Regarding a discussion about pre-Westphalian history, bards, resiliency, open-source warfare, and more, I believe this summarizes my position. Note that the audience knows all the words, and are singing along. Just like they do in Athens, in Paris, in Prague, in San Francisco.

credit:
rmatthendrick

A purely virtual rc tribe is not, and will not be, entirely useful in terms of disaster/collapse situations. This is partly for the reasons Andrew and Lance mention, but also from physical reality. Take Katrina as the example – without comms to outside, the value of the net is limited. Software developed freely and ad hoc for people locating was done rapidly, and with a minimal requirement for coordination, although the temporary creation of relief 2.0 (which I helped create and co-ordinate) allowed the software to be standardized.

But by the time the tsunami hit, no one was participating – it wasn’t nearly as useful as putting up voip servers.

What was lacking in Katrina – and in most disaster/collapse situations – is a replacement non-national-grid infrastructure systems internal to the region. Which is to say:

- Solar/battery/wind powered mesh cell/wireless networks with cheap, easily deployable nodes. A lot of them.

- Solar/alt energy water pumps and distillation distributed at a block level.

- Locally accessible databases for currently available resources and co-ordination – who is where, and what are they doing?

- Human powered vehicles – more trikes than bikes, to move material where needed and perhaps function as ambulances.

- Triage facilities and local co-ordination points at the same level of granularity. Centralized relief facilities (superdomes, what have you) should be a secondary level of response.

- All of these need to be provided in a way that non-authority powers (gangs, etc) can also be leveraged for comunications, co-ordination, and material, transparently to the “authorities”.

A local police department cannot provide the manpower necessary to police every block in the manner required for security, so “down for the block, yo”. Under situations like this, painkillers and stimulants may be required in quantities local hospitals and pharms can’t supply. Heroin is a *useful* thing when you have a large number of injured folks and no access to pharms – so is marijuana. Got a moral issue? Too bad – survival trumps morality almost every time. (This is the bottom line on “no ideology”).

Participation in a virtual RC frankly isn’t required for the 98% of the population that won’t use it anyway. They just need to be able to get to someone who can tell them what to do – that’s what they will want and respond to. And by “get to” I mean walk, crawl, or swim no more than a quarter mile.

Of the 2% who use their access, 80% of *them* will just be reporting in. Community logistics and tool management overhead (where necessary) should require minimal personhours and perhaps a core of 10-20 people for the *entire* enterprise.

There *will* be knowledge/information/power differentials. There *will* be power struggles over control of the resources. There *will be “bad behavior”. It can all be handled, and “swordlessness” is probably the only effective way for the duration of the emergency.

With or without this, a response community of people who do useful things will emerge – it *always* does. The goal should be to provide that emergent community with the tools to be effective in what they do, rather than pre-establishing an organizational model and identifying members, or centralizing and standardizing “what they should do” beyond “deploy the block kit”.

With this kind of distributed system in place, it *doesn’t matter* if the Gov responds as slowly as in Katrina. Basic needs will get handled, the nightmares of the domes don’t get repeated, and there is something in place already for the disaster relief folks to tie into if they eventually show up.

You may notice there has been no mention of either food or weapons. Generally speaking those are both secondary to the situation. Reality is that most people won’t starve to death in a couple of weeks, even with no food at all. The will die of dehydration or injuries long before starvation is a problem. And not “hoarding” is an example of swordlessness – if there is nothing to take by force and that is known, no one will bother trying to take it by force.

And what of the rural survivalist “preppers”? Utterly irrelevant in the larger context. Suburbanites “protecting” their communities? Route around them – if they don’t like it they can’t have any. Oh, they’ll be there, but wasting their time and cutting themselves off from the best means of dealing with it all for everyone. You want emergency food? Buy a case of ramen.

Total cost of each node in such a network can be brought down to well under 2 grand, including a weatherproof triage tent/yurt. The entire kit would weigh under 200 lbs, and be storable in the space under a conventional single bed. If you want to get fancy, add a container in your yard to store it all and act as c&c facility – that would run about 3 grand additional.

(note: reposted from a comment I made on John Robb’s Global Guerrillas

The question today is – how do you prepare for something that can wipe out an entire species when you don’t know what it is you are preparing for, you don’t know what you need to know to prepare for it, you don’t know when it’s going to happen, and you can’t possibly know either what you need to know or how to find it? You don’t know what the variables are, and you may not even know you need to prepare for it. Everybody’s been talking it about it for years, and they all have the answer, but they’re all different answers. What’s real, and what’s true? What’s the story on that?

This is an answer to that question.

You might model it. You build a system around some basic rules. You observe it, and test it to destruction. Then you add more rules, and refine your procedures, and you keep repeating it. It’s an iterative procedure. And then you might create programs to solve for different functions. These agents are intelligent, which means that they process information. They are objects, and they have attributes. I flash back here to Dr. Arthur Danto droning on about “blue” while I quite seriously pondered jumping out a third floor window at Columbia University in 1968.

Coders and gamers nowadays can understand and work with the concept of objects and attributes pretty easily – back in the day it was a mental construct in the province of philosophy, and for this 18 year old was impossible to comprehend.

There are a lot of variables and constraints in the system. Here are a couple of key ones: Intelligence is not consciousness. Both intelligence and consciousness are distributed unevenly.

You are operating in multiple dimensions. This means you must account for the dimensions you’re operating in. This includes the physical. In order to resolve, your program must have a body – it must embody the solution.

Next is that it’s an all or nothing scenario on this question – the outcome is binary. Do or die. There is no try. (Thanks, Yoda!) This has certain implications for your agents. They either solve for their function or not. If they test themselves to destruction, that set of circumstances didn’t resolve that question. As  far as we know, or can know.  Self-preservation seems like a good idea to incorporate.

You have a huge amount of data to work with, including the full or partial output of all your other agents, including those that have been tasked with or assumed that function. That data may or may not be corrupt. This means that you need a strategy for quality. You have all your agents, themselves. They may or may not be functioning correctly.

So let’s start the design. We’re going to need a body – with at least enough capacity to hold the intelligence. It needs to be able to interact with the other body/program/intelligence/consciousness agents. Because we’re concerned with survival of the species, the (let’s call it a “human being” at this point) has to embody as a human being.

A human being has a lot of attributes in multiple dimensions. We can handle that. One idea is that we can do it effectively by designing for the problem. Another idea is that we can just program for the creation of permutation sets and run a lot of them, hoping to brute force the solution. Cool – permutation sets are easy, but they’re kinda boring – it’s repetitive work. We’ll task that part to the replication subroutine for the genetic structure.  (it’s not that simple, and we can speed up the process using something called a Taguchi test, but roll with it for now, ok?)

So let’s engage in some conscious, intelligent design, shall we? Because it’s a question of “how”, you might want to maximize for something we’ll call “strategic intelligence”. So let’s add that to the spec. In fact, let’s make  intelligence a prime attribute.

It’s got to be able to handle utterly incredible amounts of data, and that means multimodally – input comes in many shapes and sizes, colors and tones and flavors and scents, ideas and feelings and interactions. Broad spectrum doesn’t begin to cover it. So let’s add Input to the design spec, and make it highly sensitive.  A precision instrument.

Due to the nature of distributed consciousness and distributed intelligence, it’s got to be able to communicate with other agents and the environment, and report when it’s found a solution. It would be nice if it was self-documenting.  Sounds like Communication might be just the ticket.

It’s got to be able to process that data effectively…. so it has to be able to Learn. Got it, check.

And if it really solves the problem, it will communicate the solution to enough humans that the species survives, AND they will somehow store that information, process it, and make any system changes required.  It’s an important task, so let’s give it the ability to induce other agents to do what it wants – let’s call that Command. Ok, we’ve got our Pick 5 for main elements.  We get five here, out of 34. The other 29 aren’t excluded, but they are present at more minute levels, down to trace amounts.

Ok – we’ve got the human basically designed. Let’s make it specific, because it has to be specific. Pick some gene pools – let’s say marginal Jews, refugee Slavs, and English Puritans. They all are promising test pools for survival and resiliency.  Just for grins, let’s drop it in Los Angeles, California in, say, 1950. Then we wait and let the program run. If it fails, there’s no big loss, it’s  just one approach. If it succeeds, great – issue resolved. Either way, we can deal with other interesting things in the meantime.

Ok, so that’s how you do it consciously, if you’re me. That’s hindsight, too – reverse engineering, if you will.  It’s self-justifying. But Consciousness is not Intelligence – we do not have to believe that intelligent design implies conscious design. You don’t even have to believe that the process is intelligent – remember, we added that to the mix fairly late. You can if you want to, but it doesn’t really matter.  I’m here no matter what you believe.  (Darn, there’s the limit on “you create your own reality”).

The universe has enough intelligence and consciousness to do that now (I’m in the universe, I’ve consciously specified the strategy: doh). But remember something – I don’t solve for “does God exist” or “intelligent design” or anything else – this solution is for “How does the human race survive an unknown catastrophe that may or may not happen at any time?”

If you are an economic and rational type, you have a bottom line, even if I don’t. I’d like to make you a present of how to calculate that.  Your situation:

There is a solution to that problem. Solving that problem implies a great many things about other problems and problem-solving in general. It’s a non-trivial problem with multiplex solutions, and this part of it took 59 years to work out in a system that is designed and/or adapted to solve it.  That might be demonstrably true. If  it is, what’s access to that kind of processing power worth to you? You may want to think about that.

Note the second paragraph quoted – that’s a rational analysis. Odd we don’t see more of that here. But if we did, it wouldn’t be news, eh?

“I believe that looking after the environment will be one of the big generators of jobs in the future,” Slim said on a beach on Mexico’s Caribbean island of Cozumel at the launch of the alliance.

“Whether there’s a crisis or not, the cost of looking after the environment and reducing risks is more advisable than not doing anything,” Slim said….

The selected regions for the project are the Gulf of California, the Chihuahuan desert, the Mesoamerican Reef, Oaxaca, the Monarch Butterfly Region and Chiapas, including the Lacandona Forests and El Triunfo reserve.

via Billionaire Slim launches $100 mln Mexico green project – Yahoo! News.

Earlier I tweeted “I don’t usually tweet games but… holy cow. http://bit.ly/XBOX-E3-2009 . Idoru, anyone?”

The object of my amazement is the Milo demonstration of Natal:

He’s quite wrong when he says “science fiction writers” haven’t written about similar things, but never mind that. That this tech is running now – at a consumer product level – gives us about 2 years before this all starts for real.

Welcome to your New Best Friend Forever, who lives in your smartphone. She knows where you are, and will ever so gently nag you about your appointments. If you’re at the supermarket, she’ll know all the specials. He’ll always be available to lend an ear (welcome back, Eliza). Add in a little arfid sauce and some biometric sensors, she can do prelim work for medical diagnosis. Add a few bluetooth attachments and the porn industry will go wild with teledildonics.

This may – very soon – give us a cheap and usable UI for bots. How long, do you suppose will it be until someone hacks the unit to run servos?

It will probably happen sooner than that.

great to see all the young Geeks 2.0 *er* children having fun with the toys at MakerFaire.

@PerfectSmileNow only if the thing you’re doing repeatedly is causal and not probablistic. I flip a coin 3 times, I expect different results

“Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.” – Prof. Jonathan Haidt

the future is now, so we may as well get started

It was not that I lost interest in futuring and creativity….  It was not that the last 8 years left me feeling like the American people deserve the future they unwittingly have been creating… It was not even that I was destitute and lost all my hosting.

No, none of those things.  It was a lost vision of the future. It was “life in the present, tense”. When you have a vision, and no one can see it… when you KNOW it can be better for everyone, and it seems like no one is listening… it can be rough.

But when all roads lead to Rome, does it matter which path you take? If the future is failed empire, does it really matter? When you realize that, in Alexei Panshin’s memorable phrase, “yesterday’s tomorrows” are all the images of the future people can muster, does it matter?

It was time to spin new yarns. Pull back the skeins and strings that lead out “there”, and let the future become as nebulous as it actually is.

Mayhap this time the vision won’t seem so trite. I can only hope.

G