Brain One: "What we’re moving into is an era of abundance"

[identity]

from Brian Eno's 2015 BBC Music Peel Lecture:

The dole, you know, why does the dole exist? It exists because somebody thought it was repulsive that people should be poor in a society where there was a lot of money going around, that some people should be very, very poor. It seemed objectionable. Doesn’t seem objectionable to a lot of people these days, which is interesting. So these forms of social engineering appeared and, as I say, I think they represent a sort of altruism, a generosity towards the future, which I think is just starting to find its time now. We are now in a new era. We come from an era of scarcity, basically. Economic scarcity. And when all of economics is based on the idea of scarcity and the idea of competition for resources. What we’re moving into, I think – this is explored in Paul Mason’s book Post Capitalism and in David Graber’s books and various other people are writing about it.

What we’re moving into is an era of abundance. And co-­‐operation. We’re super productive, we’re going to become even more productive as we automate, and we’re going to become even less connected to the production. Because automation means robotisation and it means that humans are less necessary to that process. So what are we all going to be doing? We’re going to be in a world of ultrafast change. It’s really accelerating at the moment and will continue to. And we’re going to have to somehow stay coherent. What are we going to be doing? I think we’re going to be even more full time artists than we are now. And I don’t just mean the professionals like me, I mean everybody, is going to have to be constantly involved in this activity that I was describing earlier of being able to resynchronise with each other, to connect things together, to be able to make adventurous mind games about different futures, to be able to understand things. There are some interesting social initiatives now. There’s one called Basic Income. I don’t know if you have heard of that. This is the idea that everybody should get a wage. Everybody. Whether they work or not. So that we simply eliminate poverty in one step like that. There would be no more poor people. You think Jesus, that sounds ridiculous. It isn’t ridiculous, actually, you might want to read about it.

Have I been spending too much time lurking around RI and related sites? Does automation/robotisation inevitably mean job losses and (even deeper) grinding poverty for the masses (as I think most of us here would agree is the most likely result), or can/may/will it lead to a new Renaissance, as BE foresees, with all that freed-up energy that used to go into work now channelled—by a work-free humanity living the good life on their Basic Income—into outrageous expressions of creative genius such as the world has never known? Does Brain One have maybe less than half a brain? Should we consider him as an "RI subject"?

Your thoughts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p033smwp

[seemslikeadream]

thank you I really needed to remember this


The Birth of the Long Now Foundation - Brian Eno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y3H1fuxXE8

Composer Brian Eno recalls how he and Stewart Brand joined up to co-found The Long Now Foundation. Eno says his interest in long-term thinking was sparked by moving to a dysfunctional New York in 1978, where city dwellers were stuck in the "short now."

-----

Long Finance is an initiative begun in 2007 to establish a World Centre Of Thinking On Long-Term Finance. The initiative began with a question - "When would we know our financial system is working?" - which challenges a system that can't provide today's 20-year-olds with a reliable financial retirement structure. The aim of the Long Finance Institute is "to improve society's understanding and use of finance over the long-term."

The research project proposals range from theory versus practice or fiscal versus monetary to sustainability versus robustness. The iconic project for Long Finance is the Eternal Coin, with the objective of starting a global debate about society's values over the long-term.

This is the second event that Gresham College has co-hosted, where learning from the sister Long Now organization and its 10,000 Year Clock Project. - Gresham College

Brian Eno is a musician, composer and producer of audio and visual landscapes. Eno's synthesizer work and electronic manipulation of audio textures was first featured during the early 1970's as a founding member of Roxy Music. His solo and collaborative musical compositions with John Cale, Robert Fripp and David Bowie have been in circulation world-wide over the last 25 years.

Eno has produced records for numerous artists including U2, David Bowie, Jane Siberry and performance artist Laurie Anderson, executive produced the "Help" benefit album, and performed with Pavarotti, Bono and The Edge at 1995's Modena Festival to benefit the War Child charitable organization.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36933&p=516551&hilit=+Brian+Eno+#p516551

10,000 year clock project gets mountain, $42M from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, music from Brian Eno


Geek-Cetera By Jennifer Bergen Jun. 27, 2011 2:17 pm
‘Let’s face it; a lot of people in this world are shortsighted. When warned about the future dangers caused by global warning, many people think so what? I’ve got a hundred years on this earth at most and then the next generation can deal with it? Our civilization has historically had a problem with planning ahead. For instance, when we realized that many computers were only programmed to use two numbers to denote a year, as in 12/31/99, many people were worried about the Y2K crisis that was supposed to crash computers worldwide when the year switched from 1999 to 2000.
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One man, however, decided that it’s important to look forward. Computer scientist, designer, and inventor Danny Hillis came up with an idea in 1989 to design a clock that would keep time for the next 10,000 years. No one can predict what the world will be like 10,000 years from now. In fact, there’s a good chance our civilization could be extinct by then. However, according to the Long Now Foundation, started by Hillis in 1996 to support the project, most civilizations last about 10,000 years.
The Long Now Foundation wants people to think in the perspective of a person living 1,000 years. It focuses on what your actions now can do for the future. Hillis’ goal for the clock is to inspire long-term thinking and would act as an artifact, a reminder of generations past.

The clock will be built into a mountain and will tower at about 200 feet. A project like this obviously isn’t cheap, but Hillis and team have some good support, specifically from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos who has given $42 million to the project. Bezos didn’t just give the project a boatload of money; he’s also giving it a mountain to build in. According to a website Bezos recently launched called 10000yearclock.net, Bezos has been helping Hillis with the project for the past six years,
Hillis will be building the clock on Bezos’ land in western Texas. It’s the first of what the Long Now Foundation hopes to be many millennial clocks that will be built around the world. A second site has already been purchased in Nevada for the second clock.

Hillis said in 1996 that he wanted to build a clock that ticks once a year with a century hand that advances once every 100 years, and a cuckoo that comes out on the millennium. Hillis and his team built a working 8-foot-tall prototype that was completed on New Year’s Eve 1999. At midnight, the clock chimed twice to start the new millennium. It now sits at the London Science Museum.
The 200-foot clock, however, won’t be as easily viewable. Reaching the clock will start with a several-hour-long car ride from the airport. It will require a day’s hike on rugged terrain to reach the entrance, which is almost 2,000 feet above the desert floor. The entrance has a jade door rimmed in stainless steel and a second steel door behind it that act as an airlock to keep dust and wild animals away. The tunnel is pitch black and is a few hundred feet long. At the end of the tunnel you’ll find a 500-foot-long vertical tunnel about 12 feet in diameter with a continuous spiral staircase.
The stairs are literally carved out of the rock by a special 2.5-ton stone-slicing robot invented specifically for the project. You can see the stone-slicer in action in the video below. The robot will incrementally make its way down to the bottom of the floor as it carves out a few stairs a day.

Obviously, designing and building a clock that can last 10,000 years takes a lot of thought. Hillis decided desert terrains like that of West Texas and Nevada were best since there isn’t much of a temperature fluctuation as in other parts of the country. There’s not a lot of rain, and there’s never any issue of frost, both of which could cause the clock to rust. The primary materials used in the clock are marine grade 316 stainless steel, titanium, and dry running ceramic ball bearings.
The clock actually needs two to three people to wind it. However, it also runs off of solar power, so it can technically never have a visitor and still tick away. It can also run for 100 years without solar power. So, granted we lose our sun, the clock could work a century without it before it needs humans to wind it up.
To conserve energy, the clock doesn’t show the time unless someone prompts it. Otherwise, the visitor will see the time of the last visitor. This is pretty neat, in a way, since you can see the last time a person had visited the clock, which could be days or decades.

The clock uses 20 huge horizontal gears called Geneva wheels (pictured at right), which are 8 feet in diameter and weigh 1,000 pounds each. This mechanical computer calculates the over 3.5 million different melodies that the chimes will ring. The father of ambient music, Brian Eno, composed the never-repeating melody generator that rings the clock’s chimes, making each visit to the clock 100-percent unique. There are 10 huge chimes that are optimized for the acoustics of the shaft space. Eno is also the creator of Bloom, an iPhone app that creates randomized ambient music that also never repeats itself. Each user’s experience is unique and no two users will ever create the same sound, much like how the clock’s chimes will work.
Inside the tunnel are also five room-sized ‘anniversary chambers,” one for the one-year, 10-year, 100-year, 1,000-year, and 10,000 anniversaries. The first will feature a special orrery, which is a mechanical solar system model, that will be activated by the clock one year after it launches. The team is still deciding what to do for the 10-year anniversary. As for the other three, they’re leaving that up to future generations.

Jeff Bezos Explains Why He's Building a 10,000 Year Clock

BY SETH FIEGERMAN
NOV 30, 2012
Jeff Bezos has already revolutionized the way we shop, now he wants to change the way we think about time.

Earlier this year, news broke that the Amazon founder and CEO has invested at least $42 million in a project to build a 10,000 year clock deep in the mountains near one of his homes in West Texas. The clock would play a different sound to celebrate the passing of each year for the next 10 millennia.

During a wide-ranging interview at the Amazon Web Services conference on Thursday, Bezos offered a thought-provoking explanation about why he's interested in this particular project and how it works.

"The clock is a symbol for long-term thinking," he said in the interview. "If we think long-term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish." As an example, he noted that asking someone to solve world hunger in five years might sound preposterous, but doing so in 100 years might not. "All we've done there is change the time horizon, we didn't change the challenge. Time horizons matter. They matter a lot."

Bezos continued: "We humans are getting awfully sophisticated in technological ways and have a lot of potential to be very dangerous to ourselves, and it seems to me that we as a species will have to start thinking longer term. This is a symbol, I think symbols can be very powerful."

The clock itself will have five "anniversary chambers," which Bezos describes as being like "the cuckoo on a clock." The first of these chambers will go off every year, the second every 10 years and so on until the fifth chamber, which goes off just once after 10,000 years have passed.

"We're only planning to build the animations for the first and second chambers," Bezos said. "We figure our future generations can worry about the third, fourth and fifth chambers."

Bezos, who invests in other futuristic projects including his private space company Blue Origin, noted that the clock is being "carved out inside of a mountain," which takes a kind of "pilgrimage" to get to. However, he said when the project is finally completed, "we'll let people come and tour the clock."

Hopefully, we don't have to wait 10,000 years for that to happen.

The discussion about the 10,000 year clock starts at the 32:00 mark in the video below:

One on One - Brian Eno

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glxrJRcTVyE
Stewart Brand: Building a home for the Clock of the Long Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq000rAZBMc
Construction of the 10000 year clock - Alexander Rose (SETI Talks)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY

[divideandconquer]

This guy needs a serious reality check.

[Blue]

Still have some old LP's of Eno and Fripp but man he's dain bramaged. Too many drugs or too much money/success. People have been talking about this for decades and it has never materialized. Other than a few elites in the arts most artists are struggling to carve out time after work to create and people are buying less art now since a) they can't afford it and b) they can "be an artist" themselves with all the software and hobby junk out there.

We're racing towards a world of scarcity for first world countries and more of the same for those already experiencing it.

[IanEye]

Weekend Edition
January 2 - 4, 2009

An Experiment in Provocation
Stealing Gaza
By BRIAN ENO

It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.

[seemslikeadream]

well then he's obviously dain bramaged


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0BFyhDFUw


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDULlMa8Hxc

[dada]

Does automation/robotisation inevitably mean job losses and (even deeper) grinding poverty for the masses (as I think most of us here would agree is the most likely result), or can/may/will it lead to a new Renaissance, as BE foresees, with all that freed-up energy that used to go into work now channelled—by a work-free humanity living the good life on their Basic Income—into outrageous expressions of creative genius such as the world has never known?

Who's going to buy all the stuff the robots make? Didn't Marx mention something about this?

I suggest we program the robots with the desire to create 'art.' Then we won't all lose our jobs. A dirty tactic, but this is our competition we're talking about.

Isn't art a value judgement? Who decides what an outrageous expression of creative genius is? It's just another authoritarian game.

I guess I can only speak for myself here. For me, art is something that happens like a sneeze. I can tell art happened when I'm doing something for twelve hours and it feels like only two hours passed by. People can work in the garden, or tinker around in the garage in the same way. That's the art people will express if we give them a chance. And I make my value judgement that this is better than most gee whiz art-products you'll find on the market.

What I'm saying is, we'll need to change the way we look at things. And Eno is not thinking out of the box, here.

[brekin]

Love Eno. Have some quibbles though.

As automation & robotisation grows and humans are less necessary to that process, the problems is humans are less necessary.
Their problems and concerns become less pressing, less interesting, more bothersome and regressive because "that process" is increasingly becoming a, the, chief concern of society.

When you fetishize technology, futurism, efficiency, robotics, etc. humans are seen, in comparison to something "that works" as a problem to exploit and manage, get out of the way, and not a resource to allow to flourish. Smelly, unpredictable, slow, inefficient, argumentative, etc. in comparison to technology, people with abundance will choose their phones, computers, ipads, cars, tech entertainment over people everyday. Also, those in tech, use a tech lens to deal with people, which is really just about determining and controlling behavior by creating more technology, not less.

We are really just creating an abundance by technology, for technology, and the few elite who gain monetarily, but don't have to devote most of their life to managing and overseeing the process. Many affluent people now swimming in a sea of abundance are chained to their email and texts, enslaved to the process of constantly monitoring and overseeing their wealth (time poor). Why would they seek to help make the money poor, time rich? When they resent the lack of control and predictability in their own lives?

I would gladly give up some tech in my life for more free time. But I don't see that happening. I don't see the robot factories allowing us all to paint watercolors all day either. I'd gladly go on some type of enrichment dole for a year or two, but I don't see tech creating that opportunity. I see it preventing it. We've become tools of our tools, and if the sharing of abundance wasn't institutionalized when you had so many theorists, and communities, trying to do so during the steam engine era why would it in the smart phone era? The dot com era helped break down communities and the need for shared resources, collaborators, and real time and in person collaboration.

Cue long, slow, reflective music no one has the time to listen to all the way through.

[Wombaticus Rex]

UBI is an interesting concept, and probably the best solution. That's not a good thing. We're in a situation where our technology is (still) accelerating, our working class can't keep up (or even afford to work thanks to benefits cliffs), and our elites are primarily concerned with protecting themselves from the consequences of this. UBI will act as a palliative remedy, to be sure, but I have grave doubts that it will lead to some kind of renaissance. I have a lot of high school friends here in Vermontistan who are currently living the Basic Income dream; they are mostly depressed and bitter, with a horizon that spans from pills to porn.

Do humans want security without dignity? I was given everything growing up, I mostly pissed it away, enjoyed an extended adolescence and only became an adult when I absolutely had to. While I rather wish it had happened sooner, I'm still grateful for the perspective into the learned helplessness that affects so much of the western world.

UBI will have to provide more than monthly income payments: it has to provide a narrative whereby taking free money just for eating and shitting is dignified. It has to provide horizons beyond consumption.

It won't provide either.

[semper occultus]

....there's that old saw about give a man a fishing rod being better for a man than handing out a fish.....it does slightly smack of chucking everyone's fishing rods in the bin and doling out the fish as everyone claps their flippers ...

[Luther Blissett]

How many United States Dollars do you think it cost to build that alien superstructure around that star?

[stefano]

Keynes wrote Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren, in 1930. In it, he explored a world 'a hundred years hence', so, 14 years from now. Basically our time.

Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes – those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs – a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

I think we're there, certainly in the rich world. But how do you make the relative needs feel less urgent? How do you encourage people to get into 'non-economic purposes' that make them happy or even ones that aren't antisocial (porn and alcohol abuse spring to mind).

Also notable that, right about then, the persuaders saw what Keynes was seeing, and considered this a very serious problem. This is when advertising was invented, to get people to consider essential things that normal people had not up to that point desired very hard.

[brekin]

How many United States Dollars do you think it cost to build that alien superstructure around that star?

0

[Agent Orange Cooper]

Brian Eno has brain damage from too many drugs, lol, give me a break. You have no idea how many drugs Eno has done, or if said drugs even cause brain damage that wasn't already there to begin with. This place just makes me sometimes.

Rather than getting up on your high horses and making squarely uninformed medical judgements, how about just accepting he has a different view of the human situation than you do?

Nothing any of us will ever do in our lives will compete with this in terms of sheer genius, so I'm inclined to give him a break:

[dada]

Nothing any of us will ever do in our lives will compete with this in terms of sheer genius, so I'm inclined to give him a break:

(another green world)

Hey, speak for yourself, pal:)

Anyway, I thought these were some well considered responses to identity's request for our thoughts. Eno's words were a good jumping off point for productive discussion. A bunch of us took time out of our day to comment. I'd say this is a positive thing.

Maybe we should all just talk about Brian? I like his music alright, yeah. I used to play some Roxy covers with one of my old bands. And so what, and so what.