Not A Blog™

This started, as far too many of my entries do, with me thinking about ideas, and my occasional lack of them. It’s not that I have no ideas, but that they wax and wane like so many moons. I’m currently in a depression in the idea market, which never bodes well for the Not A Blog™.

One of things I have been thinking about in the midst of this dearth of ideas are ideas themselves. This ties in to a lot of things including intellectual property and patents and people getting their ideas ripped off. But I’ve been thinking specifically how an “idea”—or thought or meme, etc.—might be of use in a transhumanist society.

A primer and/or recap for those who don’t follow the futurists in their clown cars and goofy hats: transhumanism (sometimes abbreviated H+) is the sort of humanity we’ll attain after the singularity. Or somewhere thereabout. Technically speaking, H+ is just humanity augmented by integrated technology, but I’m going to go ahead and throw out a Futurist Prediction of the Day by saying that we won’t really successfully integrate technology into ourselves in a way that will affect the way we live apart from any sort of extreme advancement, true singularity or not.

There are a lot of qualifiers in that previous sentence. Let me clarify a few. First, I don’t consider H+ to be a separate thing from the singularity. I see no reason that they would not develop simultaneously, and it may even be more appropriate to say that H+ is a subset or byproduct of the developments that will inevitably happen during a singularity-like advancement. Secondly, regular readers will know that I don’t really buy into the singularity anyway, so if anything like that happens it will either be a “partial singularity” or probably just regular “technological advancement”.

At this point, it’s interesting to consider what H+ might make obsolete, or at least no longer a concern. I don’t mean to say it’s going to make things like your fancy-pants iPod obsolete—although it will. I mean things like eating.

In fact, let’s just take the whole base of the hierarchy of needs, en masse. Eating, sleeping, breathing, defecating and sex. Today, it’s possible to imagine—though not construct—a technology able to handle these things for us. There are plenty of sci fi stories that posit technologies of this nature. In one story I don’t remember the name of and am too lazy to hunt down right now, transhumanist type folks were eating oil and sand just because it was there and they were hungry. (They also passed the time by cutting their arms and legs off and watching them regrow.) Advancements in nanotechnology could provide the mechanisms to turn these inedible substances into stuff the body can use, or they could just change the body entirely—which might turn out to be easier. (Though I suspect not—the technology augmentation route will probably be easier, though inferior, and thus less desirable, for other reasons.)

If the basics are taken care of, what’s next? I hardly believe it would be utopia, but without needing to worry about things like starvation or shelter, this leads us to consider that we also wouldn’t need to worry so much about things like money. After all, why do you have a job (assuming you have a job)? It’s to make money, so you can live your life. And “living your life” means all that basic stuff: having food and shelter and so on.

But if you get those things without a job and without money, then what? Well, aside from opening up a pandora’s box of people not knowing what to do with themselves, and also the pandora’s box of risk compensation where, because there are safety elements in place, people take more risk, then you eventually start considering the possibility that no one would really need money.

This is somewhat counterintuitive. I would agree that just because people wouldn’t need money doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want money. It’s an easy-to-grasp measure of success and power; it’s not like it doesn’t have any secondary uses aside from being a medium of exchange. But there are people in the world who don’t go chasing it; people who just want enough to be comfortable and not worry. Transhumanism certainly promises this.

There is another thing to consider about money which is: what does it do and how? This can get very complex and boring, so most people just stick to the obvious answer which is: it’s a medium of exchange that both sides of the transaction value because they know that everyone values it, for this very same reason. Also it should be scarce. Douglas Adams makes fun of this in, I believe, Mostly Harmless where a luxury space ship crashes on a planet (which later turns out to be Earth) and the passengers and crew attempt to set up a provincial government. They declare leaves legal tender, shortly after which it takes an entire deciduous forest to purchase one packet of peanuts. This is more pedantically known as “inflation”. Most cultures use something slightly more scarce, such as precious metals. Today, oil is commonly used.

Regular people don’t use oil (or gold), of course, because this is cumbersome and messy. Governments use oil. The oil aids in their solvency, in turn allowing them to create their own currency. Everyone learns in school that the US dollar is just fiat currency—it’s backed by the credit of the US Government—which isn’t anything tangible. It’s just a sort of “hey, look how big the government is! They’re not going anywhere.” And so everyone agrees to agree and money works fine.

So we have this definition of “money”: needed to buy basic stuff, is not unlimited, and backed by someone solvent. Knock out the leg of “needing to buy stuff”, and the rest doesn’t really matter.

Now, we can consider what non-money-loving transhumanists might be doing. They’ve got the basics covered. What else is there? Well, if they’re anything like me, they’re making a lot of art. I’ve mentioned in the past that part of the reason I like my job is because I get to do artistic-like things for work. That being said, I still just basically consider my job to be the thing that covers the basics, allowing me the peace of mind and free time to pursue things like painting. Or writing this kind of nonsense for the Not A Blog™.

Which brings me full circle.

Why don’t I write in the Not A Blog™ daily? It’s not really due to a lack of time. It is to a certain extent because it takes a finite amount of time to write all these words and solidify my thinking—but it’s really due to the fact that I need time to recharge the old idea banks. In other words, I need some free time to read and think and input information, in order to consistently output information. Three days a week plus the occasional weekend is just about my limit—and even then I take a week break every eight weeks or so. I say it’s because I’m “busy”; what I’m actually busy doing is finding more stuff to write about.

Of course, if I had tons of free time as these future transhumanists might (or if I didn’t have to work), I could update the Not A Blog™ daily, because I would also have enough free time to do the inputting. The other thing to remember about H+, though, is that it will probably happen in the midst of incredible technological development—even, as loath as I may be to admit it, in the midst of a singularity.

A singularity, again, posits the inability to predict additional advancements in technology. So if we have people with tons of free time, combined with the inability to predict future advancements in tech, and possibly along with that, cognizant artificial life that also creates art—and in light of the fact that we’re already in a deconstruction-happy post-modernism where ironic context disappears—

Then what?

Well, it makes me wonder if ideas won’t be the currency of transhumanism.

It wouldn’t work like regular money, for one thing. What would you trade it for? Lack of boredom, I suppose. But there are tons of ideas that are already out there, and a philosophic transhumanist could spend quite a long time just learning about other’s thoughts.

But I think ideas themselves might end up taking on an importance of their own. As I mentioned recently, ideas do not currently have any sort of protection. How could they? The idea needs to be made manifest. But I imagine some sort of system not unlike an extension of the current internet where, when someone has “an idea” or something similar, it could get published—perhaps on their own blog much like we do now—and this would be sufficient for proving “first manifest”. Money would not be the commodity paid for it—but maybe recognition? Something that a transhumanist would value. This might be outside the scope of my imagination. Someone who has the basics and gets to do as they please so long as it doesn’t interfere with others—what would they long for? The stuff higher up in the hierarchy of needs, I would assume—as this has certainly been the case with me. But money doesn’t get you that stuff. Ideas do.

It’s not that I believe ideas will literally be the currency the way Benjamins are now. There’s not an isomorphism between them. But I can see the day when ideas will be more important than money. At the risk of introducing yet another proverbial cliché into the language: the rich man can get a lot of stuff—but the wise man can get a lot of stuff that matters. (That’s probably an actual proverb in the Bible somewhere.)

It could be blind optimism on my part. I don’t have much money but I do have ideas, so that could be the subconscious mote from which this article has sprung, as a rationalization for my current state of affairs. I trust this isn’t the case.

But even if it is, it still gave me an idea.

-Ted