FootprintsintheWind.com

There is a hoary thread in the sci-fi genre that “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” (Isaac Asimov)

So we picture robots as machines with arms and eyes and voices which walk about stiffly doing our commands. We do not picture them as servers in the back office in Berne, moving money and credits about, bringing financial doom on persons on Main Street.

“Casino finance” is a term that is used by Capra, Luisi, Posner, Weyl and some others to talk about what happened in 2008, when these computers ran amok and did actual damage to humans. The easy answer is to program them to do no harm. The difficult question is how. The most difficult question is who will have the will to do so?

:- Doug.

So is there a way to cultivate life within the extractive? On the mundo level we can make the point that the air, the water, the earth, love is not owned and should not be, that the driving purpose ought to be life, not accumulation of money. What do we do on the day-to-day micro (individual) and meso (group) levels? Some of it must be to take a mundo level view into the micro and meso. We do better when we are aware of what we are doing.

A big part of what we are doing is caring and loving. This indeed is a larger view. If we as individuals see this larger picture, we can decide which of the “commands” of our “leaders” is legitimate. We can be like soldiers in wartime commanded to slaughter a village of innocents, who decline the illicit order. In a softer way, we can turn the order from extractive to include generative, giving both the profit motive and the loving motive breathing room. Nobody said it is easy. It will get easier as we find more ways.

:- Doug.

It is not us v them, generative models v extractive models: that dichotomy will not work, at least to start, because contra leads to contra and the deck at the moment seems to everyone involved stacked. We need to work together, work life within life, or perhaps even life within non life.

:- Doug.

Here the purpose is
To live well
Together
Where can we
Say this
See this
Today?

:- Doug.