audio to text transcription for your benefit.
I think most people by now will have started to realise there is
something fundamentally wrong with our current socio-economic system
With bacteria in a petri dish, exponential growth will eventually
stagnate and go into collapse. Now there are various people who will
put forward various tweaks of our current system but I would argue
that will just delay the inevitable. If we dont get the core problem
of this exponential growth, the system will go into a state of
stagnation and collapse. If we accept that our current system will do
that, then the question then becomes what sort of socio-economic
system can we have that is sustainable? Thats where the design comes
in; thats our proposal for a sustainable social economic system
Have a look at this *shows motherboard*
This is a computer motherboard.This is quite a complicated piece of
equipment. It takes many years for someone to understand this.To be
able to build one of these and be able to make competent decisions,
most people who use computers don't understand how they actually
work, and it doesnt matter as long as they do. Though there are many
aspects of society that are ultimately complicated, from transport
systems to medical healthcare systems, to information systems, to
farming, all these take many many years before someone can actually
make a technically competent decision, most people do not understand
what goes on around them.
In society, as long as it all works, nobody really cares. But this is
our first observation for society. That is has a technically complicated
side to it but it also has a people side to it. The people side to it
deals with social interaction, ethics, morals, the things people do
in their everyday lives. Then we have the technical side, on the other
side. I make this distinction but its also important to remember that
the people who work in the technical side are also the people that
live within the people side as well. But we propose a system that takes
this sort of split and makes the sort of society where the technical
aspects are managed by those people who are trained and are competent
to make the decisions in it. So medical doctors and nurses will make
decisions and policies regarding medical care, manufacturing engineers
will make decisions regarding manufacturing. Power systems engineers
or transport systems engineers or whatever will make decisions in their
own field. It also recognises that a lot of people in our society do
not have a technically correct solution, they will be based more along
the people side and we propose a system where people make the decisions
affecting their own lives locally, in their own community in what we
propose for a 'direct democracy'.
The other fundamental foundation for the design is the application of
science to society. By science we mean both method for learning and
understanding how nature works and the body of knowledge that is being
built up for the application of that method. If you look all around us,
science offers the most comprehensive, best understanding of nature that
we have, better than any other system of knowing that we have. Its produced
far more successes than any other system of knowledge that we have, so
that is the fundamental root of our system. If we understand nature
through the application of science and then we apply that knowledge back
to society. One thing that we learn from nature is that nature doesnt
have a centralised, hierarchical form of governance as if its a military
command or something. Its a very distributed form of control. Nature
is composed of many different types of organisms from trees to mammals
to insects or whatever, they all interact at various different levels.
Largely in a cooperative way.Some competition, but largely cooperative.
So that type of system is one that we want to emulate. In the way that
nature works together to produce a system that is balanced; balanced
with our needs with that of nature's and therefore has a sustainable
core to it.
Such a system is called 'Holonic', its the technical word for something
that is 'part whole'. Its an entity that is part of something but it is
also an entity in its own right. So if one studies a tree, the tree is
part of a forest. So we want to build communities that are communities
in their own right but are also part of networks of communities at
higher levels. Layers within layers within layers. This brings a system
where power is distributed, theres no central authority. Power is
distributed among the people at various different levels according to
different expertise. So, power becomes very localised of people in decisions
that are affecting people at a local level. Then, within this system
the technical side becomes like a skeletal framework where the communities
interact with each other as much or as little as they would like so the
communities have their own characteristics and their own way of doing things
so for example you could have primitive communities, transhumanist
communities, religious communities, atheist communities. There has to be
some sort of common basis to tolerate each other. They dont have to like
each other, but they need to tolerate each other in order to cooperate and
work with them. There has to be a sort of common basic level of human
rights and people need to have the right to move between one community
and another. So as long as we have that common baseline these communities
run themselves and run their own networks themselves on a direct democracy
application, with the technical things being managed by technical experts.
The design also proposes a moneyless system. So we don't use money in this
society, which gets away from this exponential growth problem. Instead
we have resource allocation system that we call 'energy accountancy'. Energy
accountancy works on the basis that in nature everything runs on energy,
you can't do anything without energy and that society has a certain amount
of energy available to it. If we extend that idea and just concentrate on
the 'usable energy' we have a concept that we call 'exergy'. 'Exergy' is
'usable' energy. It just so happens that when we use exergy it gives us
a way in which to measure materials and information. So exergy gives us
a common accountancy unit that we can use to measure how much materials
and how much energy we have in society. We can then divide that up so the
people can then decide how it gets allocated, how this energy gets allocated
within society. We call this allocation 'energy credits'. It is a representation
of the production capacity of society in energy terms and the people decide
how that production capacity gets allocated and what gets produced. Behind
the system we have this management of experts who will manage the system
in a sustainable way, to manage it in a balanced way in a balance with nature,
to keep the system going in a sustainable way. For this type of distributed
system to work everybody needs to be working towards goals that are compatible
with each other, to an overall goal. The overall goal we have here is the
'highest standard of living possible for the longest time possible'. A high
standard of living to us means its going to be a technological society. The
longest time possible means its going to be a sustainable system. So it has
to have sustainability built right in its core. Its a sustainable, dynamic
system. Theres probably much more I could go on about the design but its all
in the book there if you want to read that, but i think this summarises the
most important points.
11 Apr 2013, 4:12 pm
