Re: Capitalism

Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Wed, 02 Sep 1998 08:48:39 -0400

John Clark wrote:
> >Then it will become globally apparent that national currencies are
> >in fact an unregulated but inferior form of supervised neural
> >network (i.e., all those cumbersome hidden layers, the invisible
> >hand of capitalism, etc.)
>
>The best way to improve the world's currencies is to increase the amount
>Of speculation on them not decrease it. If an individual would rather
>be paid in pounds than dollars let him, if a nation tried the old
>tax by inflation trick people could just switch to a better currency.

I think this misses the point. Imagine that your brain and my brain were hybridized (possibly through/with an AI). At that point, we would no longer use an "economy" to allocate resources; we'd just make up our collective mind and go for it. So the goal is not to eliminate speculation, but to eliminate the economy and replace it with a different, very complex system.

I think. Legg's posts have a very high buzzword ratio.

> >Capitalism is not a natural law of nature, as some like to say,
>
>I like to say that there are many parallels between capitalism and
>Thermodynamics as well as Evolution.

This is interesting. What sort of parallels do you see?

>That's the fatal flaw in Brin's idea, he doesn't like encryption but he
>never makes clear exactly how he plans to stop people from using it.

The impression I got was that Brin thinks encryption will be pointless when one can maneuver a fly-sized camera into your home and watch you type in the cleartext of your message before you have a chance to encrypt it. Heck, reading the cleartext even beats OTPs. ;)

Personally, I'm dubious as to the degree to which this is possible; it's certainly not possible in realtime, but the fly-camera could work if it recorded onto some kind of very small RAM system and then returned home to upload the recording onto a larger computer. Diffraction problems could be solved by having multiple bugs staring at the same thing and having a computer sort out what the true image looks like. Again, not possible in realtime, but if the bugs took shifts, it wouldn't be a big issue.

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