Abstract
Human beings are cooperative general purpose computational entities. What we consider "best" depends on the value sets we choose. Our society seems to be driven by some very poor understandings of the two key concepts of evolution and money. Evolution is not just about competition, cooperation is a natural result of evolution, and human beings exhibit many levels of evolved cooperation in action. Cooperation is arguably the highest and most powerful expression of evolution. Market value is fundamentally based in scarcity. Markets inherently devalue real abundance to zero, and cannot incentivise the delivery of abundance of anything to everyone. Technology can deliver abundance of all the necessities of life to everyone. Technology seems likely to deliver indefinite life extension soon. Once the threats of survival needs and aging are removed, many others remain, some involving social issues around justice and some that require massive engineering capacity. Social justice requires that we deliver the necessities of life to everyone, and where they go from there is largely up to them. Our security and common future relies on us moving away from the incentives of the market, and into a conscious choice to develop and distribute the technology to deliver abundance of all the necessities of life to everyone. We have a real option of creating a future of freedom, security and abundance for all, with the necessary diversity that comes from those components; and it is clear that market incentives cannot deliver such a future. We have a choice to make. Will we make it?
Ted Howard