From the always thoughtful Ian Loic:
This new sharing economy supposedly shakes up traditional businesses by harnessing the distributed power of the internet, but when you ignore shiny apps these businesses look a lot like traditional rent-seeking middlemen.
It feels like a bug that we are making new businesses that look like such old businesses. Ride sharing shouldn’t need middleman. Prospective passengers and drivers should be able to discover each other, agree on a transaction, go for a ride and then make payment.
Ian goes on to describe one of the difficulties (reputation/trust) with this scenario, one of many I’m sure we would encounter and solve if we were of the habit of doing such things as a society.
Friend and thinker Adam Keys explores “our current political Trolley Problem”:
As self-driving cars inch closer to a daily reality, the Trolley Problem seems to have entered our lexicon…
He goes on to quote from an Alan Kay essay, Enlightened Imagination for Citizens:
In a raging flood, a man risks his life to save a swept away child, but two years earlier he voted against strengthening the levee whose breaching caused the flood. During an epidemic people work tirelessly to help the stricken, but ignored elementary sanitation processes that could have prevented the outbreak. More astoundingly, as many as 200,000 Americans die each year from diseases spread by their own doctors who have been ignoring elementary sanitation (including simply washing their hands when needed), but who then work diligently to try to save the patients they have infected. Studies show that about 80% of Americans are “highly concerned” about climate change, yet this percentage drops to less than 20% when the issue is combined with what it will cost to actually deal with these changes…
Kester, another friend and prolific writer, muses about the Brexit vote:
Now, once the dawn is rising on the actual consequences of that decision–now that it turns out that Leave don’t have a plan in place at all, now that we’re seeing a complete unraveling of the United Kingdom…there is evidence that many people are questioning how they voted.
This is absolutely natural, because…what they voted for was an illusion that tapped into very deep and very human anxieties about community and liberty.
Back to that Kay essay:
One of the reasons the consequences were not imagined is that our human commonsense tends to think of “stability” as something static, whereas in systems it is a dynamic process that can be fragile to modest changes. One way to imagine “stability” is to take a bottle and turn it upside down. If it is gently poked, it will return to its “stable position”. But a slightly more forceful poke will topple it. It is still a system, but has moved into a new dynamic stability, one which will take much more work to restore than required to topple it.
…because of our deeply embedded human behavioral patterns, we are also easily fooled—in fact we pay to be fooled! So, to change opinions in the short term, there could be campaigns to fool the voters by various means including raising their fear, exploiting their xenophobia, or greed, or need for status, etc. But even though there are already many attempts to fool the public by businesses and politicians, we must see that this “normal behavior” is disastrous to a democracy. We must find a better way.
In the end Kay and Kester are suggesting similar solutions. While Kay’s main point is about education, he does mention:
One of the reasons we are a republic with a democratic base is that the representatives can be selected to be “the best and the brightest” from the population as a whole (this was another early ideal for the great American experiment). We could argue that the current representatives are “all too representative…”
Kester:
The best way to stymie the threat of tyranny is to have an evolved democracy. And that seems to me the most mature and reasoned thing that we can do in this situation.
So the question remains: how? How do we manage to be led by the best and the brightest, who lead with maturity and reason? Kay’s essay does an amazing job of describing the educational requirements:
…education is about ideas, processes, and transformations, and should use all means available for helping learners reshape their inner realities and powers of imagination.
It should be painfully obvious that learning how to program a computer has no direct connection to any high form of enlightenment—no more than learning scientific technique, mathematics or engineering. And yet each of these can be vehicles for deep insights into the much larger worlds that the human mind is capable of understanding.
Education is a topic near and dear to my heart. But there is another aspect to reshaping our inner realities, and maybe that has been the narrative of this blog since its inception. And despite our media and social networks constantly displaying evidence to the contrary, I have hope that humility, compassion, understanding, beauty and meaning will prevail. More on why, and thoughts on how, later…maybe.