm. Prayers and miracles for instance would have physical manifestations. One of my favorites is walking on water or even flying. I’m reminded of the elementary science projects where student turn solids into liquids and finally into gasses. In order for either of the aforementioned miracles to happen the physical properties of air or water would have to change from less dense to more dense, in an almost instantaneous fashion.…but there are simply no traces of that type of activity. The ideal that non-physical beings are more relevant to our physical realm is (in my opinion) invalid, and in fact provides a brand of ego-centric hope that ails human kind’s potential for real harmonious interaction.

The faith assumption is the cornerstone of The New God Argument, not the probability logic behind the benevolence argument. This should be conversely true considering the “value proposition” of spirituality: connectivity (or human connections).

It could be argued that I am faithful in human-kind’s ability to generate a desirable future and create linkages between persons without any need for a creator figure to intervene, generating an organic omnipresent benevolence. And even as I have coined myself as someone with no beliefs at all, I would keep that all we have is our opportunity to live and create connections…and dream of benevolence by using our technologies to create situations where resources of sorts are NOT scarce, and creating environments where we have incentives to connect. Faith is no substitute for rationale and action.

- from the Integrationalism blog

Video — U.S. Job Market — People Staying in Jobs Longer — WSJ.com.

The Cleveland Fed shows research that people staying in jobs for longer periods of time is requiring adding the economic shock of any crisis where lay-offs or retraction is involved. The problem with this is that research also shows that people out of work are less likely ever re-enter the work force.

While economists (per the this interview) wouldn’t look at this as a “structure problem” because of the forecasted potential for worker volume to return, it is likely that their opinions are a bit too faithful in the existing model of compensating laborers for a honest days work. The enduring jobs crisis can and should of course be looked at as an economic issue and even a political issue, but it would likely be better pursued as a socio-cultural and a legal issue.

The ideal of honesty and the preferred compensation for ones good work is perhaps too subjective; having stated that, the ability for an individual to own so greatly in lieu of the potentially many other individuals that cater to the discovery, development, and distribution of goods/services is (in my opinion) the root cause of our (nation, states, humans) wealth distribution and compensation problems.

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