Afaik, the reason artists were devalued throughout history was due to two facts:
Lack of abundance in the ancient economy
Which is why I find the idea of turning into more of a knowledge age economy unrealistic. It makes the assumption of permanent abundance on the lower levels of things like Maslow's pyramid (or whatever sociology mechanism you subscribe to), thus forcing the price of those things lower, while giving greater, perhaps unwarranted value (a bubble) to things higher on the pyramid (entertainers). The fact is, things like the amount of life in the sea and the wild are decreasing, which is diametrically opposed to the functionality of this age of abundance. Not to mention that such a thing would probably require a flatlined or decreasing population and more intrusive, tyrannical government, with even more power to regulate all aspects of things like copyright.
From doing a brief inventory of the world, it's kind of obvious we're already in this so called knowledge age right now, probably peak knowledge age, at least for our lifetimes, due to the fact that population is still increasing. Unless population decides to take an immediate nose dive to sustainable, pre-industrial revolution levels (500 million), I see the value of the lower levels of the pyramid (food, housing, etc) increasing, which they are, and the more frivolous things like entertainment decreasing in comparison (bubble dies).
Even if you claim technology and robotics will infinitely scale the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid beyond all human needs, the specialization of skills required to make them function will lead to increased centralization and monopoly to do whatever they want with the price (already happening with Monsanto and we're still relatively low tech).
Don't count on this. We are not at all far from the point where people can do DNA editing in their garage.
Hey, I'm not a farmer, I just assume we can't use any mysterious tricks to create an infinite food supply from a finite top soil, seemingly more contested fresh water supply amongst counties and states, and dwindling ocean population. The last time we tried to farm everything in sight we ended up with "the dust bowl".
The UN is saying people should "eat insects" to fight world hunger:
You pay attention to the propaganda from your enslavers at the UN

Nothing is infinite in the quantized (real) world, because the speed-of-light isn't infinite (
for it is was the past & future would collapse into an infinitesimal point and we'd all be "proof its gone") and thus the
heaviness of atoms isn't as informational (entropic) as human knowledge formation.
Ah we have ArticMine the Malthusian who apparently religiously (irrationally) subscribes to the fable tale fraud of AGW and r0ach the Mathusian who doesn't appear to be aware that we can grow more food in our basements than we need:
MA was predicting some technical innovation to enable us to grow food in less space and in any mini Ice Age coming...
One of the more vital technological advancements has been developed locally in Philadelphia. They can grow all the necessary food without farmland from inside a warehouse that is completely free from genetic tinkering or chemical whatever. The owners of
Metropolis Farms actually grow fresh produce all year long. Those interested in survival of the fittest, well here it is.
President Jack Griffin developed this technology and has been doing a bang-up job. It would probably be a bad idea to set one up in a basement for the years ahead. As he explained, The innovation here is density, as well as energy and water conservation. Griffin continued, We can grow more food in less space using less energy and water. The result is that I can replace 44,000 square feet with 36 square feet. When you hear those numbers, it kind of makes sense.
This is the way of the future fresh food coming from your basement.
I believe the key technological breakthrough may be long-life, high-efficiency, solid-state LED grow lights:
https://www.google.com/search?q=high+efficiency+grow+lightr0ach do you want to remembered and laughed at like the Luddites who resisted industrialization because they said it would destroy civilization?
There are no absolutely no population problem limits that won't be solved by the free market. Period. The Mathusians have always been wrong and always will be. Always. Forever.
The [Existential] fear emotion is inherited from the primitive, post-paleozoic, hunter-gatherer time period when mortal danger was omnipresent. Fear stimulates a
fight-or-flight adrenaline spike in response to extreme stress. Adrenaline rushes are thrilling and addictive, especially when the threat is low-grade, not thoroughly exhausting, and thus repeatable because it only exists in the imagination. Adrenaline (plus cortisol) shuts down rational thought in the pre-frontal cortex. Production of the steriod cortisol spikes to redistribute more energy to the muscles and nerves, depleting energy from the immune system, digestion, and toxic waste processing necessary to maintain health.
Even if you claim technology and robotics will infinitely scale the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid beyond all human needs, the specialization of skills required to make them function will lead to increased centralization and monopoly to do whatever they want with the price (already happening with Monsanto and we're still relatively low tech).
As for human population, yea, I'm aware how some people forecast we will hit something like 8 billion then start going down, but nothing like this is set in stone. Humans can only survive by all of them converting to K selection theory. I think most people who actually work in this field claim that all humans are K selection by default, which seems like complete bullshit to me. You can find huge differences by looking at different ethnic groups alone, possibly from colder vs warmer climates as well.
This is why national sovereignty is such an important thing. Nations that don't implode obviously have converted to K selection, then you have people from Marxist, organized Jewry coming along and saying, whoa, homogeneous society is bad (except for Israel of course), it's time for us to use the most powerful lobby in the world (AIPAC) to force you to import some 3rd world R-selection rapefugees to destroy your civilization. And this is what they have done by overthrowing the 1924 and 1965 immigration act of America. Their latest foray into blatant hypocritical behavior and destruction of the entire planet is exporting all their K selection refugees out of Israel and into Sweden. Even though both countries are similar population, Israel said the refugees were a threat to the destruction of the Jewish state, but hey, who cares if Sweden is destroyed right?
http://www.europeanguardian.com/81-uncategorised/immigration/635-israel-is-shipping-its-deported-africans-off-to-swedenhttp://www.jpost.com/National-News/Eritrean-migrants-resettled-from-Israel-to-Sweden-337414[/list]
So yea, you're not getting any knowledge age as long as you have the all powerful, organized Jewish lobbies attempting to force multiculturalism upon all nations. Which in reality just means dumping as many K selection groups as possible on top of your functional society to destroy it. It's no coincidence this is happening right now either. Right at the opportune moment when bankers are at their weakest an in danger of being overthrown, they wanted to give you a more immediate problem to deal with to distract you.
Readers I didn't intend to thread-jack the Zero cash thread with a sociology tangent about copyright,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society, maximum-division-of-labor, the
heaviness of atoms, and the Knowledge Age, but it just spawned spontaneously due to a debate upthread between CoinHoarder and myself.
Quoting myself:
I am quite flabbergast that Eric S. Raymond (self-professed to have 150 - 170IQ, the creator of the "open source" movement) could get the logic so wrong on the coming Knowledge Age.
In
his critique of Jeremy Rifkin's book,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society,
he misses the key generative model of open source, which is that the source is always changing. The enslavement of knowledge by capital is due to the transactional cost of the propagation of creations. As we lower that friction, knowledge takes over.
And he apparently fails to comprehend
capital can't buy knowledge because
thought isn't fungible, and this becomes more evident as the diversity of innovation becomes more fine-grained.
The claim that the material input costs will be significant relative to the marginal cost of distributing more copies of intellectual property is wrong because the only costs in material production that can't be reduced asymptotically to 0 at economy-of-scale and automation are the knowledge inputs. Thus knowledge is infinitely more valuable than material production at the asymptote. The only reason that capital has been able to enslave the knowledge portion of the cost in the material cost is due to inability of fine-grain, autonomous knowledge to control the creative outputs of material production. The 3D printer changes this because the printer will be in every person's home. The commodity value
relative to knowledge value of raw material inputs will fall asymptotically to 0.
What Eric misses is that many types of intellectual creations and creative processes can be incrementally fluid and shared, including music, video production, medical processes, etc.. People can take the designs of others and refine them. This is precisely open source. It is not that we won't possibly use fungible money (micro payments perhaps) to pay each other for creations, but that money won't be in control of the startup costs. Individuals will choose what they want to work spontaneously. This destroys the power of stored capital to enslave knowledge.
We will still use this money to buy those non-creative things that drop near to 0 in price, such as raw materials and food.
This is what I was trying to explain to Eric a long time ago, but it just flew right over his (and his readers') cuckoo head(s) so he banned me.
Note this doesn't mean I am agreeing with Rifkin's Marxist conclusions about the end of private property rights.
All the indicia of cod-Marxism are present. False identification of capitalism with vertical integration and industrial centralization: check.
Vertical integration enslaves knowledge and will fall away. Capital will increasingly become knowledge instead of stored fungible claims on labor.
Writing about human supercooperative behavior as though it falsifies classical and neoclassical economics
Supercooperative doesn't have to mean Communism. It can mean more finely-grained, autonomy of work. Eric is conflating here, even though Rifkin was also apparently erroneously introducing Marxism. They both got it wrong.
the concept of the commons is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems
Wrong! The commons means knowledge takes control. For example, physics assures us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is only the lack of knowledge production that makes energy finite or scarce. And I am not referring to perpetual motion machines, rather to more efficiency and automation of extraction of energy through greater innovation due to faster propagation of knowledge.
Nobody ever says that the commons requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn.
Correct. Rifkin doesn't understand fine-grained, autonomy is the key element of the commons.
>So @esr, how do you align the long tail of maintenance into the sunk v marginal cost framework?
Er, simply by observing that it is neither of those things and cant be jammed into that framework.
He makes it clear that he didn't even consider that the lower transactional propagation cost of digital distribution of editable creations increases the frequency, granularity, and autonomy of those maintenance edits. He apparently doesn't remember that Metcalfe's or Reed's Law says that as the number of those editing nodes increases, then the
value of the knowledge network increases squared.
When people speak of capitalism and free markets as being separable ideas, and I inquire into that, I generally find that theyre identifying capitalism with the way free-market economies behave in the presence of high communication and transaction costs big firms with lots of vertical integration, deskilled employees treated like cogs in Taylorized processes, and elaborate hierarchical management structures designed to manage the largest possible lumps of capital to collect economies of scale.
Economies mostly stop looking like that as the costs of transaction and communication drop and technological leverage increases revenue per employee. But its still capitalism because specialists in capital accumulation drive most of the productive activity.
Ah he was so close to getting the point, then he screwed it up on the last sentence. Yes Eric, but what capital are they accumulating? Stored capital or knowledge capital. He just hasn't quite had the epiphany yet on how the relative value of stored capital can plummet.
Oil is food, Oil is materials, Oil is Energy, Oil is what backs USD
Oil is what you can't print. Oil is your Tax.
You can't seem to agree that knowledge will 1000X more valuable than those raw materials.
You have entirely missed the point of my post here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144So I think we will stop the discussion now. I don't have more time.
Let them raise the price of oil to $1 million per liter. Our knowledge value will rise proportionally. Then I (and others) will be earning $1 trillion per day.
It is the value-added to raw inputs that is relevant. With mass production, the value-added of knowledge was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of xerox copies.
Now the creations will change 1000s of variants per day or minute. The value-added is unfathomable.
It is the speed of the propagation of creation of product innovation that destroys (devalues) their control.
Discussion continues over at the blog of the creator of "open source".
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479716There is very limited knowledge networking value for carrots. Extrapolate from there.
What does agriculture have to do with network value of knowledge creation?
Do carrots have anything to do with open source business models?
Carrots will continue their downward spiral of relative value. Iron used to be a precious metal. Commodities have trended downward in price for millennia. If knowledge can be unleashed from vertical integration gridlock, those trends should accelerate.
The refutation I expect is that there are many contributors to Linux and to aggregate value and then distribute it to the contributors requires business models such as corporate sponsorship. I agree a dearth of modularity is a barrier, but it doesn't apply to all types of creations. And I was working on higher-kinded semantics computer language to hopefully improve modularity.
Even for Linux we could ponder a pay-per-download micro payment with a new crypto-currency, then have a list of contributors ranked by LOC and distribute to them. Not sure if that works, but I am not going to try to pretend I'm as omniscient as you and know all the limitations of ingenuity of mankind.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479742Performers and analysts are earning tips from their YouTube videos. These seed creative thought, which spawn other creations.
We will be able to produce all the food, raw materials, and energy we need with robots. There is no reason the price shouldn't trend towards zero, once the robots can build more robots.
The activity that can't be automated is creativity and knowledge creation. Thus it should rise in relative value.