Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease

No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all.
--Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring

Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?

These four projects all represent post-scarcity trends relating to a small local investment yielding huge results globally. A few million US dollars on Wikipedia turned into millions of person-hours of global labor (taken mostly from TV viewing) to yield a global multi-lingual resource that is changing the face of education worldwide. A college student (and grandson of a poet) named Linus Torvalds developed Linux in Finland, and, along with others' contributions (both volunteer and done while on payrolls), that free software now makes possible huge server farms and huge supercomputers (which previously were slowed by the inability to customize proprietary software, as well as essentially a tax per CPU); those supercomputers are promising all sorts of wonders including new medicines. A few million dollars spent developing WordNet at Princeton has led to a "cognitive revolution" in software that can process text. GNU/Linux and WordNet together made possible Google as it is now. While Google may have annual operating costs in the billions of dollars, it is saving trillions of dollars worth of time spent researching, and it is also improving the quality and timeliness of information used to make important decisions globally. In each case, a relatively small initial investment has produced enormous global benefits. Encyclopedic knowledge is no longer scarce. End-user modifiable software is no longer scarce. The ability to intelligently process text is no longer scarce. Timely answers to certain questions are no longer scarce.

And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, extrapolating from Moore's law, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often).

And, as will be mentioned later, everything that digital computing touches is seeing falling cost trends. Even food, despite the current grim news of food shortages from speculation, can and will get cheaper through agricultural robots and precision farming, and with another benefit of less environmental impact.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=agricultural+robots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_farming
These exponential trends in rising capacity and dropping costs illustrate a very different future than the increasingly competitive gloom and doom ones most conventional economists tend to paint for the short term. They even suggest a future where money itself may be less and less important as a control system for day-to-day activities. As Ray Kurzweil puts it:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).

We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-)

So, here is some advice to prospective Princeton University (PU) students based on reading between the lines of the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW). And maybe it offers some advice for PU administrators and trustees too. And maybe even some alumni might get something out of it, as it brings up global trends related to an emerging post-scarcity society. But many others may find it of interest even if they have never heard of, say, Nassau Hall (where the office of the PU president is). I am sorry that to even begin to expose the scarcity-related (and other) mythology interwoven in only a few selected PAW articles, it has taken me about four times as many pages as the entire issue. :-( And all this is without even looking at the ads or class notes. :-)

The fundamental issue considered in this essay is how an emerging post-scarcity society affects the mythology by which Princeton University defines its "brand", both as an educational institution and as an alumni community.

Here is another earlier and more abstract essay by me on post-scarcity ideas in relation to universities:
"The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
It also includes a little more of the theory behind these ideas. That essay is about one-twentieth the size of this one and might be a better choice to read for those daunted by the length of this essay, or the personal nature of parts of it, or the interwoven rebuttal of PAW's thoughtless choice of entitling an article "Jumping from the Ivory Tower", or the other Princeton-specific references.

One motivation for writing (or reading) this essay

I have written on these post-scarcity topics before. The biggest single motivation for the organization of this specific essay is the PAW article on "Jumping From the Ivory Tower".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_phd.html

Is that title going to bring up echoes of this controversy?
"Automaker agrees to changes after meeting with suicide prevention group that objected to spot showing fired robot jumping off bridge."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/09/news/companies/gm_robotad/

The robot is shown forced to take a number of menial jobs, including holding a speaker at a fast-food drive through and becoming upset enough [by repeated failure at them] to throw itself off a bridge.

(I won't link to the video, which contains a graphic image of leaping from a bridge.)

That PAW article title was selected only a little ove a year after this statement by a recent Princeton University alumna on behalf of her family:
"Cho family statement"
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/shooting.family.statement/index.html

On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world. ... We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. ... There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.

With Princeton-praising articles titled "Jumping From the Ivory Tower", it seems like PAW is not helping answer these deep questions. If anything, PAW is helping bury them under inappropriate humor. This essay is not intended in any way to condone violence or the abdication of personal responsibility. But it is intended to help understand some of these issues of suicide and alienation in a university context, and to make suggestions for improvements to the social part of these issues. It even tries to use humor in relation to suicide and morbid themes a bit more appropriately (satirically about PU in this case, discussing options like its voluntary peaceful self-dissolution to help a billion poor children get an education, or its metaphorical death and rebirth as an agent of global economic transcendence to a post-scarcity society of abundance for all). It is always easier to destroy than to create, so this essay includes some specific suggestions for improving the situation at Princeton University, which is a mythologically troubled institution (even as it is filled with many wonderful and caring people).

Like how the Cho family describes Virgina Tech, PU also is filled with people with "so much love, talent and gifts to offer". Even the brother of Sun-Kyung Cho '04, Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, might have been able to develop his capacities for love further in a different context, whether he ultimately committed suicide or not, and whether he ultimately took others with him or not. We can, and should, ask how we can create institutions that help everyone in them become healthier, more loving, more charitable, more hopeful, more caring (even as they may be dying or even if they are tragically taking others with them). The last word on almost all airplane crash cockpit voice recorders is the same -- "Shit!" -- usually after the pilots' calm struggle for minutes with a seemingly impossible situation like trying to get an airplane with a multiple failing engines over a mountain -- they don't give up even when the task seems impossible. But those are just the aircraft tragedies, the same training helps pilots fly millions of safe and comfortable air miles.

We should also ask how we can create institutions which even help everyone in them become even more faithful in the sense of believing at least in values like health, love, charity, hope, community, and caring. As I say later in this essay, it is part of the human condition to have faith in something (even if it is faith in faithlessness).

That kind of deep questioning might help avert some extreme incidents, or it might even perhaps help bring some little peace to the Cho family someday. But a more important reason to ask those hard questions is to make life day-to-day better for everyone. The most extreme incidents are a bit like strobe light pulses illuminating for an instant in stark relief what is going on all the time. Ultimately, as sad and tragic as extreme incidents are, people die all the time around universities for all sorts of reasons, usually accidents or addictions or health issues. Consider:
"Top 20 Causes of Death - Young Adult (20 - 24)"
http://www.statisticstop10.com/Causes_of_Death_College_Age_Adults.html
That table suggest the roadway system is the biggest single predator of young lives in the USA (about 5700 a year), although murder (about 3300 a year) and suicide (about 2500 a year) come next. I don't mean to deny or minimize the grief all involved at Virgina Tech feel on a personal basis, but as a percentage of annual deaths, 33 deaths is 0.17% of the annual number of around 19000 in that age range. So, that tragedy is illuminating, but these numbers show the folly of focusing too many resources on preventing that one type of very rare incident.

Roadways can be made safer by looking at the issues surrounding automotive tragedies, including the rare multiple fatality incidents on the roadway, even if that does not help any with a tragedy that happened. With many accidents in cars correlated with a driver getting behind the wheel upset (or getting that way afterwards), even on the roadway helping with emotional issues make a difference (or coming up with ways emotional issue don't effect driving safety).
"Anger on the road"
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun05/anger.html
"Study finds emotional upset linked to accidents"
http://ink.news.com.au/mercury/mathguys/articles/1999/990215a1.htm
In that sense, a pleasant drive is a safer drive. But more than that, when you really look deeper at the whole notion of transportation you might think of things like self-driving cars as at PU or other rapid transit concepts as elsewhere including automated deliveries. Just think, for example, of all the lives Amazon.com is saving on the roads from trips not made to the local store. Ideas may appear that make life *better* for everybody (even those who don't drive), not just safer for a few who might otherwise be involved in automotive tragedies relative to some number of millions of miles driven.
"Accidental Deaths - United States - 1999-2003 -- [Motor Vehicle -- 1.3 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles]"
http://hazmat.dot.gov/riskmgmt/riskcompare.htm

I'd suggest the same may happen if we look deeply and creatively and life-affirmingly at issues affecting murder and suicide at universities and take helpful action on the findings -- that life might get better for *everyone* on and around campus. This essay does not in any way explore the specifics of the Virgina Tech incident. But, that incident did in a sense illuminate for an instant the landscape this essay explores, and an awareness of that tragedy was an aspect of my motivation to write this essay in relation to the PAW article.

This essay mainly uses the illumination from some tragedies I saw myself related to PU (although there are other tragedies in here too). But to counterbalance those tragedies, I also point out specific examples of caring people at PU, as well as try to add in a bit of humor (so think of this is a bit of a tragicomedy). This essay is sad at times and hopeful at times -- like my own personality. :-) And oftentimes, this essay tries to be both sad and hopeful at the same time. That's part of humor sometimes too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful

Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who must learn how to use his fertile imagination to help his son survive their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.

By the way, for anyone reading this who is feeling suicidal, or who even just has a friend or loved one who might be, one resource is:
"If you are suicidal, read this first"
http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/

You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible.

That web page also includes free hotline numbers, other suggestions, and some links. Or this general Google search would lead you to many others, just to show all the good people out there willing to help:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 1,810,000 for suicide prevention. (0.10 seconds)"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=suicide+prevention&btnG=Search

And for anyone feeling homicidal or war-like in regards to others, or if you know someone who might be, this book is a good resource for alternatives to killing anyone:
"Creating True Peace : Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World" by Thich Nhat Hanh
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-True-Peace-Violence-Community/dp/0743245199

Sometime, people who cannot find any way to resolve a problem with someone else are tempted to eliminate the problem by eliminating the other person. They wish the other person would just go away, die, or disappear. That desire may be strong enough to lead them to kill. Killing another person is not an act of freedom but an act of despair and great ignorance; it will not bring freedom or peace. (page 92)

Our enemy is never another person; our enemy is the wrong perceptions and suffering within him, within her [or sometime even within ourselves about them]. When a doctor sees a person who is suffering, he [or she] tries to identify the sickness within the patient to remove it. He [or she] does not try to kill his patient. The role of the doctor is not to kill people but to cure the illness within them. It is the same with a person who had suffered so much and who has been making you sufer -- the solution is not to kill him [or her] but to try to relieve him [or her] of his [or her] suffering. This is the guidance of our spiritual teachers. It is the practice of understanding and love. In order to truly love, we must first understand. (pages 89-90)

All of us can practice nonviolence. We begin by recognizing that, in the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and the seeds of violence. We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We realize that, at any given momemt, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending o the strength of those seeds within us. When the seeds of anger, violence, and fear are watered in us several times a day, they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding in us everyday, those seeds will become stronger, and the seeds of violence and hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of anger, violence, and fear within us, we will lose our peace and our stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us. With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace. (Pages 1-2)

And for those who are parents and trying to find ideas to apply in your home to raise peaceful and happy children, perhaps the single most illuminating thing I have learned about peaceful parenting is the difference between "authoritarian", "authoritative", "permissive", and "neglectful" parenting behaviors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
All parents are each of these four types at times, but what matters is the relative proportions in relation to the situation and the child's own growth. And matches of personality between parents and child also a big issue, with each parent personality and child personality matchup having its own unique issues as parents try to build on their strengths and accomodate their weaknesses:
http://www.motherstyles.com/
And, as with a critical reviewer of Thich Nhat Hanh (mentioned below) who says Thich Nhat Hanh overstates his case, it is the tension between these first three which can make it hard to find a path of peace in Western society. It doesn't help that US society (including the workplace) generally is often both parent-unfriendly and child-unfriendly. This isn't meant to blame anyone, just to illuminate the landscape of how peaceful families grow.
"Mister Rogers' How Families Grow"
http://www.fci.org/viewproduct.asp?ID=%7B01AF13CB-D655-4832-A2E9-CCA6A75EFE7D%7D
There are other specific cultural problems in the USA right now, including praising abolute qualities ("you are smart") or accomplishments ("good job") instead of perhaps sometimes effort ("you must have tried hard"), progress ("you are getting smarter everyday") or specific aspects of results ("giving that present must have made that person feel happy"); see in general:
"Five Reasons to Stop Saying "Good Job!""
http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm
It can also be harmful to labeling kids, even with positive labels like "creative", instead of approaching them as whole people who are continually growing and changing, in part by their own efforts. Another difficulty is isolated Western nuclear families without as many ties to relatives in different situations and of different ages to learn from or seek refuge in. General knowledge is obviously no substitute for practice; where do children and would-be parents get a chance to practice parenting skills in our society before they need them? These issues are all interwoven into later life happiness for children. It is not fair to pick out one and blame one person or one aspect of a culture for a tragedy. They are all interwoven (including personal choices).

Psychologists are beginning to realize the study of psycological pathology can only get you so far. Probably the same is true for the study of ethical pathology. Ultimately, it may be a better idea to build on strengths rather that try to remedy weaknesses. From:
"Building human strength: psychology's forgotten mission" by Martin E.P. Seligman, APA President
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan98/pres.html

We have discovered that there is a set of human strengths that are the most likely buffers against mental illness: courage, optimism, interpersonal skill, work ethic, hope, [humor, :-)] honesty and perseverance. Much of the task of prevention will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to foster these virtues in young people. Fifty years of working in a medical model on personal weakness and on the damaged brain has left the mental health professions ill-equipped to do effective prevention. We need massive research on human strength and virtue. We need practitioners to recognize that much of the best work they do is amplifying the strengths rather than repairing their patients' weaknesses. We need psychologists who work with families, schools, religious communities and corporations to emphasize their primary role of fostering strength.

I now see "Positive Psychology" was probably something I unconsciously hoped to find in the PU Psychology department a quarter century ago, but sadly I did not find much of it at an academic level (though there was some at a personal level, thankfully). So, while this essay does consider tragedies at PU, it does, following positive psychology, suggest some ways PU could build on some of its strengths both in engineering & science and in the liberal arts.

On "quality" in a university setting, and a sketchy map of the landscape of this essay

That robot in the controversial car company commercial was supposedly suicidal because "everyone at [a Big Car Company is] obsessed with quality". Sound like any university we know? What does "quality" mean anyway? How many dimensions does "quality" have? Let's try to go beyond an abstraction like Pirsig's metaphysics of quality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig's_metaphysics_of_quality
and, as it were, "name names".

Are these all aspects of a quality experience at PU too? How much "quality" is in the PU experience by these various measures (both undergrad and grad)? And if we expect there to be an abundance of stuff to go around in the "future", why would we want to sacrifice any of these core humane values in the "now"?

Let's consider some specific tough questions about Princeton related to "quality" in the "now".
* Do, say, most people who start PU PhD programs usually get professorships?
* Does the typical person with, say, a degree in linguistics get to later do research on, say, the history of words after graduation?
* Do alumni who, say, endow professorships have long and joyful lives?
* Are donations doing unique good?
* Is there room for everyone, young and old, to give what they can to the local community and the global world?
* Are ethics integrated into science and engineering?
* Are the non-university surroundings strengthened in diversity and community by the university's presence?
* Are the students socializing Friday and Saturday nights in joyful settings promoting wellness and balance?
* Are PU assets producing the highest return in terms of people well educated globally?
Princeton is a complex institution, so there can be no definitive or easy answers to each of these questions. Still, this essay suggests that, more often than it should be, the answer to all of them is "No". So, I suggest, not only is Princeton conflicted about the "future", it even misses the "now". Which means it is time for serious change in how it sees itself.

Maybe, frankly, that's why "jumping from the Ivory Tower" is a little too realistic a problem for most PhD-granting academic communities. Or, as Leslie Farber suggests (below), why a life spent around PU might too often be spent just *thinking* about jumping from the Ivory Tower, either career-wise or really from Fine Tower? Why might that be? And might it get worse before it gets better unless strong action is taken?

There is also a mention in that PAW article of the term "post-academic". Maybe "post-academic" is not what the PU community should be talking about. Maybe a better thing to talk about is "post-scarcity"?

This essay (more like a short book by now) is written towards addressing both the issue of PU and "quality" (as it relates to "jumping from the ivory tower" in multiple senses) and also the issue of PU and "post-scarcity". These two issues are intertwined as well, for reasons this essay explores. And don't worry PU, this will be a narrative evaluation -- no letter grades here. Make of this what you will.

This essay is not a scholarly work. It is more a humorous (somewhat satirical) travelogue of a romp through a newly discovered island of ideas (myths, really) to which this issue of PAW has provided transportation, like the ship that brought the Swiss Family Robinson to their island. :-) Now that the essay is done, it seems more obvious how it could be structured to be clearer. I'll outline a map of that island of ideas for future explorers, but this essay remains as it is, and it will be up to real scholars to make better maps than I.

So, after the fact, I can now see how this essay would be better and shorter if I had just made a long list of myths many Princetonians live by, and then went through them one by one, to see just how true they are now including how much they are self-fulfilling prophecies, and then venture a guess how true the myths might be in a post-scarcity future or what might replace them. Some of the myths to explore might include:
* the value of competition vs. cooperation
* the value of individual success vs. collective success
* the value of excellence vs. joy
* the value of perfection vs. effectiveness
* the value of the market vs. a gift economy
* the value of materialism vs. voluntary simplicity and spirituality
* the value of reputation vs. playing the fool
* the value of self-censorship vs. free expression and personal growth through feedback
* the value of artificial scarcity vs. universal abundance
* science as truth vs. science as a faith
* external incentives vs. intrinsic motivation
* high anxiety vs. appropriate anxiety
* numerical grades vs. complex narratives
* technology as value-neutral vs. technology as embodying our values through what we build and research
* non-profit private rights vs. non-profit public responsibilities
* institutions as shadows of individuals vs. institutions as emergent beings
* the meaning in movement and ideas vs. the meaning in place or community
* knowing, dominating, and appreciating vs. caring for and being cared for
* classical views of academic intelligence vs. the value in a diversity of intelligences
And so on. Maybe these myths might be carefully captured in the wild from years of PAW or commencement speeches. :-) This essay does address a lot of these myths, just not in a coherent scholarly way. And I don't want to imply that these "vs." statements are mutually exclusive. One may well need some balance of, say, excellence and joy to have a happy and healthy life. Or even lots of both. :-)

I forget who said this: "Sometimes you need to go a long way out of your way to go a few steps correctly". Pogo?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comics)
Probably something I read in my class yearbook over two decades ago. Anyway, this essay is all those wrong steps. :-) But this work is freely licensed (see the end) so feel free to use it to help go a few steps correctly. :-) If I were to write it over, I'd try to be more upbeat about how PU was making steady progress towards a better future (from where it and our society was coming from). I hope someone can do that, and perhaps just show this essay is perhaps a dark shadow from the past.

The end result will be the diagnosis of mythological "heart disease" for the PU community, of which PAW articles like "Jumping from the Ivory Tower" are just a symptom (just like our current president in the USA is more a symptom of something wrong at the heart of the USA than the problem itself, given he could otherwise be easily impeached). If you ask any doctor about, say, heart disease, they would give you this typical advice (and I add what is in parentheses for keeping your mythological heart healthy, too :-):
http://mayoclinic.com/health/heart-disease-prevention/WO00041
* give up smoking (and competition),
* exercise regularly (especially your compassion, which studies show increases with practice),
* eat a healthy diet (and do good works and do joyful things),
* lose weight if you are physically obese (or give away money if you are financially obese), and
* have regular interactions with your health provider (and supportive community).

This essay goes into how to translate the parenthetical advice to a Princeton University context. :-) I also include a "Modest Proposal" for transforming PU into a post-scarcity organization, as well as a more realistic one, as as *starting* point for discussing these issues. It also seems to have turned into a bit of a memoir. :-)

As an incentive to perhaps get a few people in the current PU administration to skim this essay, I'll point out that this satire also has a section entitled: "The Abolition of the Princeton University Band". Or in other words, be careful what you wish for, you may get it. :-)

It has been pointed out to me since first writing this that the PU Band has curbed its excesses since I knew it in the 1980s, and, despite still having a fundamentally subversive voluntary and egalitarian nature, the Band has come to live more symbiotically with a compulsory and stratified university system and so is now flying under the University's radar so to speak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stratification

So, to further tempt PU administrators to read this essay, I'll mention a few more issues it "resolves" for the university: :-)
* sustainability and greening,
* traffic and parking,
* the Robertson lawsuit ( http://www.princeton.edu/robertson/ ),
* Congress' interest in mandating spending down the endowment,
* the changing landscape for financial aid, and
* the university's relationship with the eating clubs.

Well, this essay doesn't actually address the last very well, but some conflicts require more poetry than prose to resolve (like in the movie the Yellow Submarine where Jeremy gives the chief Blue Meanie a rash of roses and a song in his/her/its heart via poetry), so maybe some of these people might be able to help more with the low intensity social conflict between the University and the eating clubs?
http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

As one alumnus put it, this long essay is "Shakespearean". Thanks, Harold, I'll try not to let that go to my head. :-) And for the record, consider this essay as a vocal accompaniment arising to greet Harold's steady drumbeat of posting alternative views on TigerNet (PU's alumni mailing lists). You are an inspiration, Harold. Thank you for your persistence in the face of adversity. If this essay is of any value in the end to PU, also thank Harold "Happy Tiger" Helm '68 for his long lasting dedication to the higher ideals of the liberal arts. :-)

Or building on Harold's "Shakespearean" idea, this essay should perhaps instead start with:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Although, for the purposes of this essay, you can take "fortune" to be the WordNet sense of "abundance", thus increasing the *irony* of that quote as it applies in a PU context. :-) Yes, I am suggesting Princeton University's deepest trouble is the coming world of "fortune" for all. :-) And PU can take up arms against that fortune for all, or PU can accept these metaphorical slings and arrows, be thankful for them, and change its mythology to help bring good fortune to an inclusive world.

A taste of Post-Scarcity

Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero?

That's because any number divided by zero is infinity (except maybe zero itself. :-) You know all those "divide by zero" errors in economics simulators? Maybe they were telling us something?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22divide+by+zero%22+economics

Results 1 - 10 of about 18,000 for "divide by zero" economics.

An example:
"The Long Tail: The Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance"
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/03/the_tragically_.html

I'm preparing for my talk on Long Tail economics at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in ten days, and I've run into a slight problem. The Long Tail is all about abundance: the economic effects of infinite shelf space. Unfortunately, neoclassical economics has virtually nothing to say about abundance. Indeed, the economics of abundance is almost exclusively the domain of extropians, a few other transhumanists, and science fiction writers. How can this be? Well, for starters the classic definition of economics is "the science of choice under scarcity". That's a warning sign right there. From Adam Smith on, economics has focused almost exclusively on behavior within constraints. My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw's otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn't mention the word abundance. And for good reason: if you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up.

Also discussed here:
"The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0671.html?printable=1

So, any aspect of the economy which goes towards zero in cost, tends to make everything else also go to zero in cost (or infinite in abundance), whether zero cost food, zero cost energy, zero cost time, zero cost healthcare, or ... zero cost computing. Karl Marx and others talked about related (but not identical) ideas a long time ago.

And so, maybe more economists (especially at PU) need to start using a calculus of infinites, since infinity times anything is ... infinity. Well, that's true for infinity times anything except maybe zero, if, say, our global society chooses to blow itself up physically. :-( Is diverting our R&D resources to war really a better option than learning to share, and learning to use our collective imagination to make the world work abundantly for everyone, and thus learning to let those now obsolete neoclassical economic equations just blow up *numerically* instead of guiding our society to blow itself up physically fighting over artificial scarcity? :-)

See also:
"The Myth of Scarcity"
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/783

Perhaps the single most devastating myth on earth is that of scarcity. ... The irony of this tragedy is that while people eagerly embrace the myth of scarcity with respect to everything which in reality is or could be abundant if we use our imagination, they ignore the one thing that is actually running out for humanity - TIME.

Or:
"Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek [The choice is ours]"
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15736

Star Trek takes place in a world where all the ugly things about human existence have been erased. Interstellar globalization has brought us new technologies to make transportation and translation effortless. Machines called replicators can produce absolutely anything you want, so the economics of inequity are gone. The injuries of race and class and gender have been surmounted, if not forgotten altogether. Scarcity, borders, money, and culture have all ceased to exist. ... Galactica is sci-fi without that BS. Sci-fi with all the anger and stupidity and sadness that real people experience. Sci-fi without the conviction that we will conquer our own ugliness. Sci-fi for the age of peak oil and 9/11 and natural disasters compounded by climate change to the point where they can completely destroy major cities. Galactica's message is that unless we come to terms with our own history, we are doomed. Mankind created the Cylons to fight our wars and to do our grunt work for us. Eventually they rose up and wiped out 99.999% of us. This basic lesson is one we still haven't learned: that exploitation leads to exploitation, that if you oppress someone you sow the seeds of your own oppression. ... These days, Battlestar Galactica's warning that technology and progress will bring us to the brink of total annihilation is far more resonant than Star Trek's hope that technology and progress will solve all of our problems.

After an earlier version of this essay was up and people were skeptical that a post-scarcity economy is emerging, I issued a challenge on PU's Advocates and Skeptics mailing list to pick *any* industry and I would reply with a plausible way that digital computing can reduce the cost to near zero over the next few decades. :-) (I hoped. :-)

Here are what one person picked, along with my replies and some elaborations:

* "Aluminum smelting"

Generate the electricity with solar panels that are printed similarly to how computerized ink-jet printers print on paper:
http://www.nanosolar.com/
Energy is the dominant cost there.

Printing solar panels to make cheap electricity to power aluminum smelting involved computers, both for design and to control the printers. That all reduces costs.

* "Steel refining"

I could say the same as Aluminum. But for variety, replace most of it with plastics. Grow the plastics as specially bred trees. Use supercomputers to design the new materials and the new DNA for the trees.

Designing new types of plastics and bioengineered trees to replace steel involves computers. That reduces costs.

* "Transportation of people"

In cities:
"Personal rapid transit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

In rural areas:
"Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering"
http://pave.princeton.edu/main/

Suburbs perhaps best being demolished and returned to farmland? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

I know, you will object that these vehicles cost resources to build and operate? But what if energy is nearly free from those solar panels above and aluminum and steel-like substances are nearly free? See how all these trends start to interact?
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html

Machines to guide vehicles involve computers. As I pointed out, those will be free or cheap if the other aspects are free and cheap, and the rest of this explains how they will. That all reduces costs.

People may suggest materials will still be expensive, but what about robot mining?
"Robots Set To Change The Face Of Australian Mining"
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/robot-00g.html

We need to differentiate between the true energy, informational, time, and physical capital costs of doing things compared to a societally-defined acceptable "rent" a few may charge for access to resources.

And when robots make the robots, they are all cheap too. So. that all really reduces costs.
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22robots+making+robots%22

* "Water purification"

Currently in design:
http://medgadget.com/archives/2005/05/lifestraw.html

LifeStraw™ is a simple device, still in a prototype phase, designed for those unfortunate people in the third world who do not have access to clean drinking water. The pipe is composed of two textile filters, followed by a chamber with beads impregnated with iodine.

And available for purchase:
http://giardiaclub.com/survival-water-filter-straw/index.php

At about an ounce in weight, this survival water filter straw takes out giardia. It will also make you the star of the backpacking trip with friends and colleagues. ... SuckUp Survival Water Filter Straw $9.79

And that's even without nanotech. This will only get cheaper and better as people at places like PU invent new materials (perhaps solar powered ones) to make these things filter better and last longer.

I wasn't kidding when I say later in the essay that dissolving Harvard would give everyone who is poor in the world clean water -- via one or two of these straws.

Granted, I don't know how long the straws can last. But that's the kind of research the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials is for, isn't it?
http://www.prism.princeton.edu/

Water purification using nanotech (and the internet to spread the word about earlier cheap solutions) involves using computers. That reduces costs.

* "Construction"

Theoretically near free for materials:
"MAGMA, CERAMIC, AND FUSED ADOBE STRUCTURES GENERATED IN SITU"
http://www.calearth.org/lunar.htm

And nearly free labor:
"Could This Robot Build A House In A Day? California Engineer's Invention Could Roll Out Concrete Homes Starting This Year"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/16/business/realestate/main2487598.shtml

Construction using robots involves using computers. As does related structural and materials simulations. That reduces costs.

Granted, this area needs work. But hey, the PU's CE&OR graduate program twenty years ago didn't seem to want me to stick around in their graduate program. :-) Granted, I was less of a nice person then. :-(

* "Furniture"

Already essentially free:
http://www.freecycle.org/

Welcome! The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,383 groups with 5,173,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on "Browse Groups" above the search box. Have fun!

OK, I'm playing here, but really, you want free furniture there it is -- or just cruise by PU just after graduation. :-)

OK, another answer: if you are growing free genetically engineered plastic as above, then why not grow it into chairs directly instead of logs you need to cut? :-)

Furniture grown using programmable DNA involves computing, as does freecycling coordinated over the internet. How much furniture does the world need anyway? How much is just landfilled when it could be repaired if it was designed better and people had more "free time" to fix it for fun? That all reduces costs.

* "Shoes"

Already essentially free:
http://blog.reprap.org/2008/05/shoe.html

I just reprapped a left shoe. It cost me 30 pence...

A custom shoe was printed in 3D already for about US$0.60. (That is printing a new one, not reuse.) That involves computers. What more proof do you want for the possibility of cheap things -- shoes made to your dimensions for about a dollar right now. Granted, the materials need more work, which brings us back to structural and materials simulations, as above. That reduces costs.

* "Movie production"

This is already essentially free (for some definition of "movie"):
http://www.youtube.com/

As with all of the above, people may object that I am discounting the value of people's time. But that is part of a point made later on. If things are easy or fun, motivating people to do them for their own sake is not very hard. Lots of people bake cakes, and the world could survive without cake (though it might be hard for some).

Movie are now produced and distributed "free to the user" using computers and computer-powered digital cameras. The people who make the movies generally do it for *fun* so the time is essentially free. That reduces costs.

* "Crop growth"

Agricultural plants are already free and self-replicating and powered by sun and rain. :-) And these self-replicating food plants have been the basis of most societal wealth through the past few thousand years. Our natural self-replicating capital of all sorts has sustained humanity for countless generations.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/need.htm

Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials. In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.

OK, how about asking who does the actually planting and harvesting and tilling? How about these agricultural robots from the 1970s sci-fi movie "Silent Running"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
http://www.jeffbots.com/silentrunning.html
http://www.squaremodels.netfirms.com/drone1.html

I saw that movie, which contains both multiple murders and a suicide when I was around ten or so on TV (who knew then from the advertising?). And it has in various ways, for both good and bad, been a force in my life. If you do watch the movie, please remember at the end to identify with Dewey, not Lowell. :-( Or maybe you should identify with the filmmakers? :-) It's taken me myself decades to reach that point of view though.

Robots tending crops involve computers. Precision agriculture to reduce fertilizer and water use is only possible by computers. That all reduces costs.

And contrary to what some might say, water and artificial fertilizer just increase yields -- they are not strictly necessary, at least if you return the nutrients from "night soil" back to the land like China has been doing for 40 centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_of_Forty_Centuries
Available here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=NOpEn8H1wmsC

Professor King provides intriguing glimpses of Japan, China, Manchuria, and Korea, with information about the customs of the common people; utilization of waste; methods of irrigation, reforestation, and land reclamation; and the cultivation of rice, silk, and tea. An invaluable, profusely illustrated resource for organic gardeners, farmers, and conservationists. 249 illustrations.

Ground rock dust also make great fertilizer.
http://www.fertilizeronline.com/rockdust.php
There are rocks everywhere. Some are better than others for this purpose, naturally.

* "Others?"

If you can think of something that eludes me in seeing how it can get cheap in a world trending post-scarcity, remember that I am only one person (granted echoing thousands of other voices I have read or learned of directly or indirectly). Imagine what would be possible if most of the people on campus at Princeton University and all the alumni decided to think about these issues too. :-) Just imagine...
"YouTube - Imagine - John Lennon"
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=imagine+john+lennon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOkxRLzBf0
(More on that later.)

Maybe that's the best song to answer Silent Running's bittersweet ending?

Or maybe this satire by Frederick Pohl is more likely our future than scarcity? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage.

Many capitalists, like members of any secular religion, still seem in denial about the trends Marx (and others) spotted long ago. The end is near for capitalism -- admittedly in part through its own success. :-) Some people end up that way too: :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_lennon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/

If Jesus of Nazareth was anything, he was an extraordinary friend of the down-trodden, definitely a Liberal, whose advocacy on their behalf so infuriated the ultra-Conservative religious and political leaders of his day that they had him killed to prevent the public from hearing the very liberal teaching that you will see quoted abundantly in Jesus' own words on this web site!

Capitalism, like the USSR as the Berlin Wall came down, is already history. And all the stuff people have been saying with precise sounding economic numbers has not helped them predict its ongoing demise, just like the collapse of the USSR took the US government by surprise -- and studying the USSR was a major reason for the CIA's existence and high level of funding. Some in the CIA may have understood what was coming, but few listened to *them* either. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_Soviet_collapse
As with this change, likely there will be no accountability, either. :-( But, in this case, I don't mind. :-)

For reference, as I learn more about this myself:
"The CIA vindicated: the Soviet collapse was predicted"
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-17426424.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n41/ai_17426424

Another reason [for incorrectly assuming no one at the CIA predicted the USSR's collapse] is that the intelligence community has indeed failed in other cases, and it is often easiest to paint with a broad brush. The most famous example is probably the intelligence community's failure to alert U.S. policymakers of the weakness of the Shah of Iran, the strength of his opponents, and, in particular, the support enjoyed by the Islamic fundamentalists. In that case, the evidence confirms that the failure occurred because the United States, in trying to maintain friendly relations with the Shah and the Iranian intelligence service, failed to develop independent sources of information within Iran. The Soviet case looks like the Iranian case -- Uncle Sam betting on the wrong horse -- and so people have assumed that it is the same.

Of course, that last line is callous and out of touch with reality (like the "Jumping from the Ivory Tower" article title) given that what the USA was "betting" on was controlling other people's lives outside the USA with state-terrorism like the Shah used.(%)

I'm sorry to be another bringer of the bad news to Princetonians that the capitalist world view is way out of date. :-( Our society is in the midst of transcending to something beyond it. Whatever any of us do. I do feel we can make a difference here and there though -- to represent the virtues we chose to believe in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue
Still, there is something to be said for the time honored tradition of "shooting the messenger". :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
It makes messengers take their work more seriously -- they are only going to deliver a message if it is really important. :-) Of course, I don't expect the people on top to do that, they are realists -- what would it accomplish? But no doubt, the same pettiness and cruelty that has so warped many capitalists and their minions will play out in other ways as it continues to resonate around the world and even into my own home. :-( As it does in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib or for, that, matter, any prison, even a "Prison Planet" so many seemingly eagerly build.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/

Still, maybe we can ask, economics aside, what are the more deeply held values and virtues you see in the market or yourself? And maybe we can see how they would apply in a post-scarcity society? This essay does not explore that issue, but maybe as individuals we could?

(%) An ironic Iran-related disclosure about my family and me:
"A rant on financial obesity and Project Virgle & an ironic disclosure :-)"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/701471e5e9af8b00
So, in some sense, you can thank the global intelligence community for my "free time" to do all this analysis work for them. :-) And, another benefit is that those same analysts who would have gotten fired for writing this can now spend all their time analyzing it to see what about it is totally off-base. :-)

No, I haven't met Mr. P. personally (avoiding rank here :-). But I know he sincerely means well (I think. :-)
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
http://www.samueljohnson.com/road.html
Of course, the same might be said of my own work. Time will tell. :-)

Another good free thing to come out of that work (by my wife):
"Working with Stories in Your Community or Organization"
http://www.workingwithstories.org/
And for the record, my wife was always above board with what she was doing. And what intelligence agency would not have known about me? :-)

And even though this essay is all about personal growth, I won't speculate on what sort of person Mr. P. has become from his own trials and tribulations. A better one, I hope, as I have become. At eighteen, I thought all Iranians should be forced out of the USA for the hostage crisis (until I met one at PU, even though he kept throwing his knife into the ceiling tiles in the dorm). I'd have still been cheering on the current Iraq war and recommending even more flaming death as what those impudent Iraqis deserved for mishandling "our" oil. I would not be distinguishing between the people and their guards (let alone having compassion for even the guards). I was all for bombing the oil fields in Iraq in Gulf War I to teach them a lesson (which rightfully shocked my mother, whose house was firebombed during WWII and lost almost all her personal possessions like clothes then). People grow. Even famous or infamous or anonymous ones. :-)

My wife, by coincidence, is currently working on a study on "The future of volunteerism" for a non-profit consortium. Hint: a major issue is that volunteers don't have enough "free time". A post-scarcity society promises a lot more "free time" to volunteer. So, a lot of the issues relating to the emerging post scarcity-economy relate to transitioning from a mostly command economy (whether central government commands or market financial commands) to a mostly voluntary economy. And, in many ways, from child raising to elder care, the economy is mostly voluntary (even given some daycare and some nursing homes). A related idea is that most homes are currently heated with solar energy even when we say they are heated with oil, which would be pretty obvious if the Sun suddenly went out. So, while it seems like the "economy" is all about money, if you look at actual hours spent in activities, from voluntarily watching endless TV sitcoms (and commercials) as a "consumer" to voluntarily cleaning up vomit (and blood) as an "EMT", the economy is already, and always has been, mostly volunteer. It's just hard to see that sometimes unless you turn off the television.
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/

Some economic numbers related to Post-Scarcity

About two to three billion people on the planet live in technological societies out of approaching seven billion people. That's a lot of capacity, even if the other half of the planet may have more social capital and ecological capital than industrial capital.

In the dollars everyone wants to talk about, the global economy is about US$60 trillion annually as a gross world product (GWP).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy
There are naturally problems focusing on money -- this is one alternative view:
"Redefining Progress"
http://www.rprogress.org

Or, per capita:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

Gross world product (GWP) is the total gross national product of all the countries in the world. This also equals the total gross domestic product. See measures of national income and output for more details. The per capita GWP in 2000 was approximately $7,200 US dollars (USD). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their Third Assessment Report (TAR), predicts a maximum per-capita gross world product in 2100 of approximately $140,000 (in year 2000 dollars). The IPCC reports a survey of "economic literature" as providing a maximum value of approximately $110,000 (2000 USD).

That's a lot of per-capita income projected ninety years from now. :-) But let's ignore it as "speculation" even if it is what this essay is about in some sense. That would make things too easy. Also it would be misleading, as it assumes our current economic structure would persist when everyone on the planet could essentially be a millionaire by today's standards. So, let's stick with the current GWP of US$60 trillion and assume in rises only slowly.

On that scale of a US$60 trillion annual GWP, none of the costs for the four projects above, even billions to operate Google per year, are even barely noticeable. That's all part of this issue of post-scarcity -- the costs to do big public digital works whether Google, WordNet, Mammalian Genetics Simulation, or anything else likely to be of breakthrough value are so trivial as to not be noticed. One billion dollars is 0.002% (rounded up) of GWP. Trivial. The entire venture capital sector in the USA is a laughable 0.06% of GWP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital

A recent National Venture Capital Association survey found that majority (69%) of venture capitalists predict that VC investments in U.S. will level between $20-29 billion in 2007.

So, do we need to structure our *entire* global economy a certain way because Princetonians and others strongly control 0.06% of the money flow?

That makes no sense as a big picture. That's not even the tail wagging the dog. That's a flea wagging the dog. Naturally, it's still a flea that is a lot bigger than my own personal net worth. :-) Unless I count differently, like measured in free time. :-)

OK, the global equity market is a big thing too.
http://www.ssga.com/library/esps/hoguetswfandglobalassetprices20071231/page.html

Estimates of the size of the world's capital market vary; the average of figures compiled by the McKinsey Global Institute, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch place the total stock of global equities at roughly $33 trillion; global government bonds - $21 trillion; private sector bonds - $24 trillion.

That's US$78 trillion for all three together. But, that is still only a little over one year's global spending. So, while that is not a flea, it is still a tail wagging the dog if you consider global spending over twenty years.

As long as investors think in terms of private gain, not public gain, they will emphasize investments that can be the best guarded, not investments that maximize social returns they do not see on their balance sheet. Sometimes, as with Google, they can still make a lot of money, because the trillions in annual saving from Google (for time saved searching, and improved quality of results) leaves a lot of money falling off the table to grab some of somehow.

But if you don't need much funds, because you are frugal, or you are retired, or your parents support you as a student, then you can do whatever you want with your "free" time. :-)
http://www.linux.org/

Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License , the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone. [Find] out more about the operating system that is causing a revolution in the world of computers.

TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year:
Mining the Cognitive Surplus
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/27/1422258

Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms.

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years:
Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/1313223

So. we are looking at about one year of global GWP going into foundations over the next 25 years. If something is worth doing as a digital public work, money is not the problem. Again, nor is time when "TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year". Mythology is the problem. Which is why I wrote this presumably ignored email around 2001: :-)
"On funding digital public works "
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615

So, what is even a *billion* hours of human work on those scales compared to sitcom viewing on TV? It is about 0.5% of the total hours devoted to sitcoms.

What is even a trillion dollars on this scale? Nothing.

I've seen an endless parade of articles reassuring the US public how "affordable" the Iraq war is as a percent of the USA's GDP -- a war now projected to cost three trillion dollars or more. If that exercise in fantasy and needless suffering and spawning terrorists is worth that much, then surely we can as a society spend much more than that on real investments in a happy future for everyone on the planet?

There is plenty of time and money for a massive number of massive projects. That we don't see so many projects has more to do with the economic mythology still dominant in our culture.

Again, the investment right now of US$600 billion that would give everyone on the planet a mesh-networked laptop is only 1% of just one year's global GWP. In ten years, as the GWP increases, and the laptop costs decrease, this will be less than 0.1% of GWP. Or, a trivial amount not even worth mentioning considering the potential benefits of reducing global want and ignorance. Well, it would reduce technical ignorance, as I suspect the social ignorance is on the other side in the "developed" world and the industrialized nations will actually get more out of it than the materially poor ones. :-) There would be some consumerist blowback no doubt as poor people became dissatisfied, which is why laptops for everyone is just the start of a transcendence beyond money, not the end of one.

One reason Google looks free is because, relative to how powerful computers are now for a little money, and relative to the $60 trillion global annual GWP, Google is *essentially* free to operate. :-) And Google search (along with the world wide web it indexes) enables trillions of dollars a year in cost savings and increased productivity and quality. My essays and emails would be effectively impossible without Google search or something similar (I know, I'm wide open for a joke here about the time people spend reading my emails actually reducing productivity. :-)

In twenty to thirty years (assuming continued exponential growth in technological capacity along the lines of Moore's law like price/performance, which most experts agree will happen),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
likely even a $100 laptop computer in 2033 will be literally a million times faster than today (as the OLPC is approximately tens of thousands of times faster than an Apple II). At that point, you could hold the equivalent of all of today's Google physical computer equipment literally in your lap. :-) And likely, someone would be throwing one out to get something better, so if you "dumpster dived", you could get a "Google" of today's computing power for free. :-) By the way, that computer could likely hold all the surface internet of today in *RAM*. And if I turn out to be off by ten years, so what? I was off by two years here -- it still happened:
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html

I'd love to make a souped up version of this for OHS/DKR use: (Read about in May 2000 Popular Mechanics)
"Cybiko Introduces First Handheld Internet Wireless Entertainment System At Toy Fair 2000"

I predicted five years for the $100 rugged laptop, it took seven. Just by thinking about about a cheap playful toy and what it really meant for humanity as you follow Moore's law along. I don't see the predictions here as much different in approach, though they are broader and so likely to be fuzzier. And in the end somebody else did it, not me. Which is OK by me -- if they had only got the software better by not trying to dumb it down. :-(

As John Taylor Gatto puts it:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates—these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.

I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.

So, even with the best of constructivist intentions, the OLPC project, filled with people steeped in these traditions, went wrong in underestimating what kids can and will learn if they want to be part of a global community. :-( If they had just said -- "here run any GNU/Linux application you want, you decide", maybe with a streamlined desktop, as was suggested by this article:
"The OLPC Sugar Interface: Don't Do it"
http://www.osnews.com/story/16582
the project would likely have been a bigger success (it is otherwise a tough call as a free software developer whether to invest in porting stuff just to it.) But, so what if some tens of millions spent on development of the first OLPC XO-1 was not 100% a success? That amount is nothing to $60 trillion a year in GWP. We can try that a thousand times as a development project and it still will be less than 1% of GWP. As an experiment, the XO-1 is a world changing success. Even if I find the two I have in some sense disappointing. But we are close to something amazing. To many amazing things. And some dangerous ones, of course.

Recruitment in an emerging Post-Scarcity world

Let's start from the heart of the matter these days, as always, for any quasi-military organization like academia needing cannon fodder: recruitment.
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

In The Republic Plato asserted that the state should take responsibility for training children from the age of three and that each citizen could be guided by the system towards an ideal conception of justice and into the social class and occupation best suited for him. Education had to be universalized so that all citizens could be effectively screened and placed. In this Plato was emphatic that it was the state's job to support and control schools and to make them compulsory. There was no question in Plato's mind that schools should be designed by the state to support the state. ...

Among those who saw the value to the State in controlling schools was Napoleon, who centralized all education bureaucracies in France and took complete control of education in the country.
"No one" it was decreed "may open a school or teach publicly unless he is a member of the imperial university and a graduate of one of its faculties ... No school may be set up outside the university and without the sanction of its head" ...the whole system was modeled on the military regime of its founder. The university, in fact, was organized like a regiment. The discipline was severe, and the teachers were subject to it as well as the scholars. When a teacher infringed any regulation and incurred censure, he was put under arrest. There was a uniform for all members of the university: a black robe with blue palms. The college was a miniature reproduction of the army. Each establishment was divided into companies with sergeants and corporals. Everything was done to the sound of the drum. It was soldiers and not men that were to be made.

Consider a prospective Princeton student evaluating whether an elite education at Princeton is a good investment of four years of her or his youth -- as well as a the direct expenses and indirect opportunity cost of lost wages. How should such a person evaluate the Princeton University "brand" these days, given, say, Donald Rumsfeld '54 as a PU poster boy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child
"Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html
And also, how should a bright student interested in a future of independent intellectual effort see a PU investment in relation to perhaps a future PhD and professorship if they stay on the academic track all the way? Is it worth it? Should they really sacrifice, say, creating their own personalized "brand" on their own in the internet age from day one, as opposed to trying to build a life under the Princeton "brand" and so perhaps follow in Donald Rumsfeld's footsteps?

Here is an analogous example of someone choosing to pass up working at Apple to continue developing their own personal brand:
"Why I passed up the chance to work at Apple"
http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000809.html
A visitor comment from that web site:

Apple has nothing on Cameron Moll. Sure, Apple is a wonderful brand. But where Apple is in the business of design, Cameron strikes me as one in the business of the art of design, and that may appear to be a subtle difference at first glance. But it isn't. ... You have built a brand for and of yourself, and I personally admire your accomplishment. I believe you describe an important self-discovery: you value the Cameron Moll brand more than you value the mighty Apple brand.

By coincidence (if such really exist? :-), such a prospective student need look no further that the current (May 14, 2008) issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Cover story: "The new rules of financial aid"):
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/table_of_contents.html
to understand how the "Princeton University" brand may need to be rethought in a collaborative GNU/Linux & Wikipedia internet age. Is it still advisable to align oneself with the historic Princeton University brand in an emerging post-scarcity society? Or, to be fair, to align one's personal brand with how that historic PU brand is now seen by the public, acknowledging there is always a lot going on at Princeton in different directions? I'd also suggest there are more alumni than just me who have stopped buying PU-related automobile window stickers (see below for more on that).

That choice of self-branding versus main-stream branding in the internet age is related to the idea of "post-scarcity". I will define that better later, but for now, let's just imagine a future where beer everywhere in the world is as easy to get anywhere as it is at Reunions after someone gives you a badge. :-) Or, a little more seriously, where you can print pizza as easily as you might print this web page. Examples:
"Funny video of a person interacting with a future computer and printing pizza"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=topeBoB-ApQ
"Printing sushi" (for real, sort of :-)
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/02/03/0330238.shtml?tid=133&tid=126

Prospectives probably know about such things, or will soon. The question is, does Nassau Hall know about them, and is Princeton ready for such prospectives and their concerns? As is suggested here:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_goheen.html

Traveling through New Jersey in the late 1960s with two classmates from Harvard, Stephen Goheen stopped back home in Princeton, where his father, the president of Princeton University, invited the trio out to lunch. Cambridge, even more than Princeton, was gripped by antiwar protests and unrest. Stephen, who later would perform alternative service as a conscientious objector, recalls that his father asked all manner of questions. Afterward it dawned on him that the elder Goheen had been "conducting research. He was trying to learn what we were thinking."
That was Robert Francis Goheen, always listening. ... He hired a young assistant professor from Harvard, Neil Rudenstine '56, as dean of students when he realized that nobody in Nassau Hall really had a clue about the late-'60s generation.

No, I'm not looking for that job. And in any case, I'm not "qualified" as I don't have a PhD. :-) The last time I was in Nassau Hall was about twenty years ago and a Dean was essentially telling me I should find a research institute to do creative research work related to sustainability and post-scarcity-related issues, not expect to do it at PU in a graduate program. :-( I'd not planned to ever set foot in there again, even though that Dean was 100% realistically right, maybe even helpful. And even if PU has come half way: :-)
http://www.princeton.edu/sustainability/

But to be fair to everyone at PU at the time, I was not then the person I am now. I have grown. As I'm sure people at PU have grown. And the institution may have grown, if such is possible. Maybe someday I will set foot again in Nassau Hall as a visitor, just for curiosity or just to mark my own growth. :-) Also, as my wife says, forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. :-)

Also, as I say here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/1edbf78087d42843

Where would I be if, for example, I did not recognize, despite the pain and trouble it caused me, the ultimate funny irony of people working in Von Neumann Hall (and surrounds) at Princeton having no interest in studying self-replicating systems? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
"Von Neumann also created the field of cellular automata without the aid of computers, constructing the first self-replicating automata with pencil and graph paper. The concept of a universal constructor was fleshed out in his posthumous work Theory of Self Reproducing Automata.[13] Von Neumann proved that the most effective way of performing large-scale mining operations such as mining an entire moon or asteroid belt would be by using self-replicating machines, taking advantage of their exponential growth."
Although John von Neumann's life is so complex and full of contradictions (whose isn't?) that they did have a lot of issues to chose from. :-) Maybe arms control was more important. And at least a handful of people there were thinking hard about green energy back then (even if the rest of the University thought they were nutty, if they thought of them at all :-).

Why am I am taking the time to write this essay as my alumni contribution then? Is it maybe just an "I told you so"? :-) Frankly, I'm *not* writing this essay out of much concern for Princeton University as an institution. I'm writing it mainly out of concern for the world my child will be living in twenty to thirty years from now (as well as maybe some general concern for the people themselves who make up PU as an institution). And I think that world would be a better one for my child if PU changed in ways that will coincidentally also interest prospectives right now, as well as help current faculty, staff, students, and alumni (since the changes might help everybody). Make what you will of that.

People who read this might rightfully say I am at the very least somewhat "bitter". OK, I won't disagree. What you have to really ask is, am I an isolated case? And if there are many bitter like me, then why?

The rest of this essay considers what, reading between the lines, PAW is admitting about the declining value of the "Princeton University" brand these days and the related spread of "heart disease" (in the alienation sense) on campus and beyond. And it suggests why aligning oneself with that PU brand might lead both staff and students to eventually consider "Jumping from the Ivory Tower" (either consciously or unconsciously). :-( And it has the beginnings of ideas on how the PU brand might be renewed in a different direction.

But what high school student, let alone one busy enough to get into Princeton, would be likely to read through more than 700K of dry text, even if it might save their life? Maybe there needs to be some added motivation, since youth generally think they are immortal? :-) So, here are some "teasers" intended to appeal to late teen prospectives. :-) As fair warning, there is stuff about "prostitution" (both on and off campus) involving "money" in here. Mostly safe for "work" though -- well, sort of. :-) And, yes, with an essay this long, especially one touching on "jumping from the Ivory Tower", there is a murder mystery in here, too, but a very sad one. :-( One in which I myself may have had a role to play. :-(

And, I would expect all this talk of sex, some mixed with money, and also my personal admission of potential involvement with a possible murder :-( would stir up some controversy, enough to perhaps cause some troubles for myself. To quote the current US President, as he expressed his support and concern for the welfare for our brave and dedicated troops in Iraq (who in some ways are the most idealistic young men and women in the USA, or would be if we brought them home), "Bring them on". :-(
http://www.unknownnews.net/insanity9.html
Oh, sorry, wrong quote. :-( Maybe I can find a better quote by Princeton's president about concern for the youth of the world? (We'll see. :-) Again, sorry, I would not want our youth to question the concern our current institutions have for their long term welfare, or should I? And some institutions clearly *are* concerned with people's long term well being, so no need to be too cynical:
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4750

More and more evidence suggests a relationship between the risk of cardiovascular disease and environmental and psychosocial factors. These factors include job strain, social isolation and personality traits. But more research is needed on how stress contributes to heart disease risk. We don't know if stress acts as an "independent" risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Acute and chronic stress may affect other risk factors and behaviors, such as high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, smoking, physical inactivity and overeating.

Oh well, no doubt no matter what I say this essay will cause trouble for me. But if those young men and women can (in their minds) risk their lives for me, maybe I can risk most likely less for them -- even if they may not appreciate it at the moment. So, trying to be brave and self-serving at the same time, I'd appreciate it if someone could bring this essay to the attention of higher authorities at PU as grounds to kick me off Princeton University's TigerNet (which I have spent too much time on anyway, including writing this), as well as to revoke my diploma (which I see mostly as an embarrassment at this point), and also to suspend my "free" subscription to PAW (which serves as a constant reminder of my youthful indiscretion in not seeing past Earthly wealth and power). Thanks in advance. :-)

Think of this as a follow up to the classic movie about the Princeton admissions process called "Risky Business". :-) Why not supply prospective Princetonians with some fun involving sex, prostitution, lots of money, and maybe death, as in the movie? :-) OK, the death part isn't funny. :-( But some of the rest is hopefully funny, like any tragicomedy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragicomedy

Tragicomedy refers to fictional works that blend aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy. In English literature from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century, tragicomedy refers to a serious play with a happy ending.

It's been said that US American public suffers from seeing too few tragedies in the fictional media. Tragedies help keep us humble -- and out of places we shouldn't be, like Palmer lake (with a new Porsche). Or Iraq. Or technology and science-filled "Brave New World" dystopias filled with military robots and other nasties (more on that later). :-( Or, dare we even think it, maybe Princeton?

But with this serious non-fiction essay inspired in part by the current issue of PAW, the happy or tragic ending is still to be written -- hopefully a happy one helped along by at least some in the Princeton community.

Using PAW for mythological analysis, or Goldilocks and the three PAWs: Too easy, too hard, and just right

Let's find some PAW article as a starting point for analysis of Princeton's current mythology (meaning, the way it explains itself to itself) as an aid to seeing whether Princeton's values are aligned with an emerging post-scarcity society of abundance and security for all (along with "liberty and justice" of course).

OK, let's flip hopefully, to, say, lucky page 13, "Campus police seek approval to carry weapons".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/notebook.html
Nope, that is just too easy to criticize. :-( "Great news, prospective students," the Orange Key guides can say, "the Princeton campus environment is now so intrinsically insecure it had to arm itself." :-( That would just be echoes of Amory Lovins and Brittle Power, but in a personal security way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. A resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current.

When I was in an engineering graduate program at PU, about twenty years ago, (actually it was the third time I was there after being an undergrad and, later, staff) I used to stay and chat with one of the uniformed officers who let me in when I came into the Engineering building late at night. He had quite a tale to tell about creeping fascism in the on-campus security. To the administration's credit, when I raised a concern about this with a PU dean, they may have taken it seriously because not long after there was a coincidental review of PU security issues. The music CD that officer recommended to me when I asked his opinion on music (when running into him by chance in a Nassau Street music shop) has become one of my favorites: Grover Washington, Jr: "The Best is Yet To Come". Maybe this was a hopeful choice for Princeton's future, especially coming from a man who used to tell me stories about the old Princeton town, when there were things for young kids to do on their own and the place felt more like a friendly neighborhood, and the sense of community and available options and strong role models kept young kids mostly out of trouble.

This was also before the University expanded into more and more aspects of everything "Princeton" as in the town. :-( Kind of like was feared in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Framed_Roger_Rabbit

Dolores informs Valiant that if the missing will is not found by midnight, a company called Cloverleaf Industries will be able to buy Toontown.

Except it actually happened in reality in some sense. :-( So, if the spirit of Toontown (no offense meant) is long gone (though perhaps also from larger social trends than just the University's operations), how can that great loss at least be retroactively justified by helping other towns elsewhere be happier and safer places -- in part by finding the "will" to do it?

Let's flip back to the beginning of PAW and try again to find a more challenging article that explains PU mythology.

Perhaps the president's letter on page 2, "A Library for Scientists" will do.
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/prezpage.html
PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. According to her letter, the new library "will symbolize the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the work in these fields on our campus". The question is, where do you even begin to tell a university president so obviously proud of her new library that making science and engineering studies even more isolated from the humanities is the opposite of what Princeton University needs to do to survive as an ethically viable institution? And that splitting ethics from innovation was at the root cause of a lot of evil in the world in the past? There is a lot of talk of facilitating "interdisciplinary" work in her letter, but if you read between the lines, you'll see that the implication is it will be between different branches of science and engineering, not say, between biologists and sociologists, or mechanical engineers and historians.

In case Professor Tilghman has not noticed, there is a picture on page 21 of that same issue of PAW of a shark about to eat a Princetonian floating in DeNunzio Pool:
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/onthecampus.html
(I know the article refers to the Dillon pool, but I don't see how that pool is big enough and deep enough for a shark of that size. :-) Maybe she had better look into that? It can't be good PR under any circumstances, can it? I had not known PU's scientists had got that far in their shark breeding experiments as they are sometimes hard to keep in captivity (real scientists, not sharks. OK, that's just a joke, both are hard to keep in captivity. :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/3cb25c402e201c88
http://ask.yahoo.com/20010911.html
Still, are those PU scientists and engineers doing a good thing? Wouldn't it make it harder to recruit prospective talent for the PU swim team? Or are the sharks in DeNunzio part of some new training regime? Unless that is supposed to be a visiting Yalie about to get eaten? That seems a little harsh, even by intercollegiate competitive standards. :-(

Still, maybe rather that "make the world a better place through advances in scientific understanding", perhaps when you make an anti-social shark "smarter" (with or without the laser beam :-), what do you have except a bigger problem? :-(

For example:
http://7dp.blogspot.com/2007/08/shark-week-super-smart-shark-edition.html

So, in an effort to save their funding, they want to take one really good go at making this...serum? I don't remember, brain activating protein...stuff. So, they conduct their test on the shark. And it WORKS! Yay! Congratulations all around! These guys f--ing rule! And it's all parties and cupcakes until someone's arm gets eaten.

Also:
http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/deepbluesea.html

Some scientists are out in the middle of the ocean, trying to reproduce proteins in shark's brains. These proteins are the cure for Alzheimer's, and one character even gives a half-assed speech about how she's driven by memories of her father's mental illness. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. Hooray.

I'm sorry to say that the internet consensus on PU's smarter sharks is that they are not a good idea. :-( Or maybe "Deep Blue Sea" was just a poorly made horror film. :-)

For a more serious take on this issue, consider:
"Is "bootstrapping" part of the problem?"
http://www.welchco.com/04/00067/60/00/12/1901.HTM
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/2168.html

As someone who had spent time living around Navajo people once told me, the Navajo had a saying something like:

If you begin a thing with the right spirit, it is a success even if it fails.
If you begin a thing with the wrong spirit, it is a failure even if it is a success.

That's not the sort of thing that would be possible to explain to many Princetonians. Was Kit Carson a PU alumnus, perhaps, figuring out the most efficient means of taking long walks? :-( So I won't even go there. Sadly, other than a splash of cold water or two, that divorce of science and engineering (and economics) from the humanities and ethics is a mythological idea so entrenched at PU and in our society that it is *way* too hard for me to address.

Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me? Still, it's pretty clear Einstein was not suggesting our societal problems would be solved by getting Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and Molecular Biology all together to work on more atomic weapons or smarter sharks, or even to fuse the two. Smarter sharks with laser guided nuclear weapons -- now that's an "interdisciplinary" idea to have PU students think about while enjoying the "tree house" (while it lasts, till the sharks learn to target it from DeNunzio Pool). :-( Or maybe smart armed sharks isn't such a good idea: :-)
"Military Robot"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_robot
"Killer Military Robots Pose Latest Threat To Humanity, Robotics Expert Warns"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080226213451.htm
"Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering"
http://pave.princeton.edu/main/
(Actually, I like the idea of self-driving cars, given the potential to reduce road accidents, free drivers to do other things en-route, or make possible driverless automated deliveries. So, I can respect that sort of work at Princeton if done in the right spirit and freely licensed, like, say, WordNet was. But you have to wonder when the military funds anything what their scarcity-oriented plans are.)

WordNet was developed at Princeton, and in the internet age is Princeton's greatest claim to fame (well, maybe other than Amazon :-):
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Maybe someday free software for ethical cars and robots might be a claim to fame by Princeton, too? :-)

Ultimately, you can't reason without assumptions, including assumptions about what reasoning tools are valid or valuable. :-) And then you also need values and desires to direct your oh-so-feeble flashlight of reason in different directions in a larger murky mystery. Even PU's early attempts towards vehicle AI begin to deal with such issues -- like whether certain memories are valuable to hang on to versus painfully abandoning them in pursuit of a certain mission. :-) Like I'm asking alumni to do by writing this essay. :-) So, "assumptions", "reasoning tool preferences", "values", "desires" -- a lot of faith there through all those (in a sense) in any life -- even in a scientist or engineer who might claim to be an atheist. :-) All these help define your personal ethics whether the roots of them are store-bought or self-crafted. :-)

To be clear, what I am really pointing out is that needing to have "faith" in something (even in just the validity and usefulness of our perceptions and reason) is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, as is then needing to build on top of that faith. This isn't meant to tear down any specific faith, whether hand-made existential humanism or even, say, off-the-rack Roman Catholicism (there are far worse faiths out there in many ways, and why take away something that works for many unless they will get something much better in return, not the risk of nihilism, even though even *that* takes a leap of faith. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

Nihilism is often described as a belief in the nonexistence of truth. In its more extreme forms, such a belief is difficult to justify, because it contains a variation on the liar paradox: if it is true that truth does not exist, the statement "truth does not exist" is itself a truth, therefore showing itself to be inconsistent. A formally identical criticism has been leveled against relativism and the verifiability theory of meaning of logical positivism. A more sophisticated interpretation of the claim might be that while truth may exist, it is inaccessible in practice, but this leaves open the problem of how the nihilist has accessed it. It may be a reasonable reply that the nihilist has not accessed truth directly, but has come to the conclusion, based on past experience, that truth is ultimately unattainable within the confines of human circumstance. Thus, since nihilists believe they have learned that truth cannot be attained in this life, they look upon the activities of those rigorously seeking truth as futile. Of course one may add that nihilism is a self fulfilling prophecy, as without making any attempts to attain the truth one is presumably less likely to find it.

See also:
"Thinking As A Hobby" by William Golding
http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/ThinkingAsAHobby

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion-namely, that I myself could not think at all. ... Grade-two thinking, though it filled life with fun and excitement, did not make for content. To find out the deficiencies of our elders bolsters the young ego but does not make for personal security. I found that grade two was not only the power to point out contradictions. It took the swimmer some distance from the shore and left him there, out of his depth. I decided that Pontius Pilate was a typical grade-two thinker. "What is truth?" he said, a very common grade-two thought, "but one that is used always as the end of an argument instead of the beginning". There is still a higher grade of thought which says, "What is truth?" and sets out to find it. ... [Though Golding has more to say, even on the folly of grade one thinking, but I won't spoil his essay. :-)]

It would take someone more like, say, Langdon Winner to *really* know where to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
But he's at RPI. Maybe in a pinch Professor Michael Mahoney at PU could fill in for Prof. Winner, as he assigned Winner's "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" at least when I took one of his courses. Of course, I did not bother to read it much until after I graduated. :-) Now I wish I had paid more attention in his class. So it is never too late to learn what PU humanities professors have to teach, and then pass on that new color of illumination to someone else as a gift, to help them complete their intellectual rainbow, and pass more colors onto others. Until the whole world is rainbows. Even for the sharks so badly maligned by that picture (as indicated by the scattered applause reported in Dillon when that animal was blown up in the movie). :-( See:
http://www.savingsharks.com/

You can help save sharks by telling everyone you know to watch Sharkwater and spread the word. We need to give sharks a new image and make ocean conservation a part of our daily lives.

But the original movie "Jaws" shows the power of myth. Even though sharks pose only a small risk to humans in most cases, several species have now been hunted to almost extinction:
"From the Jaws of Extinction"
http://www.nova.edu/ocean/ghri/jaws_extinction.html

The irony of the shark myth, according to Dr. Harvey, is that some species of sharks are being hunted to the point of extinction by humans, not the other way around. "Many species are at critically low levels and if we do not act immediately on their behalf, then entire marine ecosystems could collapse," Harvey explains.

So, where can I find something in PAW a little easier to discuss than essentially religion, but not as easy to discuss as getting more guns onto campus? I need something to chew on, not too hard, not too soft, to provide the main course of this essay. :-)

How about on page 12, "$25 million gift to strengthen engineering-liberal arts ties".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/notebook.html
Sound like a promising Navajo start, with a heart setting off in the right direction. But towards the end of the article, a black hole shows up unexpectedly:

Security, for instance, includes traditional work in national defense as well as newer research topics like secure information technology and electronic voting.

Whoa, slow down there. The USA is in the middle of spending three trillion dollars (see below) on "traditional" national defense which is making everyone in the world less secure (just ask them), and some of this "engineering for a better world" money is to be added to that boiling-over pot?

Now there is a theme we can talk about: a secure and prosperous future for all on the planet and beyond, and how the Princeton community has perhaps lost sight of it. How could that future be achieved through bold and noble investments (by people who look as very happy as that donor from being able to give a gift to the world)?

So, what does the rest of the PAW issue say about whether the mythology guiding the Princeton community helps or hurts security and prosperity for all? Or even just professor wanna-bees?

Future security and prosperity is likely a major concern of prospective Princeton students these days, who are choosing whether to give the university the gift of their youth and presumed future allegiance. Is the "Princeton University" brand up to that challenge, as the social pendulum swings from "greed is good" back to "the love of money is the root of all evil"? How does the "Princeton University" brand interact with an emerging post-scarcity of abundance (of which GNU/Linux is just the beginning)?

Also, if Princeton's current mythology is a good one, then it should be reflected at least in a lot of happy intellectuals, like newly minted PhDs, right? We'll see. :-(

What does "post-scarcity" mean exactly, anyway?

Joke:
http://www.textfiles.com/humor/JOKES/laws.lst

Murphy's (First) Corollary: Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.

And also, to keep us humble:

Murphy's (Second) Corollary: Every solution breeds new problems.

The idea of "post-scarcity" is a central theme in this essay, so let's explore what that idea means.

It has nothing to do with "posts" being rare. :-)

And it has nothing to do with not getting enough mail from friends and family. :-)

The term "post-scarcity" means "after" scarcity. So it is about a world where most everything essential to human life is so common and easily obtainable that anyone can take practically as much as they would like without metering. An example now is how people can breathe as much air as they like (even if hyperventilation can give people a headache or much worse). Or at the beach anyone can drink as much sea water as they like (which isn't very good for you either, of course). Or, almost anyone with an internet connection can now surf to as many web pages as they like (which is not good for you either in excess).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=internet+addiction
Relative to individual human needs, the atmosphere, or the ocean, or free-to-the-user web page views are effectively infinite. Of course we may be polluting each of those three commons via industry, but that is a different issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

What happens to society when most physical things ranging from automobiles to bicycles to computers to dentures to energy to food and so on to zirconia all become essentially free-to-the-user?

Some might suspect what I am talking about would be European "socialism" or Soviet-style "communism". But I'm not. I am talking about transcending those economic rationing and taxing and working issues altogether. And I am saying, as above, that this is a virtually unstoppable trend (short of cataclysmic war) that is happening with or without our individual involvement.

For reference, from Wikipedia on "socialism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Socialism refers to the goal of a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community. This control may be either direct—exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils—or indirect—exercised on behalf of the people by the state. As an economic system, socialism is often characterized by collective ownership of the means of production, goals which have been attributed to, and claimed by, a number of political parties and governments throughout history, due to this, socialism has been identified with communism mainly because the distribution of wealth is controlled as a whole and not individually.

For reference, from Wikipedia on "communism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Communism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems believed to be inherent with capitalist economies and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. Communism states that the only way to solve these problems would be for the working class, or proletariat, to replace the wealthy bourgeoisie, which is currently the ruling class, in order to establish a peaceful, free society, without classes, or government. The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism and Luxemburgism, are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarchist communism) also exist and are growing in importance since the fall of the Soviet Union.

That's not to say, of course, that a lot of ideas in socialism don't make sense -- from using increases in the money supply as a "social credit" dividend to progressive taxes that equalize the rich-poor divide and produce public works. :-) It is possible to use laws to try to make a "market economy" work to meet some social goals (more on that later).

But I am really talking about something else than market-interactive socialism and the taxation it usually involves.

Also, one could perhaps draw parallels to "communism" as defined abstractly above, but still not at all to how communism has ever been put into practice, since "common ownership" generally translates to "strong state control of production by bureaucrats" and assigned "work" which is tightly supervised (even though it does not have to).

Still, yes, I shall admit, in a broad sense, I am asking Princetonians to think about communism and *beyond* (as in going beyond "work" and "school" as ideas, towards "play"), because "from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs (or wants :-)" is happening right now in various ways -- even in the USA, and Princetonians can no longer stop it. So even if you have a visceral bad reaction to that idea, read on so you can think of ways to stop it. :-) But, as a hint, maybe you can't, and maybe you would not want to -- so essentially, there is not much of an alternative to heading these words sooner or later. :-) Other that blowing most of everything up, of course, as in "better dead that red", or is it, "read"? :-(

To see the difference (at least from anything tried recently :-) let's read together the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Princeton-related "This Side of Paradise",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise
where the main character, Amory Blain, toys with socialism. From the (free) text: