Work and idleness 3/4: Transhumanist take

During the last 200 years, technology has lifted the Western masses from rags to affluence. The logical end of this trend is Iain Banks' Culture, where robots do all the work, but we are not there yet. Work should maintain and improve the standards of living and guard against risks like nuclear war, which may stop us from reaching singularity. Workers can be classified based on whether they advance this goal.

Maintainers keep the system running at current level. For example postal workers maintain capability to send packets, and soldiers guard against foreign army burning down the nation. We would notice very soon if these people stopped working.

Improvers make technological and political progress happen. For example researchers may develop a cure for cancer, or a politician may remove a wasteful regulation. We would notice big difference in 20 years if these people stopped working.

Leeches neither maintain or improve other people's standards of living. This includes not just people who live on income transfers (it doesn't matter if it comes from state or from dividends of inherited wealth) but also workers who have little impact. We wouldn't notice any difference if these people stopped working.

In the long run, more and more people can neither maintain nor improve standads of living better than robots. In that case it's ok to relax and take it easy, but anyone reading this blog can't use stupidity as an excuse.

Virtues: Efficiency and enlightenment

Technology enables "hard" efficiency, for example food production no longer requires 50% of the workforce to labor at farms. This frees resources also to "soft" wants and needs, like better human rights, social safety net, education, healthcare etc. No matter if your values are hard or soft, efficiency powered by technology delivers it. (But it doesn't deliver relative wants, like being wealthier than the Joneses.)

Politics must ensure that greater efficiency does not translate into more efficient slaughter in gas chambers, etc.

Enlightenment and knowledge help spot opportunities to organize things differently.

Problem: It's not possible to be the only transhumanist around

It is practically impossible to talk with most people about transhumanist impact of work. It is too abstract topic for someone who usually talks about cars and apartments. Also most people only care about how much they and their ingroup get, making it heresy to talk about outgroup's interests. People with a mortgage and a family to provide for couldn't care less if a project produces nothing and it is clear from day 1.

Nowadays transhumanism is to me mainly quiantly naive idealism of the youth.

Status 1/3: Economics and status in programming work, rabbit-duck edition

Summary: Programing work can be seen from two angles. The "economic" angle is that programming aims to produce software. The "status" angle is that in any big bureaucracy, the internal dynamics make status the primary aim.

Economic view

Alistair Cockburn defined software development as a co-operative game of invention and communication. The primary goal is to deliver useful, working software. The secondary goal is to prepare for the next game.

In this naive view, programming is just one type of work which aims to deliver customers something they are ready to pay for in order to keep the organization afloat.

A good software developer should know technology and economics and to have earlier experience about similar software.

This view is in line with transhumanist ideology, where technological progress is a driving force which enables new and better things, when people get more tools to implement their will and can afford more and more slack.

Status view

The status view emphasizes hierarchy and influence inside a bureaucracy. The primary game is how to gain influence through office politics.

From status view, programmers have two millstones in their neck. They are at the lowest level of their hierarchy. Secondly, they have a bad reputation for not being experts in gaining Roissy-style psychosocial dominance by talking.

In status view, shipping working software is irrelevant, unless failure to do so threatens the very existence of the organization. The only relevant question is if your back is covered if something goes wrong.

A good developer should know marketing, be extroverted and slightly narcist.

Technical knowledge is important only to the extent that you don't lose your face. Technical knowledge has a half-life while social skills don't. Therefore technical ways to solve problems are inferior to other ways. People who know too much technology are losers who play the wrong game.

The four post-Marxist social classes

Half Sigma divided people into 4 social classes. The two higher classes are the college graduate class and the value transference class. Here, the economic view uses the values of the college graduate class and the status view uses the ideals of the value transference class.

This post was about the conflict between economic and status-based worldviews. The video is about the conflict betwen scientific and religious worldviews. In both cases, reality can be interpreted in two equally justified ways.

The difference between social democrats and transhumanists

Genetic testing tells some people that they have a high risk of disease. They can prepare for it if they hear about the illness years before its onsalught.

FuturePundit predicted in 2007 what actions people will take when genetic tests reveal information about their future:

But which risks will be worth testing for? Those you'll be able to do something about. Suppose a genetic variation makes Alzheimer's inevitable at middle age and that diet has little influence on when you'll get it. Well, I guess you could decide to avoid taking on family responsibilities that you won't be around to fulfill. But initially the biggest potential for doing something about a risk will involve risks that can be influenced by diet or exercise.

...

What you should do when you discover 5 or 10 years hence that you have high genetic risk of a disease: Write your elected officials and argue for more research on the disease you are on course to get. Lobby for cures for diseases that will otherwise kill you and your loved ones.

This is exactly what Sergey Brin did when he discovered by genetic testing that he has a hereditary risk for Parkinson's disease.

The article also contains a description of social democratic attitude, where people are considered helpless victims rather than players who execute moves to improve their position in the go board of life:

In the study, a team of researchers led by Robert Green, a neurologist and geneticist at Boston University, contacted adults who had a parent with Alzheimer’s and asked them to be tested for a variation in a gene known as ApoE. Depending on the variation, an ApoE mutation can increase a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s from three to 15 times the average. One hundred sixty-two adults agreed; 53 were told they had the mutation.

The results were delivered to the participants with great care: A genetic counselor walked each individual through the data, and all the subjects had follow-up appointments with the counselor. Therapists were also on call. “People were predicting catastrophic reactions,” Green recalls. “Depression, suicide, quitting their jobs, abandoning their families. They were anticipating the worst.”