17:24 "Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature. The quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."<br /> -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

aka: soft power. psychowar. aggressive exploitation of human stupidity.

we have two worlds: public and private = day and night.<br /> everything in public life is optimized for idiots = neurotics = socialists and nationalists.<br /> smart people are forced to hide in private life = psychotics = communists and fascists.<br /> the basis for this division are personality types, which are inborn and stable for life.<br /> this means, idiots are physically trapped in their stupidity (in plato's cave),<br /> and all forms of "education" can only hide that stupidity.<br /> idiots are physically blind to conspiracies, high-level organized crime, slavery.<br /> so the challenge is to find a better symbiosis between stupid and smart people.

!- key insight : autonomy and symbiosis

!- comment : autonomy and symbiosis entangled - this goes to the heart of Deep Humanity, the entangled individual / collective

!- symbiosis : definition

Explore this idea....

What does it look like quantitatively?

Sounds like a sweet deal!

Find out more in this GigaBlog posting on the project http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/rickettsia-bacteria-to-rule-them-all/

Societies have been inexorably been moving toward interdependence. More and more people specialize and sub-specialize into smaller fragments of the work that we do. As a result, we become more interdependent on the work of others to underpin our own. This makes the worry about renting a domain seem somewhat disingenuous, particularly when we can reasonably rely on the underlying structures to work to keep our domains in place.

Perhaps re-framing this idea may be worthwhile. While it may seem that we own our bodies (at least in modern liberal democracies, for the moment), a large portion of our bodies are comprised of bacteria which are simultaneously both separate and a part of us and who we are. The symbiosis between people and their bacteria has been going on so long and generally so consistently we don't realize that the interdependence even exists anymore. No one walks around talking about how they're renting their bacteria.

Eventually we'll get to a point where our interdependence on domain registrars and hosts becomes the same sort of symbiotic interdependence.

Another useful analogy is to look at our interdependence on all the other pieces in our lives which we don't own or directly control, but which still allow us to live and exist.

People only tend to notice the major breakdowns of these bits of our interdependence. Recently there has been a lot of political turmoil and strife in the United States because politicians have become more self-centered and focused on their own needs, wants, and desire for power that they aren't serving the majority of people. When our representatives don't do their best work at representing their constituencies, major breakdowns in our interdependence occur. We need to be able to rely on scientists to do their best work to inform politicians who we need to be able to trust to do their best work to improve our lives and the general welfare. When the breakdown happens it creates issues to the individual bodies that make up the society as well as the body of the society itself.

Who's renting who in this scenario?

The authors of the text are proposing a radically different approach to the inevitable "singularity" event. They propose the research and development IA, or Intelligence Amplification, is developing computers with a symbiosis with humans. Noting that IA could be easier to develop than AI algorithms, since humanity had to probe what their true weaknesses and strengths are. In turn, developing an IA system that could cover humanities' weaknesses. This would summarily prevent an IA algorithm from getting over itself, which could potentially slow a point when we reach singularity.