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Making a living, the history of what we call work ⊗ How DeepMind is reinventing the robot ⊗ Building new weblike things

This week →{.caps} Making a living, the history of what we call work ⊗ How DeepMind is reinventing the robot ⊗ Building new weblike things ⊗ Networked planetary governance ⊗ The four dirty C-words of the Internet

A year ago →{.caps} The most clicked link in issue No.144 was Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism” by Russell Means.

Making a living, the history of what we call work

On Twitter, Aaron Benanav described his review of James Suzman’s new book, Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, as “post-scarcity thinking in both anthropology and economics, featuring Graeber, Scott, Polanyi, Sahlins, Galbraith, Keynes, Freud, JS Mill and (implicitly) Marx.” Which should be enough to get you reading.

The first part of the article screams ‘[[half-life of knowledge]],’ as Suzman goes through history, showing how the decades-long notion that hunter-gatherers were barely surviving was wrong, that humans were quite well-off living that way, which might indicate that we are actually quite able to live simple lives working only a few hours a week. Then why, now that we have all the tools needed to do so, do we still live in a never-ending cycle of perpetual growth, consumerism, and never feeling productive enough? Suzman has his own theory, Benanav exposes what’s missing in it and provides his own directions where he feels the book is lacking.

Beyond history and economics, I’d like to add one component which might explain some parts of the underlying question of the book, one seemingly not covered in there: stories, narratives. One might yell repeatedly “capitalism,” and of course yes, and it’s also largely about power and who wields it. But capitalism has told a story that we’ve bought into, marketing and propaganda have made us all into consumers and often dumb voters. We even, often unwittingly, become marketers for what we buy, bringing others into our wake. So for sure, spending 95 percent of our 300,000-year history as hunter-gatherers might show something of our nature, for sure capitalism, for sure power and inequality through the centuries, but perhaps also noticing the stories we buy into, the ones we forget, the ones that sell us something, the ones trotted out at election time. But more importantly, the need for thinking of the new ones that will show the way out of our current predicament.

Why the wealthy few are able to satisfy so many of their whims before the world’s poor achieve basic levels of economic security has always been an uncomfortable question for the economic profession. But economists assure us that, in any case, the only long-term solution to global poverty is more economic growth. […]
Keynes’s vision of a post-scarcity future was as much a recovery of our species’s pre-scarcity past. Humanity’s “fundamental economic problem” is not scarcity at all, but rather satiety.{.highlight} […]
Suzman gestures toward “proposals like granting a universal basic income,” “shifting the focus on taxation from income to wealth,” and “extending the fundamental rights we give to people and companies to ecosystems, rivers, and crucial habitats.” But he provides no argument for where constituencies supporting these policies might be found or how coalitions working toward them might be constructed. […]
We should set the course not to Mars, for vacationing with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but rather to a post-scarcity planet Earth on which their wealth has been confiscated and put to better ends.{.highlight} Getting there will require that we overcome the endemic insecurity that continues to plague nine-tenths of humanity, while also reducing and transforming the work we do.

How DeepMind is reinventing the robot

Part of IEEE Spectrum’s special report, The Great AI Reckoning, this one is largely based on an interview with Raia Hadsell, head of robotics at DeepMind, and his quite engaging on two fronts. First, as another piece where we can get a better understanding of how far anyone is from General Artificial Intelligence (see “catastrophic forgetting”). Second, despite those limitations, it’s fascinating to see the different techniques Hadsell’s team and  others are using to make it possible for one neural network (or a specific combinations of a few) to learn multiple things one after the other while not forgetting what it learned before, hopefully with each skill feeding into the others.

[I]nstead of having lots of neural networks, each trained on an individual game, you have just two: one that learns each new game, called the “active column,” and one that contains all the learning from previous games, averaged out, called the “knowledge base.” […]
[T]he progress-and-compress model, Hadsell says, will allow an AI system to transfer skills from old tasks to new ones, and from new tasks back to old ones, while never either catastrophically forgetting or becoming unable to learn anything new. […]
"I have a fairly simplistic view of consciousness," she says. For her, consciousness means an ability to think outside the narrow moment of "now"—to use memory to access the past, and to use imagination to envision the future.

Building new weblike things

The web is the largest software platform that isn’t owned, how might the different technologies underlying it be used as an alphabet, recombined in new “weblike things” that are not mediated by any single player?

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple system. —Gall’s Law{.highlight} […]
It seems likely that much of our lives will be mediated by networked software. Indeed, this is already the case. Much of this mediation happens through platforms owned and controlled by companies, with a few exceptions—web, email, podcasts. It seems valuable to build a few more platforms for networked software that are open, not-owned. Preferably, as many as possible.{.highlight}

Networked planetary governance

An interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, at Noema on the “disconnect between sovereignty, which is held exclusively by national governments, and the actual work of governing, which is often done by many different actors working at multiple scales.” I’m noting it here particularly for the first quote and highlight below, and for the last part on fluid, hybrid networks and the role city-states could play in such a network.

With this alternative approach [of using impact hubs], we don’t wait for the big players — we just go do it, knowing that our younger folks are going to be with us. I’m not saying we should work against states — just that we should not necessarily start with them. Assume that governments are still important, but don’t wait for them. Let the great power rivalries play themselves out as they will; get the important work done other ways.{.highlight} […]
We need to tear that down and connect every single person who’s an expert, regardless of their place in the hierarchy. We need them to be able to connect, disconnect and reconnect dynamically. […]
[A]ll these ancient edifices, which as you say are literally cast in concrete in D.C., present a huge challenge for getting to the world of ad hoc and self-assembling networks that are capable of dealing with problems as they emerge in a fluid manner.

The four dirty C-words of the Internet

Paul Jun tackling something I mention all the time, the washing out, the stretching of meaning, and the outright appropriation of words. In this case, the four horsemen of content, culture, community, and creator. Jun knows better than to try and fight the heavy current of how these words are being used, but he does make a good case for slowing down, thinking, and “working around this language [to] make your ideas stronger and give them a fighting chance to resonate in the world.”

When you can’t use the empty c-words, you’ll generate real language to make your ideas specific and clear. When you can avoid calling your work “content,” you give yourself a fighting chance to build something significant.{.highlight} […]
Lazy language is a sign that you don’t really know what you’re making or who you’re making it for. It means you really don’t have a point of view (yet! That’s okay —you can develop one). But the moment you succumb to using all of the c-words, slow down. […]
[I]n specific contexts, it’s helpful to double-down on clear language. It’s where you can gain leverage by enrolling others into exciting possibilities for what the work can become. It shows your attentiveness to language, the lifeblood of any endeavor.

Asides

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