Month: January 2017

Robots are an integral part of the vast industry that creates the wealth we enjoy. It is about to be essential to the exploration of Mars, as it will prepare the habitats and generate the fuel for the return journeys of the SpaceX spaceships. Robots are used in greenhouses, ports, you name it. The abilities of experimental robots, which combine vision and powerfull computation are impressive even in fields like manual dexterity, pick and place where humans have had the upper hand up until now.

A robotic mayflower..

The principles of economics do force robots and automatic systems into every nook and cranny of our production machine, simply because they do more valuable work for the same resources compared to humans. Thus we have a ‘singularity’, one much more real than the AI singularity, where the cost of a robot performing a human job drops below the cost of the human, and all humans will be redundant for tasks that can be performed bu robots. The same principles of economics however also increase the market price of robots so that the buyer will always only marginally reduce his cost compared to humans, and so only a disruptive new way to make these human level capable robots will finaly kill of human work. This shows once again how economics when it serves a banking/fossil elite becomes stifling to progress.

I call increased automation progress because it is good to save people from tedious dirty boring jobs. The only bad thing about robots and automation is that these techniques are introduced under our fossil credit system, the system that maximizes the fossil industry and banking turnover. This system is super wastefull, because wastefull consumption generates more cashflow than when porduct quality is high and people have to replace products less often. The trick is to rebase automation and our production machine entirely on sustainable resources, both energy and raw/natural materials. Then the cost of everything will drop and we will start to accumulate more resources instead of be depleting them. For now there is no police force in the world that can bring this situation about.

But there are regions on our planet that nobody is really interested in, regions where there are not much resources to begin with. The thought that rarely pops up in people’s mind is : How can we use robots to generate resources we might like to use in the future? How can we use robots to restore a damaged or absent ecology in places where nobody is able to destroy it again. I Africa dramatic projects are being initiated, showing simple planting of trees can turn barren land into a lush green habitat that will even bring rain to the desert.

Robots to have kill switches, pay taxes?

Robocolonialism is a part of the roboeconomy, the economy correctly adapted to the use of robots, not putting people out of work, but providing cheaper and even free products to all. Robocolonialism is the process of terraforming earth so to say, remote regions being revived by armies of robots that work the land, plant trees and other plants, make sure rain is stored underground and doesn’t flush the topsoil away in a once a year flood. Robocolonialism can be the answer to the question “How to use the vase empty (and usually hot) spaces to reabsorb atmospheric carbon to secure the current evolutionary shift on Earth? “. You can move to Mars, but why not revive this planet before it goes through a true death cycle. How are we going to do that? We need machines to help us.

Of course one could start martian colonies in regions currently uninhabited and unable to sustain much life. This is part of the extraeconomic approach which does not seek to economically exploit a region, which does not tie into a global economy but juse aims to generate resources, capture carbon and sustain its inhabitants. As Trump breaks down global security the world is (at least until flight is electric or XtoGas technologies are immature) moving to a more local renewable based model in which the resources have to be local anyway. All this is not a deterioration of our wealth, health and happiness but a vast improvement. The renewable resources are more than 2500 times more abundant than the now hard fought fossil ones, so wealth will explode in this century.

We propose to build a robocolonialst drone that can sail to the barren coast of Namibia and autonomously plant and irrigate trees. First step is the autonous sailing drone, which actually is not that hard to make. Second is the addition of a desalination plant based on solar, and a rover able to deploy the irrigation tube and plant the tree seeds. In general we need much more technology (and we already have) for making land able to sustain life. Agiculture is so focussed on producing massive amounts of food that the potential to envigorate barren regions with only tiny tweaks is overlooked, even though there is certainly something to gain. The reason is as always the desire of the energy and banking sector to make money, which both run against anything that is autonomously sustainable.

Our base drone will use a Lora transmitter to report back, its own computer to control itself and GPS navigation to get to its destination. We hope to gather interest for this project and hope to learn about roboeconomic activities elsewhere. Just like fossil fuel is pushing the planet to the precipice of human extinction, automation and renewables combined can counter that process and stop it dead in its tracks. Let robots colonize our planet where humans can’t live, and turn into the paradise it was before we started burning things..

Our society is dissociated because instead of being forced to cooperate from an individual skill perspective, economics has made the individual all but irrelevant, and so individual bonds. We rely in each other for social support mostly, and in business we have a choice, we can be hard core and never make a friend. What we do is also no longer as essential. Food we can buy, few people are involved in food production. Energy and water are also taken care of by a few anonymous workers in ‘utilities’. Medical services are insured or unavailable, not a cottage industry, a deep backbone of the fossil fuel economy. For all the other stuff we don’t really need we have shops and delis and other places where lots of people do stuff that doesn’t really matter and doesn’t generate wealth, its the consumer economy.

If you want to run it you have to enforce laws, but the dept to which the commercial motives have been allowed to play a role made it so that leaders need money, and lots of it, to be considered eligible, to promote themselves and get elected. There is a huge army of unelected officials that just work hard but they also as shown all the time to be sensitive to financial stimulation. The USA has allowed itself to be rotted by money since it has been run for almost a century by big oil looking to sell its product. To sell a lot of oil you need a booming economy, not so people can buy it, but just to sell it. A booming economy consumes the most fossil fuel, and in the 20th century the USA has boomed as much as it could with anyones fossil fuels it could get under control.

The downside of it is that it really requires a lot of stupid people to keep consuming fossil fuels, because they are  simply not the easiest option. No matter how luxurious life gets, it sucks having to breath fumes at the gasstation. Also there is not enough to give all people a luxurious life. If you spread the wealth thin, you will never have real examples that sell the economic dream, the american dream : You can strike rich. Luck is real, some people get lucky, its a tragic fact and we are all sensitive to gamble on it. So if you are in the US, and you don’t have your own mind to validate the information you consume, you run a risk of being a user or getting used in the great economic mechanism that sells fossil fuels called the carboncredit economy.

It does not matter to those who benefit of this economy if it is moral, just or even sustainable. This is just a relic of the forced cooperation we experienced when society was rural. When that changed you had those with real skills or with property/farmland or those without any control over how to sustain themselves (factory workers) and those ruling them. Then you had those that took without work or a desire for equitable exchange, the criminals and thieves. Civil society came about because people kept believing they earned their social status and position, and wanted it protected at all cost even if it entailed being a nail stylist. This is the ‘American lifestyle’ Cheney wanted to protect with wars in the Middle East (which have to be seen also as religously motivated). Modern society is vain and lazy, and that’s not even my problem.

The problem is that if nobody really adds essential value how do you motivate justice? How do you keep money from corrupting everything, and from creeping in every exchange in society, from supplying food, to care to love. Money is the big factor and our imagination is the limit on what people will do for money. Somebody will think of something, and if that somebody or somebody else has enough money, it will happen. Not always though, mostly the things that require a lot of fossil fuels but anyway.

Our leadership consisting of individuals are in the same matrix and by its nature sensitive to money. Being a politician even in Holland is about selling your time and attention to those that will give the best returns, later on in life. We fail to aknowledge that they are all human beings, although you can imagine an AI politician entering the scene soon. The problem is that the best leader to have is one that dies at the end of his/her leadership role. Then you never have to worry if this leader is keeping any other agenda etc. in check. He/she will because his/her life is at stake. Erdogan is a good example of someone that simply can’t have any other agenda controlling any part of his society. He doesn’t feel safe or in control enough and for sure his life is in danger as he is fighting the kurds, ISIS etc.

When there is no penalty to not controlling all forces the result is a melting pot of influences that are really hard to manage or steer or for that matter to survive, unless you relent and let them fight it out. So the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Wallstreet etc. all have their own agenda’s and Donald Trump is not going to control any of them. Everyone is after money and the only thing that matters is that people keep relying on these institutions, that those which create the conditions for survival do not stop doing that. Like farmers are asked to keep farming to feed soldiers that keep looting and raping and who frankly don’t care what the outcome of all that mayham will be.

Fossil fuel economics creates a immoral unsteered society in which all participants just want to avoid the biggest diseaster while they make their little bit of money. It is a banquet that is being robbed but in such a way that the servants don’t stop restocking the table. What is served is irrelevant. This is going to be the case under Trump/Pence. It is not enough because we need to go in a direction away from renewables, and towards large scale climate action. This economic corruption of every part of our society should be abolished by reducing our reliance on it. This of course is hard, the fact you need to make money all the time is a real ball and chain, as real as the metal version.

To cut loose we must own, we must make, we must be independent. Independent of external energy, raw materials, food, etc. If we are, if we have a farm that can feed on thousand people, and no debt to pay, those 1000 people can gain wealth to own more, also without debt so without the need to pay constantly and work for money constantly. Renewables and alternative currencies play a vital role in freeing us from the fossil credit economy, our economy. All the resources of a region must belong to the region, including all the money, and nobody must be able to create it without consent of all who are expected to use it.

On a personal level we should perhaps be less interested in money, more in cooperating to simply stabilize our future, by co-owning and being less of a consumer. Once renewables become the primary energy source for production wealth creation will grow and drop in cost for another century, because there is much more solar and wind than fossil fuel to make our stuff and revive our planet.