Subject: Is Capitalism the Ideal or the State of the Art?

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 07:47:38 +0200 (IST)

I am wondering (and pondering) about whether Capitalism is the Ideal way
of running an economy which will accompany us for the rest of history or
it is simply the best way to run things at the moment, a fact that could
change sooner or later.

At the moment we witness the Open Source revolution which is an innovative
twist on intellectual property. It has now expanded to Open Content, but
it will probably take some time before other forms of intellectual
property besides source code catch up with Open Source. (if at all).

However, think of what the future will hold. Imagine it is possible to
exactly and affordably duplicate most material goods. Naturally, car
manufacturers, for example, may require the buyer to sign a contract that
he will not duplicate the car. But, then there will be an open-product
initiative that will eventually generate free as in free speech cars,
Electronic devices, computers, and so forth.

Such a development will make matter as efficiently to duplicate as
information is today, so reproducible material property may face a 
similar turnpoint as intellectual property faces now. So, the question is
what will become of selling goods?

My theory is that money (which will become un-compulsary for living) will
be used to pay for labour (like localizing, configuring or installing a
component somewhere), or for such things that cannot be duplicated,
whatever they may be. Some people may still be greedy and may wish to be
considered rich, (naturally, Gold and other valuables will become
worthless, so money will exist only on "paper"), but most people will not
find a point in being rich on "paper".

So, I suppose we will turn into a society in which people will create,
discover and develop new things for the joy of it, without expecting to be
financially rewarded for that. I suppose fame will become more important
at such times, and more people will strive to be famous.

In any case, what do you think about Capitalism vs. the progress of
technology?

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked] 
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

The prefix "God Said" has the extraordinary logical property of 
converting any statement that follows it into a true one.

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From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 09:35:33 +0300 (IDT)

> Electronic devices, computers, and so forth.

I believe that there will always be the equivalent of closed source code. 
People need some sort of intellectual property rights as long as there are
projects, which need a lot of effort from one person (or from one group of
people - referred to below as workers/investors) and which would benefit a
larger group of people (referred to below as freeloaders). 

While some projects can benefit the workers/investors even if freeloaders
do not pay them, other projects are viable only if the freeloaders pay
too.  To be able to do the project without going bankrupt, financial
participation from the freeloaders is needed.  To get the freeloaders to
pay, a legal framework is needed, and it's why we have the concept of
intellectual property rights.  This is not to say that we need exactly the
present form of intellectual property rights (trademarks, copyrights,
patents, trade secrets).  But something is needed.

(I am not discussing here material/real estate property rights.)

> what will become of selling goods?

What will happen to deep space projects (such as spaceships, room in space
stations) in such an economy?

> find a point in being rich on "paper".

As long as the attention of attractive people of the opposite sex (or the
same sex in the case of people who have this kind of preference) is a
scarce resource, there'll always be a point in being "rich". 

> In any case, what do you think about Capitalism vs. the progress of

Fundamentally - no change.  There will be stronger safety net for people
who fail the capitalist game (150 years ago you could face the death
penalty for stealing a loaf of bread, today you'd just be pitied if you
were caught in this criminal act).  People will take more risks (this is
happening even now, when people invest money in startups with no good
business models).
                                             --- Omer
WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  see at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Mar 2001 11:47:27 +0200

Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]> writes:

> twist on intellectual property. 

Not really innovative. If you go back to the 70ies, to the "personal
computer revolution" of Altair, Apple, etc, you will see amazing
parallels with today's Open Source.

> Electronic devices, computers, and so forth.

It happened. That's how all those IBM PC clones appeared. Actually,
in an interesting twist, IBM open-sourced the BIOS of the PC to
protect their intellectual property. The idea was that anybody who
replicates the PC would have a hard time proving they didn't know
of the BIOS code. It worked, too, until one company managed to
reverse engineer the BIOS in a way that was provably independent.
IGLU have had a few meetings on the premises of that company's in
Raanana. ;-)

> what will become of selling goods?

Nothing much. Take the computer industry as an example again. It was
all open in the beginning, and hackers were building their own
computers and writing their own software. For themselves. Then - very
quickly, too - it became commoditized.

How many people would want to go through the trouble of building their
own car themselves. It's a huge expense - getting the parts (or did
you think of raw materials? Like ore?), tools, working space, 
putting them all together, testing, getting certification (you know,
safety regulations won't go away, I hope). It will be much more
expensive - whatever the unit of expenditure is, not necessarily USD
or NIS - than buying a car made by professionals and letting them have
a profit.

You did buy your home computer, didn't you? It's my wild guess that
you didn't make the chairs and tables in your house, nor did you build
the house. You could though - there is nothing proprietary about that
technology. Quite a few people don't laundry or iron their shirts and
pants for the simple reason that paying the appropriate service a
small fee is well worth their time. Even more people pay their
housekeepers/maids/etc even though they are perfectly capable of
handling a mop.

In general, you hack because you love it. All the rest of the stuff
you will be perfectly willing to pay for, and there will always be
people happy to take your money. I probably need to re-read your
posting again, but I have the impression that it is free speech that
is the issue here, not free beer.

> find a point in being rich on "paper".

The point of the money is not being "gold" or "paper", but providing a
universally accepted scale for measuring the value of goods, services,
labor, etc. So people will find a point in being rich...

> at such times, and more people will strive to be famous.

Rich and famous.
 
> In any case, what do you think about Capitalism vs. the progress of

That a balance will be found between immediate profit and long-term
progress. it has been happening for dozens of years now. Quite a few
industries' leaders realized long ago that investing in fundamental
research is cheap insurance for their leading positions. The research
done at IBM (how many Nobel and other prizes were awarded to IBM
research fellows?), Xerox PARC (no need to elaborate), TI (Kilby),
Intel and their predecessors (starting with the guy named Shockley)
etc, if we take the industry closest to our common interests, provides
clear examples.

As far as which 'ISM will be applicable to the ideal society of the 
future, I don't know. I also don't know what the dominant programming
language will be, but they'll call it FORTRAN.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
"I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs."

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 15:35:31 +0200 (IST)

> or NIS - than buying a car made by professionals and letting them have

Who says anything about building a car? People will duplicate cars other
people buy (or get from an open-cars manufacturers). Just like we can now
duplicate Linux CDs. (or properiatery software)

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 12:42:22 +0200

> find a point in being rich on "paper".

As long as there will still be unduplicatable things, people will find a point
to be rich in order to get them. A few things I can think of:

1. Real Estate - I don't see how you can duplicate a square foot in Manhatten.
   If you live in Tokyo, filling your apartment with Electronic appliances will
   probably cost you less than the apartment itself, so you wouldn't get much
   by getting these appliances for free.
   Of course, you can live in the sahara instead of in Manhatten. but I don't
   see how the demand for an apartment in Manhatten will drop because of the
   possibility of duplicating physical objects.

2. "Big Things" - Even if duplicating machines appear, I don't see how you
   can actually duplicate a house, not to mention a sky-scraper. These will
   still need unduplicatable work (although robot work can lower the amount
   of human work needed - but robots have been available for years, and I
   don't see them replacing the human builders, especially not in Israel).

3. Leasure - As someone mentioned, food is already cheap today. You can get
   a big meal at McDonalds for $7, while a more "respectable" restaurant will
   charge you at least $30. What will you actually gain if McDonalds gave out
   food for free (and I'm not talking about poor hungry people - that's another
   issue)? You would still want to go to that $30 restaurant for the more
   virtual benefits that are not the physical foods - better service, more
   physical space (see real estate above), better atmosphere, more "hype", etc.
   If you think these are not important, will you take a date to a McDonalds?
   Would you get married in a McDonalds? (I once had a discussion with a few
   people how come kids' birthdays in McDonalds is acceptable, while a wedding
   in a McDonalds will be laughed at ;) )
   
4. Mass, Energy and Entropy - duplicating things is a nice "star-trek" idea,
   but people who know the principles of energy conservation and the second
   law of thermodynamics know that there are a few problems with this idea.
   First, energy has to be conserved, so to create food, or petrol, or something
   like that, you need the energy in the first place. This is not a problem,
   because as Einstein told us, we can convert mass into energy. And we also
   need mass for the mass of the object we're going to create. But where are
   we going to get that mass? Of course, we can take cheap mass like earth or
   sea-water, or something like that, but getting that mass and transporting it
   is non-duplicatable work - just like now, if you want to buy earth or water
   you have to pay someone for it. (Using air as that mass is problematic,
   because you need a lot of air for even a small mass, and this will generate
   a lot of wind in the cities ;))
   Also, you'd have to pay a tax to recycle your entropy :) This is actually
   a big theoretical problem: when you take something and turn it to something
   with lower entropy (and food has lower entropy than sea-water) you need
   to "pay" by making the entropy of something else higher. How would you do
   that? Nobody will want your extra entropy! You'll have to pay somebody to
   relieve you of that extra entropy, just like you pay now to be relieved of
   your garbage and sewage.

   BTW, most people assume that the greatest service the sun does for the
   earth is to provide energy. This is not true - the total energy on earth
   is constant (otherwise it will get hotter and hotter until it eveporates!).
   What the sun actually does is to lower the earth Entropy (the technical
   explanation: a small number of high-energy ultraviolate photons arrive
   at the earth, and a large number (hence more entropy) of low-energy
   infrared-photons are reflected by the earth). The plants are capable of
   trapping this entropy reduction and producing low-entropy food and
   fossil fuel like petrol.

BTW, already being rich is less and less meaningful, and more and more people
are saying explicitly "I want to make a decent living but have no desire to
be rich". This wasn't always true - a century ago you were either rich and
had all the food you want and all the medicine you needed (not that the
doctors of a century ago were so successful in curing people ;)) or poor and
every day needed to think how they'll be able to feed their children and how
to prevent their children from dying from curable diseases. So when faced
with the question of being rich or poor, you'd of course prefer to be rich.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Tuesday, Apr  3 2001, 10 Nisan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |When everything's coming your way,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |you're in the wrong lane.

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 15:32:54 +0200

On Tue, Apr 03, 2001, To [email-masked] wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] Is Capitalism the Ideal or the State of the Art?":
>    And we also

I thought about this a little bit, and there's a solution to the mass problem:
If the amount of mass entering the house was larger than the amount exiting
the house was positive, then after some time the entire house will be filled
with stuff (this is a known problem even nowadays ;)) so that is _not_ what is
actually happening. So in a steady state you could keep the outgoing mass
(sewage and garbage) within the house, for "recycling" into new things. You
will still have some mass deficiancy (because some food mass will be lost as
CO2 and H2O that are harder to collect, and because you'll have a slow but
constant increase of the "stuff" you collect in your home), but this
deficiancy can probably be filled by sucking in air (at around 1.2 kg per
cubic meter, if I remember correctly).
For the sake of our atmosphere, cities will estimate the amount of air they
are using, and have manchines that convert sea-water (for example) to air.
This will probably be done high above ground so that the generated hurricanes
of air don't effect people (or birds, or whatever). Perhaps this air can be
generated with high entropy (i.e., hot) to act as the entropy-sink we also
need (see my previous post).

I once heard there's a book called something like "The Physics of Star
Trek", explaining how the things seen in Star Trek can be possible. Has
anyone read it? Does it say anything about object replication?

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Tuesday, Apr  3 2001, 10 Nisan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |If God is watching us, the least we can
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |do is be entertaining.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 Apr 2001 16:35:00 +0200

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes:

> So in a steady state you could keep the outgoing mass
> (sewage and garbage) within the house, 

Aren't you running into the entropy problem here?

> have manchines that convert sea-water (for example) to air.

Sounds like alchemy. Not really, of course, since transformations
between elements are one the biggest technological achievements of
the past century. However, we are talking about transformations
between elements like oxigen and nitrogen (the latter is not present 
in water IIRC), called "metals" by astronomers. Ask astronomers, and
they'll tell you that nuclear reactions involving "metals" -- the
so-called CNO cycle -- are exceedingly slow. The only places in the
universe where metals are produced are star interiors (no, the Big
Bang can't do it). I'll skip the details, at least until the list
applies a moderate peer pressure.

> Perhaps this air can be generated with high entropy (i.e., hot) to
> act as the entropy-sink we also need (see my previous post).

You need energy for that... A truly vicious circle.

Check the subject - we have wandered very far from it, haven't we?

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:33:23 +0200

> Aren't you running into the entropy problem here?

Yes, as I said you'll need a way to "relieve" you of the excess entropy
somehow. Entropy sewers? Releasing a small part of the air back to the
atmosphere very hot? Releasing hydrogen (you can release more atoms per
weight, so you increase the entropy)? I don't know.

> applies a moderate peer pressure.

Of course, there are several technical issues I didn't mention because I
thought that everybody knows about them and they are straightforward to
think about (but not to actually implement), and also because I thought
they had no relevance to the capitalism issue. These issues is how to create
the atoms or simple molecules you need (will you require input of the same
mulecules, say "cartridges" of oxigen, hydrogen and iron, or will you
convert any material to the atoms you need? The latter is more flexible of
course), and how to actually manufacture the object in question (this is
a seperate issue all together - see for example the best-seller "Nano" about
nanotechnology).

> You need energy for that... A truly vicious circle.

It's not a vicious circle. Assuming we have the proper "alchemy" technology,
energy is equivalent to mass, and you can create both of them from any mass
like sea-water (if you don't like to use the E=MC^2 theory for that, just
think of converting water to petrol, and then using up that petrol, or convert
water into Uranium and do some fission :))

So you if you have mass you have plenty of energy - it's getting rid of all
that entropy which is the problem.

Again, think of plants: why do they go into all the trouble of using sunlight
(which is not available at night, in winter, under trees, etc.) when the
"obvious" alternative will be to use the warmth of the ground they are on?
After all, even a frozen ground contains a lot of heat energy (the point where
it does not contain any more heat energy is "absolute zero" -273 celcius).
Sounds a good idea? Well, it isn't. The second law of thermodynamics says
that you cannot move heat energy from a cold place to a warmer place (an
action that decreases entropy) without investing more energy in making
something else warmer (thereby increasing the entropy of the system back) -
so the plant will only waste energy. This is how refrigerators and air-
conditioners work. A refrigerator indeed pulls heat energy out from the
objects in it, but far from producing energy - it needs to waste that and more
energy just to run this refrigeration cycle. Touch the back of a refrigerator
to get a feel for that energy that goes to waste because of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is actually a very interesting subject, but quite difficult
to comprehend at first (I still don't think I fully understand it all).

> Check the subject - we have wandered very far from it, haven't we?

Not really! We were talking about whether replication machines will relieve
you of the need to depend on others (i.e., pay others money), and I was saying
how you still have some unsolved (or at least which I don't know the solution)
problems that will keep your dependence on others. The thermodynamic issue
was only one of the issues I raised.

Certainly it has nothing to do with hacking, but the original question
didn't either :)

P.S. If you consider this only as a philosphical question, not a question
with physical issues, it becomes a pointless question. This is because
your replication machine can "philosophically" create a whole new planet
for you, filled with copies of friendly and compliant people that will
serve you, and an army with a huge arsenal to fend of the attacks of
lawyers on your planet, so none of the financial issues are relevant any
more :)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Tuesday, Apr  3 2001, 10 Nisan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Why do doctors call what they do
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |practice? Think about it.

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From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 03 Apr 2001 17:55:54 +0200

Allow me to re-arrange your posting a bit to put the following two
statements together:

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes:

> think about 

> to comprehend at first (I still don't think I fully understand it all).

;-)

I wholeheartedly agree with both statements. Having studied physics
for quite a few years, and worked in the area, 10% I tend to think that
everybody knows everything relevant, and 90% of the time I am baffled
by things I can't understand...

> a seperate issue all together - see for example the best-seller "Nano" about

By Ed Regis? Is it worth reading? The Amazon reviews are mixed at
best...

> if you don't like to use the E=MC^2 theory for that

No, I don't. I don't know how to handle antimatter that is implicitly 
involved in this formula... ;-)

> that entropy which is the problem.

I just mentioned another one, a purre technicality, of course.

> Not really! 

I forgot to put a smiley there.

> The thermodynamic issue was only one of the issues I raised.

Maintaining income gap as a means of keeping the world's entropy in
check? [NB: no smiley here]

> with physical issues, it becomes a pointless question. 

<troll> That's true about any question, isn't it? </troll>

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 18:53:18 +0200

> By Ed Regis? Is it worth reading? The Amazon reviews are mixed at

Yes, it's by Ed Regis. It's mostly a biography of Eric Drexler (see
www.foresight.org), some guy who dabbled in the issues of nanotechnology
(mostly talking, in my opinion). It isn't one of the greatest books I've
read, I have to admit. A lot more talk and politics than actual technical
details. You might say it was _slightly_ interesting, not more than that.

> involved in this formula... ;-)

Ooops... You're right... I forgot about the other laws of conservation,
like conservation of baryonic number (or whatever it called, you know
that quantatity that protons and neutrons have 1 of and electrons or
photons have 0) and spin (bosons like photons have whole numbers, fermions
like protons and neutrons have half numbers) and charge. So that I guess if
these laws of conservation are not overruled by the "grand unified theory",
whatever that will be, you'll need to either keep the same numbers and types
of elementary particles in your original "raw" material, or be prepared to
handle the extra matter (or anti-matter).

Sounds complicated, but seems a lot better than keeping seperate stocks
of chemical elements lying around. "Damn, I ran out of chloride. Now all
my food will taste bland." :)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Tuesday, Apr  3 2001, 11 Nisan 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Early bird gets the worm, but the second
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |mouse gets the cheese.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 04 Apr 2001 10:11:10 +0200

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes:

> of chemical elements lying around. 

As I said earlier, keep a star around (a yellow G-type would do quite
nicely, thank you), point the remote at it, and press the fast forward
button... ;-)