Tag Archives: Yuval Noah Harari

Konfession Time.

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Last week I was ambushed by a glib well practiced Flat-Earther, who left me, frankly, gobsmacked: and almost impossibly, to me: without an answer.

 

                          The experience made me realize something I had forgotten about in a rush of enthusiasm. It was this. Over the past year I have presented an argument with far too much seriousness, regarding Basic pay: and how to finance it….

   

               The sheer effrontery of my efforts have left all my readers so similarly gobsmacked, that to this moment, writing this, no one has yet raised any refutable argument against the idea. In a world almost committed to trolling the aisles of lunatic ideas I have been soundly almost curiously ignored. [Technically it is just part of the futility of being a Saharan/Namibian] grain of sand that thinks it can start a sandstorm. Not some conspiracy.]

 

                   So here is my apology for ranting on about something almost no one on the planet has ever given any thought to; and is, in its own way, as bizarre an idea as being earnestly informed, out off the blue, as it were, that the Earth is Flat, despite all protestations to the contrary.

 

                  That my ambusher last week could suggest, in all seriousness, that everything we have ever learned about the Earth, being a relatively solid ball of  tangible rock n mud flying through an ever expanding Multiverse, was/ is, disinformation… Or, in the language of our times: “Fake News”.

 

                    So here too is a full konfession. I write fiction. The piece of fiction about basic pay is an idea based on a phrase that emerged from an ‘out of body’ experience that I believe I had, nearly 25 years ago. That was when I apparently flatlined, for an inordinate time: during surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. In the language of that arch-fictioneer Lobsang Rampa, I took an astral journey that may, or may not, have been anything other than a morphine, whatever, induced hallucination.  That idea was what is today referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI].

 

                   So what am I on about? Firstly:  I write poetic based Sci-Fi crime stories. I am also not a literary novelist.  My story, “The Jonker Memorandum” is set sometime between Now and Then.  Now is whatever it is when you read it [unless] Then is about a hundred and nineteen years later. The “unless” note, means you may read this after many things that were predicted to have happened along the way, have in the meantime become Now.

 

                    One of the things that becomes ‘Now’, is basic pay, something that  I wrote about in 1994 that has in the meantime begun the journey to become NOW…. only now, is referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI]. In the marketing language of Product Life Cycle curves, UBI is in the Pre-Birth stage now after [from my perspective] gestating for a quarter century. The idea itself in its various forms has a much longer gestation time. And as we know, about 90 % of all disruptive Ideas, unlike babies, abort before birth occurs.

 

                   UBI is such an idea, that is currently experiencing some prospective miscarriage at te hands of its fondest semi-supporters.

 

                   So: What is UBI?

 

                   For me it is a fiction that solves an accounting and economics based problem that troubled the professional me, about a world running on credit [as our world does presently].

 

My present set of three stories: i.e. Part Four* of the Azanian Quartet is set over three eras: some parts of the first half of the 20th century, and two set in different parts of the 21st.  

 

 

                    In one of those latter two, Basic Pay [UBI] has become real… and as I have routinely repeated I write poetic fiction. It follows the realization that just as Marxist economics reached its apotheosis in 1989, so too [so-called] Neo-Liberal economics reached its own ideological sell by date in 2008, with the invention of Quantitative Easing [QE].

 


QE has spurred the global economy into a global casino economy; favouring oligopolies of all varieties: infesting things that once worked well. And as we all know it doesn’t matter how screwed up the political economy becomes: if you are one of the working ‘prekariat’: you still have to pay your rent and buy your own lunch.

 

                   The problem to be solved in the story was: how is Basic Pay financed. And that is the conundrum. Some of my ‘up to date’, favorite writers have come out in favour, in principle, of Basic Pay: f.i. Luce, Harari, Acemoglou among others. All have however expressed major reservations, in some cases on moral grounds; and more broadly, pure financial affordability grounds. The widely followed socialist economist Prof: Richard D Wolff on the other hand is adamantly opposed to UBI… and anything associated with it… not to mention how it could never be financed….

 

             Ironically Wolff completely validated, for me, an observation made by Professor Guy Standing, who is a fervent advocate for solving the pending widening and growing reality; of what he calls “the dangerous class” … “the New Prekariat”… a term he has coined: through the use of UBI.

 

Standing argues, that spokespersons for the left had an ideological blindspot, about the entire concept of UBI

 

           And indisputably in the old world we all lived in, UBI could not be comfortably financed with the instruments thatr we have used to fund “welfare” through the 20th century.

 

However we no longer live in that 20th century world: and haven’t now for nearly a dozen years. We now live in a world financed by QE…. aka Quantitative Easing. So how did we manage to finance a world using QE. QE btw is, for the uninitiated, is a polite term for mass printing of fake money on a scale that defies reason… without fueling hyperinflation. In fact what should have fueled a Zimbabwe or Venezuelan surge of prices has, to everyone’s confused horror, seemed to produce Deflation or at best Disinflation. Depending of course on what one chooses to measure.

 

            So the US dollar that should have made Venezuela look tame has simply pottered about…. Nonetheless the inflation is there albeit the effect has been a massive asset price bubble, world wide that is, in part, fueling the huge popular discontent noted globally.

 

            Had I encountered all my above informants varied financially founded oppositions before last year, then their thinking and mine: would have been broadly congruent.

 

           However it is now my opinion [for reasons I have shared with you] that their and my objections were /are pre-revolutionary. I mean, the FIR* transformation changes all things … Again.  And since I hardly think I am smarter that any of those aforementioned excellent writers… I choose to keep my proposed solution method, as a private fiction that I have tested on all of you on behalf of the character that introduces the financing idea, in the second part of the story mentioned above.

 

         Ok. So you can all relax. I haven’t gone mad and flat earthly-ish type weird: I am simply progressing with the background to my story with your tacit participation.

 

What predictions next then, when asking: What If?

  

            So when it comes to predictions here’s one for the road: so I can say Yay later.

 

Based on the current line up; I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is the only person the Democrats can field, who can beat the Trumper in 2020: assuming she could beat the ‘Tweeds’ and secure the nomination.

 

*[The podcast ‘Jonker’ you will remember, is Part Three]

 

Cheers

 

!NiK[’19]

Ruminations on Basic Pay

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Also known as the inevitability of Universal Income.

“ In the 21st Century we might witness the creation of a new massive class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.”
Homo Deus p325.
Yuval Noah Harari


This statement by the author: Harari comes at the climax of what could be the most brilliant sustained piece of writing that this bloggist has encountered in years. The writing is more brilliant for being extended over two masterpieces of modern writing: Sapiens and Homo Deus: for which I would recommend the author for a Nobel Prize in literature. For the “times, that were changing” reported by a recent, past winner, Bob Dylan have sneaked up and abruptly arrived: on steroids.


The veracity of Harari’s premise is thus well timed. It arrived at precisely that moment in history that the exponential pace of technological development, has so outpaced the capacity of humans to keep up with the changes, taking place in the macro world, that the possibility of an accident kicking off something that is fast running, means we could once again be on the edge of a cataclysm, the likes of which we have not experienced since the last one a century ago… when progress went into steep decline: and put us all through a century of violent disruption: Stalling time.


A while back I came across some thing published, that I had written, as the closing paragraph, to an editorial piece at a different time in the past: The op/ed piece was broadly a comment on Mr. Alvin Toffler’s book: ‘Future Shock’…. I finished with the following comment on Toffler’s vision: “The alternatives are clear: either we train people to adapt to the future, or, in Toffler’s words, ‘we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.’”


And what could be a greater “adaptational breakdown” than that represented by the “New Lefties” i.e. those now referred to as the “Left Behind” … what Hannah Arendt referred to as “The Mob”…. And for whom George Orwell, less politely, coined “Proles”. Such a phenomenon apparently elected to BREXIT, in the trending from formerly Great Britain to global britain; and put America’s first ever [perhaps] ‘Working Class’ President into power in that ‘Firmian’ Republic. Tsunami, is a “brash Blu Hawk real estate developer”; as said by a Republican Grandee on Bloomberg a moment ago as I wrote this … he spoke as if describing a Martian alien, who had just walked uninvited into the men’s room.


And then of course Le Bleu’s did the same thing; voting for the least disliked option rather than someone who could do them any good… They all promise to do that, don’t they?


And the ‘Left Behind’ are obviously in the majority… and in case you are confusing them with “New Left”: many are, in effect, new ‘Right’ [whatever that is]. They are an inter and intra class phenomenon, notwithstanding that the Brash Blu Hawker… a man who hustled buildings for a living, will not be permitted [they think] to implement his agenda, even though his agenda does not really lack any more purpose, than the agenda’s of all those others, who promised things: and then [often sensibly] compromised on the delivery: and then struggled to deliver, in the face of ferociously frantic; furiously factional vested interest groupings.


Further on into the article, that I happened upon serendipitously last year, in the midst of Mzansi’s # FeesMustFall: University ‘disrupting season’, I wrote:
“The future shock problem is viewed in many Western circles with such seriousness that a number of influential bodies, among them the ‘Club of Rome’ have gone so far as to recommend a moratorium on technological developments while the human race catches up, and gets it breath back”.


Well it never happened did it…: In fact during this past month listening to the radio local news and opinion discussions on day to day events I have lost count of the frequency with which the ‘approved’ spokespersons, on a range of topics, cite, improving education: as a solution to the problem of ‘ADAPTATIONAL BREAKDOWN”S.



Yet Mzansi, for instance, spends a huge percentage of GDP, relative to most of its chosen peers, for, apparently, as little gain as those Brexiting, President Tsunami/Le Bleu’s stricken peers have apparently gained, in the time since I wrote the piece from which I have quoted. It was published in August of 1978… [i.e:39 years ago this past month] In a magazine that no longer exists: in a country that, likewise, no longer exists.*


So we didn’t put the tech’ development process aside; and by the well known Moore’s Law dictum whereby processing power doubles every 18 months that means that the tech world has taken 26 steps, during the time that we more Linear thinking human beings have moved 39 steps… and that is only referring to those that have been moving forward.


Unfortunately the message attributable to the New Lefties, is, that they seemingly moved, more or less one step: 39 times. Meanwhile 26 steps in exponential language, [What was called Geometric Progression in high school mathematics] in the expanding macro environment is [assume each step to be a meter] more than Thirty Three Million meters. No wonder the poor NL’s feel left behind. Almost everyone is left behind.


And so it is likely that many are working on the edge of the new economy. The characteristic of the old economy, that replaced the frugal subsistence of the previous 70,000 plus years, was “Nasty brutish and short”. It was and often still is, a condition in which workers were treated like machines; and conditions were inhumane. The early behaviourist: B. F. Skinner observed then, apparently in all seriousness, that: “The real problem is not whether machines think; but whether humans do.”


Eventually the cost and legalities of fixing the horror of mass employment raised the cost of production, above what the corresponding, mass consumer market sought out: absolute rock bottom price points. So there was a clash thus, between the people who wanted to be wonderfully well rewarded, for doing something mundane: [me for instance] while simultaneously wanting as much blood as could conceivably be extracted from every stone.


And so tech has solved the inhumane aspect of mass production, to desired scales, through replacing humans with real machines that are rapidly, apparently, taking on tasks that require far more than simple manual dexterity.


True ‘thinking machines’ are evolving; and part of the world … even many of the [so-called] Globalists themselves, stare at prospektive superfluity. This as the emerging trend to kwantum komputing takes tech’s exponential journey Kwantum simultaneously, to more than a billion meters in only 5 more steps. Truly; to be left behind in such a maelstrom of evolutionary expansion is almost… normal.


In the meantime in our own part of the world I was shocked recently, to read, as part of an opinion piece published in the Jozi Star on the eve of the “Youth Day” weekend this year, a piece of information that took the idea of “Left Behind” to an unprecedented level… for me.


The piece carried the byline of a Mr. Jeff Radebe, the 5000:1 outsider for the job of President of the ruling party; and later the country, should the present ruling party win the next election again: Something within reasonable probability. As a rule politicians tend to be pretty close to the 39 step by step linear process, which is still a way ahead of NL’s trend, you’ll gather..


Radebe’s piece was broadly one of the most powerful evaluations of the idea of ‘Future to shock’ that one has come across from a sitting politician in many years. He laid out a blueprint for what had to happen, for Mzansi’s and more broadly Afrika’s emerging transformation; in order to marginally keep pace with the techno/economically evolving 21st century. The piece certainly revealed the thoughtful appreciation of someone who perhaps had covered a few hundred meters over the 39 steps…


In fact when one evaluates the alleged negative behaviour of the all the allegedly naughty President’s persons, routinely reported in a broadly unsympathetik media environment, in the kontext of what Minister Radebe presents as the stark reality of Afrika’s dilemma, then one kan understand the instinctive desire to grab the money and run, when the opportunity presents, for opportunity comes only meagerly.


So what was the shock that triggered this response?


In that part of the op/ed piece where he deals with the relevance of FIR * to Mzansi in particular, Mr. Radebe makes an astounding assertion. [* FIR = the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution a name given to this historical period which is to be characterized by the evolution of [AI] Artificial Intelligence].


Mr. Radebe asserts, that in a continent of some 880 million people more than 600 million, live presently, in a pre-electric world… a world essentially before “steps” were even considered.


To put that into perspective… Electricity represents the second industrial revolution…. [The one everyone learns about at school was based on steam, you’ll remember.] I don’t know how valid Minister Radebe’s statement is, in a world typified by ‘fake’ news lately. No references are identified in support of the assertion: I am simply assuming, rightly or wrongly, that the Minister is using staff resources to establish accurate information.


In other words nearly 70% of the people on the entire Kontinent have not yet encountered the 2nd Industrial Revolution in any meaningful way… Now that is what you kan validly call “Left Behind”. How does one contemplate developing a place that has to cover more than a billion steps just to catch up: with no idea how to do so? [unless somebody else has a betta plan]


A recent piece in the Economist raised questions regarding how an Afrika emerging from a pre-industrial era … [Mr. Radebe’s point regarding those most truly ‘Left Behind’] can progress in a world where machines that work for capital redemption, are superseding well paid cost centres, called manual workers [and those in routine clerical, for that matter]. They suggest that Afrika will have to find a new way… They were unable to suggest one however.


There is one solution, as a palliative to what is impending. I would not suggest thjat it is the only one it is however the one most likely to prevail eventually. It is the combination of VBasic Pay aka A Universal Income… linked to a levy on transactions in specific new areas of activity. I have as many of you know, promoted the idea of Basic Pay for years now. What else will there be other than Basic Pay for an increasing mass of overwhelming humanity… aka Universal Income [U.I.]. There are experiments in U I taking place in parts of Groland, currently, and of course in Mzansi, where i eke out my own pittance, there are presently 17,000,000 people living on a meager dose of basic pay… with close to zero chance of ever finding anything else.


So what does this mean
For the future
Of everything…?
Logically:
The Monetisation of
Humanity
Through data derived
Micropayments.


!NiK[17]

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Some weeks ago The Citizen published an AFP piece on the growing acceptance of what I call “Basic Pay” and their headline called “Universal income finding favour” [2 Feb, 2017].
 
I anticipated a flood of random outraged/acrimonious/ responses and have: either missed them, or they didn’t happen. This is odd since this subject should be the biggest subject in the country … never mind the world. We may well discover its completely hidden role in maintaining order, should the threatened ending on March 31st of the contract to supply 17,000,000 [seventeen million] persons with “Basic Pay”, RSA style, come to pass.
 
Then we may well discover it to be a mechanism to stave off mass conflict with those alleged to be, according to your correspondent; with reference to the recent Swiss, first round referendum on the subject, rewarding “… the lazy and the feckless” beneficiaries. While in reality they have [regrettably] committed an ancient sin of being superfluous to need.
 
Late last year you published a Gwynne Dyer piece, called “Half the jobs are going”, which I used as a discussion piece for a year end 9th grade exam. It was one of a rising tide of such articles appearing over the past few years. Simultaneously while U.S. Pres Trump is making much of his ‘bring back the workers’ theme there is growing evidence, some reported for instance this past week on the Bloomberg channel, that only about 20% of the jobs were lost to ‘cheaper’ venues from the Manufacturing industries of the USA over the past three decades; were actually lost to cheaper offshore labour.
 

80% apparently was lost to automation.
 
And this was obvious to me some 23 years ago when I began writing a futuristic [fictional story] called the Jonker Memorandum*. Aside from being intended as entertainment, the story also contains, the fact of Basic Pay and its associated Digital accomplice, The Transaction Levy [also loosely known as a Transaction tax or a Tobin tax,] as well as some ‘historical’ comment on some of the economic arguments used to justify it. This idea is currently under review in a number of quarters and China recently indicated they would be introducing it on a zero based level to begin with.
 
My site has, since its inception in 2011 attracted some 7,000,000 hits, mostly from machines, but also by some human persons: adding my arguments to the global debate.
 
In constructing my fictional world I embraced many of the ideas proponents are postulating in your AFP piece, albeit one of two departures is in your opening line… Rather than promoting basic i.e. ‘Universal’ pay in my story as a “Utopian idea” it is rather, a solution for an increasingly dystopian environment… a world increasingly perceived as less and less egalitarian.
 
Most obviously a world that continues to pour out an ever increasing mass of persons for whom no form of employment will ever exist, beyond new evolutions of self employment, is one facing mass scale disaffection; as is being revealed via BREXIT, Trumpism and a range of similar psychic reversal leaps in “LEFT BEHIND!!!!”current thinking.
 
Therefore different ways of managing survival calls for a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of the role of money [as opposed to wealth] in the world and so my story is at heart a sales pitch for the introduction of these tools [Basic Pay and the Transaction Levy] into society. If we can survive Quantitative easing to the rich why shouldn’t the same system work for the poor… at least they will spend the money: and the world’s problem [at east one of them] as the Federal Reserve keeps telling us, is an absence of demand.
 
Those unenlightened Neo Luddite persona who envisage “Taxing ROBOTS”, as your correspondent’s “Benoit Hamon surprise Socialist candidate” for Frances’s pending elections suggests, or more latterly, and surprisingly, Mr. Bill Gates suggests, have completely lost the plot regarding the destiny of both the human race and the future of the “Internet of Things”.
 
I chose with difficulty to write fiction, because by inclination I prefer poetry. So I wrote what eventually became an 84 episode allegoric prose poetic podcast cyber serial, over a period of years from 1994 to final episode uploaded in 2014. When I started on the journey I realized that it would take disruption of the most terminal type to bring about the revolution posed by basic pay and the transaction levy, so I used an event in 1998 as the trigger for a wave of disruptive tsunamis and other seismic phenomena that completely changes the dynamics of the planet; during which my Heroine introduces the idea as a solution to chaos.
 
Over the past years since I wrote and then read the world a “bedtime story’” a la Podcasting, I have noted [with concern, after all I thought I was writing fiction] that a disturbing number of things predicted as part of my story have become reality. Included amongst these is that, apparently, the mechanization of work has advanced to such a degree that three years ago in 2014 a Hong Kong based venture capital company, Deep Knowledge Ventures, achieved a world first: appointing an Algorithm to their board with equal voting rights to the other five [human] board members*. Current indications are that the algorithm performs better than the humans.
 
In closing I would mention that my position on the inevitability of Basic Pay financed through the Financial levy was first influenced and then founded by me on the following observation by Wassily Leontif [Nobel Economist 1983] who noted [then] that “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished: and then eliminated. Technology” he concluded, “can sever the link between infinite desires and full employment.”
 
Given the almost complete disappearance of horses from daily life can any statement have been more prescient?
 
Thank you.

* Ref: Homo deus Yuval Noah Harari. p322