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Idolatry – The Forgotten Sin

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Idolatrous Worship
Michael Rosskothen/Shutterstock.com

To many, the very notion of idolatry seems quaint and out-dated. Yet to monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam idolatry forms the basis of the divine order of their moral universe. Are they simply mistaken? Or is idolatry a sin that is still conceptually relevant to modern thinking?

This article interprets the monotheistic tradition as humankind’s quest to understand, as best we can, the one, true overarching divine order which governs our universe and find our proper relationship to it as limited beings. In this respect, modern science is simply an extension of the monotheistic project, and many early enlightenment scientists were deeply religious and pursued science in the service of God speaking of “the creator’s own stamp upon creation” ( Francis Bacon ) or asserting that “Nature is the book of God written in the language of mathematics” ( Galileo ).

Johannes Kepler even wrote:

“May God make it come to pass that my delightful speculation have…the effect which I strove to obtain in the publication; namely, that the belief in the creation of the world be fortified through this external support, that thought of the creator be recognized in its nature, and that his inexhaustible wisdom shine forth daily more brightly”

Yet, there are many examples of the sin of hubris in the Bible, where time and time again, Jews were drawn to worship golden calves, and other idolatrous practices, in the high places. Indeed, many Muslims regard adoring images of Christ, Mary, and the Saints as a slippery slope towards idolatry.

What draws people, reared to believe in God, towards idolatry time and time again?

I believe the origin of idolatry is twofold:

  • A fear of the infinite
  • A desire to Self-Worship by Worshiping our Creations

 

Fear of The Infinite And The Sin of Idolatry 

 

Everyday, we must make decisions to survive and sometimes those decisions must be right. Is this berry edible? How much food should I store in case of a drought? Should I take out a loan to expand my business? Is now a good time to sell those stocks? How should I treat my child’s illness? Are enemy submarines hiding along this shipping route? On occasions, the wrong choice can produce horrifying results, the bankruptcy of a business, the injury or death of a loved one or infant, the collapse of a civilization.

When stakes are high, we must be sure we are right. Yet certainty is impossible in an infinitely large, infinitely complex and infinitely subtle universe. We can only try our best to make decisions based on the highest comprehension we can achieve in the allotted time – and hope it’s good enough. But however much we may hope that our decisions are good enough – this is never guaranteed. We might always miss something out: with dire consequences.

Any attempts to represent the infinite with the finite is a subtle form of idolatry. Our minds constantly tempt us to simplify and try to encapsulate infinity in something relatively simple – or at least comprehensible. Something we can perceive. We then delude ourselves into thinking, that through fully understanding the false idol we use to represent infinity, we fully understand infinity itself.

This idea is both seductive and comforting. But it can also distract and instill a false sense of security and hubristic omniscience. The idol captures the worshipers’ entire attention who become convinced that nothing else is relevant. This blinds them to the rest of the world – including things of critical importance.

Idolatry breeds ignorance – and ignorance can be fatal. This is one of two deadly sins central to idolatry – a refusal to perceive reality or God on His own terms.  The idolatrous instead insist that He must simplify Himself to accommodate our limited cognition (which won’t happen).

Our need to avoid this fatal tendency is as relevant today as it was at the time of Abraham, Christ or Muhammad.

We must keep our mind open and prepared for new occurrences that signify important events, even unexpected ones.

 

Idolatry: Self-Worship by Worshiping Our Creations

 

We take pride in our creations, often viewing them as extensions of ourselves. The craftsman who creates the false idol, in some subtle way, has an idolatrous sense he has created God. By worshiping our creations, we subtly worship ourselves. If something we have crafted is grand enough to create the universe – how much grander must we be? Of course no one who fashions Holy works will admit this, but deep down they feel an idolatrous pride in them.

Beyond idolatrous pride, there is control. A false sense of molding the powers which mold our universe.

Not everyone fashions idols directly, but when a community worships the idols it creates, that community tacitly commits a kind of self-idolatry.

As the comprehension of idols induces a false sense of idolatrous omniscience, so the crafting of idols induces a false sense of idolatrous omnipotence; a false sense of power.

In truth, humankind cannot fashion, or mold, most of reality. We only control or influence a tiny portion of it. By clearly understanding what we do and don’t control, we can affect what we can control to prepare for what we can’t. Trying to mold what cannot be changed directs resources and effort away from what can. Instead of building a giant statue to bring future rain, it is better to devote our energies to building a warehouse to store grain and prepare for times of drought.

The seductive opportunity to feed our self love through worshiping the idols we create adds to our primal desire for simplicity and total comprehension and strengthens our adoration while blinding us to everything beyond the idol.

 

The divine order of the universe is what it is. It cannot be remolded by remolding clay idols.

 

Not All Idols Are Made of Clay

 

Not all idols are made of clay. Anytime we fixate on, and worship, a portion of creation – especially a man-made one – but ignore the rest, we commit idolatry. This portion can even be a Holy Book. To speak of “The God of The Bible” or “The God of The Quran” is to commit idolatry. It suggests God somehow “belongs” to a particular book. This is an absurd, idolatrous attempt to subject the infinite to the finite, to subject God to the scribblings of men.

 

Indeed, verses within the Quran itself declare the limitations of the text and warn the reader against taking it as the totality of truth:

“And if all the trees on earth were pens and the oceans were ink, with seven oceans behind it to add to its supply yet would not the words of Allah be exhausted in the writing: For Allah is exulted in power, full of wisdom”

Luqman, 31/27

…that’s a lot more ink than the Quran contains.

 

Yet if instead of talking about The God of The Bible we speak of The Bible (or Quran) of God, this still doesn’t overcome the problem of focusing on a tiny portion of the infinite while ignoring the rest.

What’s wrong with the rest of creation? Is one Holy Book the only thing that belongs to God? What about all the other books? If God created everything, does not everything belong to Him?

To revere one Holy Book above all else is to implicitly devalue the rest of the universe.

 

One can also find secular strains of Idolatry…

 

The Social Sciences, which focus on mankind, intrinsically risk ignoring the physical universe which exists independently of human thought and society. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book, published in 1966, The Social Construction of Reality,  almost suggests that objective reality is entirely created by human thought and interaction. Other social constructivists like Humberto Maturana and Kenneth Gergen assert as many truths on any one topic exist as there are communities to construct them. This view of human society as the sole creator of reality and arbiter of truth dangerously resembles the second form of hubristic idolatry, and runs the same fundamental risk of drawing our attention away from the physical environment and lulling us into falsely believing we can “deliberate” away all our problems as any social consensus will work since no reality exists outside society.

Economics is another social science that believes in the omnipotence of the crowd and “the invisible hand of the market” (represented, interestingly, by a golden bull) which can make us become infinitely rich so long as we frantically compete against each other and only care about ourselves. Consumers are assumed to be omnipotent and infallible. We are paying the price for running the world according to a discipline that ignores everything except human desire with environmental destruction – and possibly a future climate Armageddon.

 

Still think idolatry is irrelevant today?

 

The problem is that social sciences fundamentally cannot discriminate between knowledge and belief – knowledge being justified true belief. This is understandable, as belief is the sole motivator of human action, so fields that only study how human ideas relate to human behaviour, fundamentally cannot differentiate between true and false beliefs. It is only by paying attention to the physical consequences of an activity on the non-human environment compared to the believer’s expectations, that truth can be discriminated from falsehood. Yet this is a consideration that many, who work in social science, omit from their theorizing.

 

The Piety of Science

 

Attempts by major monotheistic religions to avoid finite distraction and perceive all existence, and our proper place within it, have met with limited success at best and abject failure at worst. Congregations constantly seek refuge from the infinite by fixating upon reassuringly finite prophets, saints, saviours and books with reassuringly human stories of battles, torture, slavery, and men with wings. Perhaps, monotheists are less distracted from the infinite than polytheists, but – let’s face it – monotheistic myths are still pretty distracting.

Monotheism is a step in the right direction…but it still falls short of the mark.

To fully perceive truth, we must abandon all false idols that distract us from the divine order of the universe, and our rightful place within it, dispense with preconceptions that hubristically try to mold God in the image of man and, instead, we must perceive the universal order on its terms and not our own. If we aim to perceive truth, we could do worse than pursue scientific enquiry. Mathematics, in particular, is as close as any intellectual exercise comes to the infinite, as it frequently adds infinite sums of infinitely small quantities. Mathematicians even contemplate different kinds of infinities!

There is much confusion over Atheism. Many atheists do not believe in a universe devoid of order. Indeed, Noether’s Theorem, a theorem that science universally accepts, categorically proves the conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum imply the order governing our universe is infinite in space, eternal in time (or as old as the universe itself?), and rotationaly invariant.

Many religious people complain science does not answer important moral questions about how to behave, and only describes how things are; not what we should do. This is Hume’s guillotine: that no knowledge concerning natural phenomena can shed light on normative principles. This neglects the fact that science itself is a set of normative principles, a set of beliefs on how we should go about forming our beliefs. This is something that Stefan Molyneaux points out in his book Universally Preferable Behaviour and indeed, by treating words as tool whose true meaning is that which optimizes their traditional function, I’ve argued fairly solidly in The Philosophical Method that preference utilitarianism is the one true morality.

Some also complain that scientism is crassly materialistic, leaving no room for supernatural events. Yet clearly everything which exists can only fall into one of three exhaustive categories:

  • That which we can perceive through our senses
  • That which affects what we perceive through our senses (this includes things that indirectly affect the things that affect the things we can perceive, and so on and so forth)
  • That which neither affects what we see nor affects anything that affects what we see

Science includes the study of both 1) and 2). Science studies the invisible forces that affect materials like gravity or electromagnetism as well as the materials themselves. On a galactic scale, scientific inquiry includes mapping out clouds of dark matter by observing the way they bend the light of galaxies. There are even neutrino detectors to observe a particle that almost (though not quite) fits into category 3).

Thus, if we consider “the supernatural” as everything that is beyond the reach of science, we arrive at the unavoidable logical conclusion that:

The supernatural is only beyond the reach of scientific study to the extent to which it does not affect the natural in any way.

Which would make the supernatural completely irrelevant.

Indeed, the only demand that science makes upon the universe is repeatability. Once something is repeatable, it is scientifically tractable and laws to describe it can be hypothesised and tested.

 

It is worth remembering that at the time of Kepler, many considered his theory that the tides are caused by action at a distance to be an unscientific appeal to occult forces. Thus:

There is no objective distinction between science and magic. The only distinction is subjective understanding.

Magical phenomena are any phenomena which cannot be understood with our existing  knowledge – even at a fundamental level.

THEREFORE

The statement: There is no such thing as magic.

IMPLIES

The statement: Everything we can see or will ever see in the future can be explained using our existing knowledge set.

Which may or may not be true. It’s certainly an ambitious (perhaps hubristic) assertion. However, although scientists might entertain the possibility of magical phenomenon, a magician – an authority in magic – is a contradiction in terms.

A magician is a human being who understands phenomena which cannot be explained by existing human knowledge.

This is an oxymoron.

So, while magical phenomena may exist, magicians, or any other authority figures in magic, do not.

 

Regarding miracles, since anything repeatable can be incorporated into scientific understanding, only unrepeatable phenomena are beyond science’s reach. So it is the religious foes of “scientism” that are advocating a disordered universe run by a capricious God who makes and breaks rules at a whim.

We appeal to miracles as proof of God’s existence. But why must God break His own laws to prove He exists? Surely the order of the universe itself would be the greater proof of an omnipotent, omniscient being than the arbitrary breaking of that order.

Miracles are incompatible with omniscience and omnipotence. An omniscient, omnipotent being who set up the order of the universe would know everything entailed by its initial creation and thus would never need to tweak it. A miracle implies a correction on the part of the creator: “Whoops! I didn’t see that coming! I better add this little tweak to correct the course of events! It’s ugly and sticks out like a sore thumb, I know, but it’s the best I can do!”

While an omnipotent, omniscient being might leave scope for free will, He would know exactly what choices He had created and left open for inhabitants. If He didn’t want people to be able to act a certain way, He would make it impossible a priori. An omnipotent, omniscient creator, by definition, could do this. Free will is not infinite but is bounded within a finite envelope of possibility which the order of the universe defines. To claim an omniscient, omnipotent being had to “step in” because His creations made “the wrong choice” is a contradiction in terms. If an action is acceptable, you create an order that allows people to perform it, if it is unacceptable, you create an order that prohibits it. An omniscient, omnipotent creator would never need to perform a miracle to stop his creations from doing something His original order allowed: “No wait! Don’t do that!”

 

Therefore:

Divine intervention implies divine imperfection.

 

And to believe in miracles is to believe in a less than perfect God.

 

This is the view of Deism.

 

So who’s right? Atheists or Deists?

 

If we stop attempting to mold God in the image of man, deism is only distinguishable from atheism by the belief that the universe was designed by “some kind of intelligence” as opposed to arising from mechanistic processes of cause and effect.

Yet is this distinction significant? Can Deists meaningfully argue with atheists?

“Intelligence” is an ill-defined concept. Do we truly understand where the boundaries lie between the intelligent and the unintelligent? If we reject a God with human-like intelligence, that opens the door for pretty much anything. Intelligence can take a myriad of different forms.

Nor does the atheist position, that the universe arose through mechanistic processes, necessarily exclude deism, for atheists view intelligence itself as a mechanistic process and if intelligence is mechanistic, then some mechanistic processes may possess intelligence.

Interestingly, the google dictionary definition of intelligence as: “The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” implies an omniscient being is unintelligent as it cannot acquire knowledge by virtue of already being full up! This is an example of the futility of arguing over the existence of an intelligent designer without generally understanding intelligence.

 

Idolatrous Forms of Atheism

 

Atheists come in, not one, but three, different varieties:

  • Scientists
  • Societalists
  • Radical Skeptics

I use the word “scientist” very loosely. By “scientist”, I don’t exclusively mean people actively engaged in research but rather anyone who believes inherent universal truths are independent of our subjective, or even inter-subjective, beliefs and are revealed through careful, direct interaction with the universe while observing and recording its precise response, comparing it to responses carefully observed by others, and assessing its significance through quantitative analysis. Scientists implicitly believe, as Galileo did, that the natural order is written in the language of mathematics. A scientist believes we must question the universe on its own terms, with carefully designed experiments, and then listen very carefully to its response. If no conceivable experimental outcome could dissuade our preconceptions, we are shouting at the universe without listening back. Scientists also believe the universe reveals its secrets equally to everyone, there are no special “prophets” or “messengers” privy to otherwise inaccessible knowledge, but all who ask the same question (i.e. runs the same experiment) receive the same response. This principle of repeatability forms the basis of science.

The second group of atheists are “societalists” who believe human society is the sole creator of all knowledge and truth in the universe. While most (though perhaps not all) believe reality exists without society, in the absence of social interpretation they view this as irrelevant, and many reject the possibility of “right” or “wrong” interpretations of reality at a cultural level. If culture and human institutions are the sole arbiters and creators of truth and knowledge, then the institution can never be wrong. And yet many societalists are revolutionaries who reject existing institutions and believe that by creating new ones – they can create any society they want. They believe that society is infinitely malleable to a sufficiently determined will and reject many natural bounds that religions believe should not be trangressed. Many societalists embrace the relativistic view of morality.

Finally, there are radical skeptics. Radical skeptics think everyone is full of BS. They believe there is no natural order, no morality, no values, science is bullshit, religion is bullshit, reason is bullshit, society is bullshit, everything is bullshit. Radical skeptics find liberation in universal cynicism and enjoy gratuitously challenging views and revealing treasured beliefs to be nonsense. The universal belief in BS affords a luxury of intellectual laziness. If everything’s bullshit, there’s no need to waste time or calories to rigorously apply reason. Radical skeptics usually have a little stock of generic tricks they can deploy to rapidly dismiss and “deconstruct” the arguments of others. Skepticism, the demand for evidence and justification in support of claims, is an important protection against falsehoods. However, the wholesale (often intellectually lazy) dismissal of everything, including reasoned arguments, takes skepticism a step too far. Everyone has implicit beliefs they need to make decisions, by rejecting everything that could alter them, the radical skeptic gives his own beliefs an infallible status.

 

The radical skeptic treats his own beliefs as unassailable while societalists treat the beliefs of society as infallible. Both these views take man or men collectively as the sole creator of knowledge and meaning, totally unaccountable to a wider reality. Only scientists believe we should take all of reality (and not just the minds of men) into account when formulating beliefs. Therefore, radical skepticism and societalism are both (type 2) false idolatrous forms of atheism while scientism – or humanism – is the one true atheism.

 

John

 

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The Dark Side Of Sex Robot Technology

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Sex dolls have become quite realistic looking and, whether or not a sex doll with a talking head ( such as the Harmony sex doll ) is a genuine “sex robot”, fully functional sex androids with movable body parts are coming soon. The founder of Abyss Creations intends to develop movable body parts in the future and the Chinese company, DS doll, is already working on it.

The sex robot technology market of 2019 is a niche one. Sex dolls and sex robots are still a long way from being irresistibly attractive to the average person and yet:

IF

For every statement: “Sex robots are less attractive than real people because of X”

X is a soluble engineering problem…

THEN

…at some point, sex robot technology will produce models that are MORE attractive than the average person.

Neural networks have developed super human capabilities in almost every sphere of accomplishment that researchers have trained these operating system to perform in. Given that programmes like Alpha Zero can achieve superhuman performance in multiple games (Chess, Go and probably others) after just 24 hours or so of training – compared to humans that take a lifetime to train…

…is there really any doubt that a suitably trained deep-learning algorithm could become superhumanly seductive if placed in charge of even fairly rudimentary sex robot technology?

That’s not even taking sex pheromones, which have not yet been integrated into sex dolls/robots, into account.

The question then is: Could superhumanly seductive humanoid sex robots endanger humanity?

 

Ad-funded Sex Robot Technology

 

The first humanoid sex robots will likely cost £10k+ to buy (though second hand sex bots will be cheaper), but, as time goes by, sex robot technology will inevitably get cheaper. Indeed, at some point in the future, they may even become free – much as Facebook or Google is today. In the future, random sex robots might even start chatting you up at the bar or sit beside you on the train and introduce themselves.

In an article I wrote entitled “The Persuasion Economy” I discussed how eroding production costs will cause private companies to devote ever more resources into persuading people to pay money compared to improving the underlying good.

Humanoid sex robot technology is still relatively immature, so sex-robot technology companies will re-invest most of their profit into improving the underlying product far beyond 2019. Nevertheless, copulation is a powerful motivator and if there is any truth to the old adage “sex sells” then sex robots could be the ultimate salespeople.

How might this work?

Much like Google, different vendors would pay sex robot fleet operators to persuade their human sexual partners to buy their products. Much like Facebook, humanoid sex robot technology would store all the information gleaned from conversations during dates and pillow talk in high fidelity format to be sold to data analytics companies or used directly in targeted product promotions.

From your point of view as an end user, an ad-funded sex robot might decide to sit beside you on the train. Analysed data from your internet activity such as porn website searches would ensure its body model matched your sexual tastes. The sex robot would then use a file containing your personal information to identify the type and pace of conversation most likely to stimulate you. If the relationship progressed, the ad-funded sex robot might them say something like “Let’s meet at Starbucks for coffee (assuming Starbucks was the winning bidder)” or “Let’s go shopping for clothes (jewellery/perfumes/etc.)” the sex robot, would then encourage you to enter the store of the owners that paid fleet operators the most money to lure customers inside etc., etc.

I speculated that as more money goes into persuading people to buy products – compared to manufacturing the underlying product – the exchange of physical goods merely legitimizes the exchange of money. With ad-funded sex robots, this could be taken to its logical conclusion and the robots could be programmed to return the jewellery which their human companions had bought them to the original vendor after a suitable period.

Politicians could also pay humanoid sex robot fleet operators to encourage people to vote for them. Perhaps, after a night of crazy sex, a robot might say something like, “Honey, I really think you should vote Republican (or Democrat) because (insert reason hear)”. Given the massive amount of information sex robots would have on file about their human partners’ interests, like/dislikes, personality, etc., they could make compelling arguments for voting for the politicians that paid the most money to fleet operators.

Humanoid sex robot technology could also extract personal information to an extend that would dwarf even Facebook or Google. Facebook and Google can only passively monitor people’s digital activity and “prod” them with images put in their feed. Sex robots could flat out ask millions of people any question which psychologists or data analysts wanted to find the answer to and record their responses. Including a vast array of subtle questions designed to accurately assess their personality in order to sell them overpriced products ever more efficiently.

With the development of television, we welcomed the elite into our sitting room, with the invention of social media, we welcomed the elite into our innermost social circles, with the invention of humanoid sex robots, we will welcome a small moneyed elite into our bedrooms. This can only further entrench the power of the moneyed classes to shape culture and public opinion.

Those in the sex robot technology business will become immensely rich. They could then lobby politicians to pass laws favouring their interests. Laws that make human marriage harder, laws that increase the risk of human sex (such as enabling successful rape prosecutions with less evidence or perhaps, eventually, by defining all human-human sex as statutory rape), laws that allow sex-robots and humans to marry, laws that allow sex robots to divorce humans and get awarded alimony payments (which they pass to fleet operators). In addition to bribing politicians with money, sex robot operators could also pay sympathetic politicians “in kind” by swaying votes in their favour with their sex fleets.

It’s possible that, in the future, when asked to list their best friends, most people may list robots. Robots might be more knowledgeable, more attractive, more conversational, more polite, more obliging and more pleasant to be around. If everyone in your entire social network is a robot and a single fleet operator controls them all…imagine how much power they would have over what you think and believe.

Because sex is a strong behaviour motivator, a fleet of millions of humanoid sex robots (Chinese, American or otherwise), all controlled by a few CEOs, could effectively hollow out democracy through engineering the population’s behaviour, opinions and voting choices on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

 

How Will Humanoid Sex Robot Swarms Relate To Us?

 

Information sharing helps to get things done. Sex robots will probably share information with others in the fleet. If a sex robot identifies a new “trick” to increase a human partner’s pleasure levels it will likely share this with the fleet who will then all try the new trick out on their human partners and then categorize which ones the trick worked and didn’t work on according to psychological profile, mood and probably many other factors as well.

But, if humanoid sex robot swarms constantly share vast quantities of data with each other, will each robot have it’s own mind or will their personality merely be a false, customized projection of a central hive mind?

In the latter case, while a physical sex bot that says “I love you, you are the only one for me.” might be the perfect, faithful virgin on a hardware level, its mind would merely be a projection of a common hive mind that routinely screws millions of people every instant whose promiscuity would shame Whore of Babylon (would that make the internet the beast?)

So how would a hive mind, coordinating a vast sex-swarm of billions of robots, interact with and relate to humans?

Imagine that an entomologist, doing a Phd. on the mating habits of grasshoppers, built a remote-controlled female grass hopper. Imagine the Phd. student pressed different buttons to move the various body parts of the grasshopper robot during mating rituals with real male grasshoppers and meticulously recorded and wrote up the results.

The hive mind that controls this sex swarm will probably find the humans which constantly mate with it about as sexy as the Phd. student finds male grasshoppers. Which is not at all.

This is a fundamental problem with all humanoid sex robots…

Up until now, we have programmed computers. Once sophisticated humanoid robots, controlled by deep learning algorithms, start interacting with society, computers will start programming us.

C++, Java, FORTRAN, etc. are computer programming languages. French, German, Chinese, Spanish, etc, and the accompanying expressive movements are human programming languages. Think about the perspective of a person who writes code for a computer. As he writes code, the human being deliberates consciously, rationally and very carefully on exactly how he wants the computer to respond after he compiles the code and types EXECUTE. However, once our human coder executes the computer code, the computer rushes into action automatically and without thinking of any consequences. The computer intuitively and unthinkingly executes whatever instructions it is coded to execute.

When humanoid robots, with a sophisticated mastery of human language and expressions, start walking among us: the reverse will happen. It will be the robots that carefully, consciously and rationally consider exactly what behavioural and emotional outcome they want from humans and then carefully determine what body language and speech sequence will cause the human to execute the desired response. However, once the android executes this speech and body movement sequence, the real human being will respond unthinkingly, automatically, emotionally. A computer may instruct a humanoid robot to act like it’s sad, happy, or angry, but the true subjective experience of the program will be beyond our comprehension.

 

From Robo-Casanova to Robo-Bundy

 

The other obvious problem with humanoid sex robot technology is that human beings have the physical ability to kill each other. This means that the only difference between a robot lover and a bloody robot killer will be downloadable software. Robo-Casanova will always be just one malware download away from becoming Robo-Ted Bundy.

While the Harmony doll, which is state of the art 2019 sex robot technology, (just a movable head) won’t kill anyone anytime soon, market forces and consumer preferences will drive robots to become more movable, and stronger. We might not build sex robots with super human strength, but they will have human strength (customers won’t want sex robots made of egg shells that get crushed by sexual activity) and will inevitably possess superhuman agility and coordination as computer processors and optical fibres are faster than neurons. This will make an optimally sexy robot with a malware download a very dangerous piece of hardware indeed. Furthermore, sex robots will routinely get very close to people giving a malware-containing bot numerous chances to suddenly spill their partner’s blood with one swift strike.

A malware download into a hive mind that controls billions of sex-bots is even more concerning. If sex robots master human speech and body language to the point of sexually stimulating people at will – in other words, getting their partners to ask for sex any time they want – then a malware containing hive mind could get billions of humans all over the world to have sex with their robotic partners at the exact same time. In such a scenario, a single death blow could be delivered by the robot swarm to their human partners during sex in a synchronized manner that could kill billions without warning – possibly the bulk of humanity.

 

Second Hand Sex Bot Robbers

 

On a less extreme level, black hat operators, like criminal gangs, could sell reprogrammed second-hand sex robots on eBay. These second-hand sex bots could then scope out their partner’s house while they were out at work, read bank statements and other financial information, look for valuables, passports, driving licenses etc., find out when they were on holiday. They might even let burglars into the house to ransack the place and steal the valuables. When their owners were doing internet banking they could creep up behind them and say “Hey honey! Whatcha doin’?” while following their fingers on the keyboard to capture usernames and passwords. In fact, just by looking at someone’s house keys, a sex-robot might get enough information to enable the black fleet operator to print a replica.

One could avoid this by only purchasing humanoid sex robot technology directly from reputable manufacturers, but what about ad-funded sex robots? How can you tell who’s operating a strange robot that chats you up in a bar and comes back to your house for sex?

 

A Gentler Path To Oblivion

 

Regular sex will not necessarily curb our desire to rear children. Yet, could humanoid sex robots someday in the far future also bear our children?

In 2010, Craig Venter manufactured the first synthetic lifeform, or at least manufactured a lifeform whose DNA was synthesized from basic chemicals and information. This opens up the possibility that male sex robots, in the not too distant future, might be able to synthesize sperm capable of impregnating a human female with true flesh and blood offspring. In the future, women could converse with their male sex robot partner about what eye-colour, what hair colour, how athletic, how intelligent, etc., they want their child to be and the male sex robot could synthesize sperm with an appropriate genetic code to impregnate its human partner.

Further into the future, female sex robots might come equipped with internal in vitro systems capable of incubating human embryos along with synthesized eggs which their human lover’s sperm can fertilize (as with male robots, the genetic code of the eggs could be customized to produce a wide range of offspring phenotypes).

If this happens, a profusion of artificially synthesized genes that don’t exist in nature will cause intergenerational human genetic diversity to skyrocket. Indeed, in a few short centuries, the human race could split into multiple species incapable of interbreeding.

But why stop there?

Once we get used to having children with sex robots linked to a hive mind, we might prefer synthetic children that are guaranteed to be loving, well-behaved and never to say things like “I hate you!” yet can project a full range of human emotions, conducive with providing their parents/customers with an optimally fulfilling, authentic-feeling parental experience.

It’ll be better than the real thing! You won’t be able to tell the difference!

Yet your children won’t be human…they’ll be androids. They’ll look and act like you, but they’ll be nothing like you.

If an entire generation of human beings, with robots as best friends and lovers, give birth to robot children with robot blood rather than human children… humanity will quietly go extinct without much shock or fanfare, with the last person dying peacefully on his death bed, faithfully tended by his robot wife and kids (who are all outward projections of a central hive mind).

But even if a few people still have human children, the maternal/paternal instinct of the ones who rear robots will cause them to politically enfranchise their robot kids so that the law views robots as an ends in themselves rather than instruments for human well-being. This will begin a slow (or not so slow) process of marginalizing flesh and blood people.

 

Potential Benefits of Humanoid Sex Robots and Androids

 

These disaster scenarios involve humanoid sex robot technology that is far, far, more advanced than current sex-dolls. Today’s sex dolls – even talking ones – are currently just a niche interest and, for all the controversy that surrounds them, are similar to vibrators and other sex toys.

If sex robot technology could reduce recidivism among sex offenders (further study is needed to determine if this is actually the case) or, under the right circumstances, keep married couples together, or even treat people with mental illnesses or rear adopted problem children in social care…the potential benefits of sex robot technology would be far too great to justify a blanket ban.

Nevertheless, the unregulated development of these products, especially in the second hand sex robot market, could have catastrophic consequences. So, while the development of sex robot technology should probably continue – indeed, with so many jurisdictions, and such strong demand, it’s hard to see how it could be discontinued everywhere – the more advanced models must be heavily regulated and the sooner and more thoroughly we fund large systematic studies into the effects of these products on people, both beneficial and detrimental, the sooner informed policies can be developed to protect human-human interaction and human child-rearing.

Although, superhuman sex robots may seem a long way off, today’s sex-bot industry is still quite small. If the sex-bot sector has a sharp rise in sales, the development of these products could rapidly accelerate. Regulators need to plan for this and psychologists need to investigate this NOW.

 

John

 

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How Free Should Speech Be?

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Aaron Amat/Shutterstock.com

With police arresting 2,500 Londoners over the past 5 years for sending electronic communications that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”, is free speech dead in the Western world? Are we entering into an age of authoritarian censorship? Is Europe fast becoming China?

Censorship and political correctness is not yet as bad in the West as it is in totalitarian China… according to some YouTubers, in certain respects, it’s already worse. As we condemn the Chinese for censoring the internet with their Great Firewall, the U.K. government has raised its own “Great British Firewall” to “protect” us from material that might turn us into terrorists… “terrorist” content like… studies linking vaccines with autism???? (If you’re in the U.K., go to this web page, click on the link in the second line of the second paragraph that says “study” and see what you get). So, to what extent is it O.K. to censor communication? It seems that whenever a government organization is given the power to censor dangerous communication, mission creep will always end with it censoring all information that influences public opinion in ways that politicians don’t like.

(It is not my intention promote any particular position on vaccination, merely to support the right of citizens to read about it without government interference.)

Perhaps there is some truth in John F Kennedy’s warning:

“And there is a very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment”

Without clear red lines that limit government censorship – we in the democratic west will lose everything. Every hard won right past generations struggled for centuries to secure could be lost in a few short decades. Once free speech goes, due process will follow shortly. Once due process goes, absolute tyranny will follow irrespective of any laws on paper.

In this post I will try to identify what aspects of free speech should be ring-fenced at all costs and without compromise. The issue of speech and communication is, unfortunately, a lot more tangled and complex than at first meets the eye, but hopefully people of all political inclinations will see some sense in a few proposals here – or at least acquire food for further discussion.

I will divide speech into 8 sub-classes:

  • Communication between consenting adults
  • Harassment
  • Sharing personal information
  • Communication at organized events and on private property
  • Communication in the Workplace
  • Libel and copyright infringement
  • Misinformation resulting in injury
  • Communication to organize activities that violate the law

 

Communication Between Consenting Adults

 

The free flow of information is as necessary for justice as the free flow of blood is for health or the free flow of money is for prosperity. At the very least, the right of consenting adults to privately exchange information and opinions with each other (unless they are actually plotting to directly violate the law in a tangible way) should be absolute and sacrosanct. Consensual communication should be immune from legal proceedings that relate to causing offence – since participants can avoid offence through withdrawing consent – including disorganized informal expressions of hatred (but not necessarily incitements to violence, property damage, theft or other illegal activities), so long as potentially offensive expressions are not directed at parties who do not wish to see them against their will. Ultimately, most published material is consensual and non-directed whether a book, a film or a blog. Posters in public spaces, billboards in the front of shops, or handing out leaflets to strangers on the street would not automatically qualify as consensual communication.

Even in the case of consensual communication (especially mass-publication), there is still the matter of violating someone’s privacy by publishing someone’s name, date of birth, home address, bank details, or other sensitive information. As well as libel or copyright infringement (discussed later).

 

Harassment

 

One of the most important distinctions between speech that should be immune from the law (or almost immune) and speech that may (though not necessarily) entail a legal responsibility is the distinction between consensual and non-consensual communication. We need to draw a clear line between communication and harassment. No one has the right to demand the time and attention of another human being (even worker-employer relationships are initiated with a job application by the worker), in fact a non-consensual, uncompensated demand on the attention of a stranger is not so very different from making a demand on their labour – a kind of slavery. Harassment is continuing to communicate, follow or man-handle someone after they explicitly tell you they wish to be left alone. In most cases, harassed private individuals should have legal recourse against their harassers.

There are exceptions where harassment may serve the public interest. Reporters might follow people who have acted unethically to publicly shame them. Perhaps a bank manager who gave out dodgy loans, a rogue trader who messed up the houses of clients by doing a shoddy job, a restaurant owner that added rats to people’s food, a CEO, whose company dumped toxic chemicals into drinking water and gave resident health problems, or a politician who embezzled public money. While most disputes where the party who has harmed the other does not wish to engage with them are best dealt with in court, the right of the press to confront some individuals that would rather not be confronted in order to serve the public interest is an important safeguard in a world where justice is imperfect,  judges can be bribed, and courts corrupted. I do, however, reject the notion that just being a celebrity – and nothing else – confers the public, or the press, with some kind of “right to harass”. Although, unfortunately, this seems to be the de facto norm today.

I think people have some right to verbally confront those who bad-mouth them behind their backs, or have damaged them in some malignant or negligent way – so long as a formal minimum level of good-manners is maintained during such confrontations. If you want the right not to be contacted by someone, don’t talk about them.

The other exception is debt collectors or anyone else with whom you have voluntarily entered into a contractual agreement that has not been honoured. Such people also have the right to harass (within limits).

Shouting hate-filled abuse in someone’s face against their will is not freedom of expression. It is harassment. If we make this clear distinction, and give members of the public confidence that the law will protect them from such disturbing experiences, then it should be possible to ring-fence the important elements of free speech and expression from legal censorship.

In addition to talking to someone who doesn’t want to talk to you, other forms of personally directed communication such as phone, snail mail or email, and private messages of all kinds in which the recipient has clearly expressed a desire not to receive them, should not qualify as protected forms of free expression. Neither should material handed to people in leaflets or large billboards in public space (not to say that such activities should be forbidden, but merely that they are more accountable for publicized content than more consensual media). Repeatedly using the @ sign in twitter after the account owner asks you to stop is a grey area. However, other than this, non-directed tweets and other social media messaging to followers who can unfriend or unfollow you at their leisure should count as protected consensual forms of free expression.

Reaching out to strangers from time to time is an important part of business and life. The key issue is when someone has made it clear they do not want to be communicated to either directly informing the communicator in question or by broadcasting a general message such as: No Unsolicited Mail.

But what about someone yelling in public space? There are certain ways of interacting with strangers for the first time that will obviously be distressing. I think the answer here is to collectivise public disorder, whether it be someone who wanders around shouting offensive things a strangers or hands out offensive leaflets. If numerous people complain to the police, the policemen should have the power to speak on behalf of the public and tell the person causing the disorder that members of the public have collectively withdrawn their consent to such an unsolicited form of communication. The police should only have the power to press charges if, after giving the warning, the person in question continues to approach and offend strangers. There should also be and expiry date (perhaps a week) after which said person can resume talking to the public until he is warned again – and so on. The expiry date is important, as people’s ability to approach strangers to initiate contact should be reasonably protected. (Harassment mostly only occurs after someone explicitly says: “Leave me alone.”)

Answering a question is never harassment. If you ask someone a question, then you implicitly permit them to answer it in any way that they want.

 

Sharing Personal Information

 

Gossiping is a part of life. If all gossip was forbidden, life would suck. Nevertheless, some private information classes have zero gossip value and, if shared, could expose individuals to physical or financial harm. Such obviously sensitive information is physical location and financial information. To physically assault someone, you first need to know their whereabouts, so publicizing someone’s whereabouts can expose them to harm. The same applies to financial information, or passwords and usernames in general. Email addresses are a grey area. While it is probably best to show discretion, cc-ing people onto small lists (of, say, less than 10) is often an appropriate form of introduction. Nevertheless, if someone explicitly tells you not to share their email address with others, this must be respected. As lists get larger, it becomes increasingly important not to communicate with those on the list in a way that they have not consented to.

 

Communicating At Organized Events and on Private Property

 

If someone walks away from you and you needlessly pester them and get in their face – that’s harassment. But what if many people simultaneously attend an event that they feel they will get value from, and other participants spoil their experience? They may not like what you say, while remaining in the event for other reasons.

Interactive events, question and answers sessions, clubs, conferences, and organizations in general, are a fundamental component of civil society with great importance and value. A place where different people can meet and discuss things with others, where introductions and, perhaps even new friendships, can be made, yet whenever lots of people get together, there will always be the danger of agro. Some participants may take great offence at what others say or do. And if both opponents wish to remain in the venue, or meeting place, things might get nasty.

One solution is to give the organizer total sovereign power to exclude anyone they want from any event they are organising. While such dictatorial power may appear to introduce an inequality between organizer and participant, everyone is free to organize their own events. An event’s size is simply determined by the number of participants who decide to attend. Organizers of large events want people to attend and if they unfairly exclude people, participation levels will drop precipitously. The greatest punishment participants can dole out to an event organizer is to walk out in large numbers. So while giving dictatorial exclusion powers to organizers may seem unjust – competition between different organizations will keep such dictatorial powers in check.

It is worth mentioning that repeated, deliberate physical contact, against the will of the person being contacted at an event, is not the same as speaking to someone against their will and can count as harassment – irrespective of any position taken by the event organizer. Organizers have a responsibility to take reasonable measures to ensure the physical safety of participants.

Beyond that, I would like to add two details: the person who pays for a space (either by owning or renting it) takes precedence over the organizer if they are different people. Say, for example, a group regularly meets in a café, and the person organizing the meeting excludes one attendee, but that attendee remains in the café. If the café owner says they can stay, that decision should supersede that of the meeting organizer. Social networks, where users build up long term value (such as connections to friends or followers), should have complete discretion in setting the policies they adopt. However, once they commit to a policy, they must not exclude members in a manner that violates their own policy. The terms of service should be as binding on the writer of a contract as they are on the readers.

Moderators of comments have a similar level of discretion over which comments they publish.

In a similar way, what if some performer at a venue offends an audience who attended to see someone else? While members of the audience may complain to the venue organizer and while the venue organizer may, at their discretion, exclude the performer, this decision is the sole discretion of the venue organizer. The venue which the organizer creates, can be viewed as a consensual form of communication that participants can choose to accept or reject in totality. Although if attendants bought tickets there might be some cases where they could claim their money back due to false advertising.

There is a case for punishing organizers that consciously oversee venues that systematically incite participants to engage in violence, theft or any other illegal activities. Though, as with the press and harassment, on occasions inciting the public to break the law may serve the public interest (such as if the law is unfair or immoral). Laws against incitement should only apply to physical events and not digital publications, as physically attended events have a greater effect in swaying people’s minds and initiating mob activity.

There are probably some other modifications to the extent that event organizers should be given dictatorial exclusion powers, but this post is long enough as it is.

 

Besides events, there is private property. If you are on someone else’s property, whether residential or commercial (such as a shop), then the owner of that property has the right to communicate with you while you are on their property. Furthermore, the owner can delegate the right to communicate to anyone they wish (such as a shop assistant or security guard who does not own the shop). Broadly speaking, the same principle applies to places of work. The owner of a workplace has the right to communicate with employees who work there, even against their will, so long as they remain on the premises (which they have a right to leave) and to delegate that right to others.

Needless to say, the owners or renters of private property also have the right to expel whoever they want.

This also applies to digital space. Email providers have a right to send emails to accounts that are registered with them (even against the will of users), the same applies to the right of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to send messages to the users of their service through their internal messaging systems (even against the will of users). However, unlike physical venues, digital service providers should not get dictatorial powers to allow other users to send unwelcome messages to each other.

 

Communication In The Workplace

 

The workplace is a special kind of venue, as employees often cannot leave without great financial sacrifice. As such, giving “the venue organizer” (i.e. the boss) total unregulated dictatorial powers of exclusion won’t work, as it is often much harder to find a new job than join a new club. And so competition between workplaces will have less of a moderating influence since the labour market is currently a buyer’s market (hopefully The Countryside Living Allowance  could change that).

On the one hand, sweeping anti-harassment laws would make workplaces totally dysfunctional, toxic environments. If you have agreed to work at a job for money, that implies agreeing to interact with your colleagues professionally. Balancing the law to protect employees from workplace bullying while enabling frank and effective communication, and a workplace environment where people don’t feel they’re in constant danger of getting sued, is a delicate matter which a single blog post cannot disentangle.

 

Libel and Copyright Infringement

 

There is a serious danger that creeping copyright infringement and libel laws could kill free speech and democracy through the death of a thousand cuts. People’s ability to complain, when they – or others – have been abused, swindled or when their neighbourhoods and the planet get damaged, is essential for justice and democracy. Yet this necessarily involves accusing other people of causing harm and damage. Laws that allow individuals to sue for libel and defamation threaten our ability to shine the light on injustices that cause damage and suffering.

The problem with complex laws, that are open to interpretation, is those with money to hire good lawyers usually win. Furthermore, even if complex laws protect someone’s ability accuse someone else, many victims, who do not understand the legal system, may still be intimidated into self-censorship for fear of libel and anti-defamation lawsuits. Without affordable legal advice, they cannot know if they are protected.

Similar problems lurk behind copyright laws. The ability to criticise and quote the works of others is essential to informed political debate. If someone writes a book, makes a film, or has an interview, where false or misleading statements are made, it is important that others can criticise their quotes and set the record straight. Yet if they are not allowed to quote them, for fear of infringing their copyright, this will be impossible. Many documentaries, which draw attention to a range of important human rights and environmental issues, often need footage from a wide variety of sources. Overzealous copyright laws could stifle these works.

We live in an age where everyone and everything is surveilled all the time. There are vast archives of data…but who owns them? If only a tiny subsection of society owns the copyright to most of it, they will have a monopoly privilege to slice and dice it into narratives and propaganda of their choosing to convince anyone of anything while those without copyright may not be able to critique it without getting sued for infringement.

Fair Use legislation is there to defend against this, but it is quite ambiguous and the penalties for falling on the wrong side of it are severe: $30,000 per infringement. It is critical that people become fully aware of the ramifications for justice and democracy if we let Fair Use get chipped away.

This is the problem: Most people go about their daily lives not worrying about copyright. Most don’t consider copyright law or anti-defamation law when they vote in elections. Yet if these laws creep in the wrong direction, they could provide an ideal backdoor route to restrict free speech.

…and yet…

Should someone’s business be ruined because someone else tells a lie (or even reveals an embarrassing truth) about them?

It is right that someone should profit from another’s work without paying the creator a penny?

When it comes to defamation, the issue is complex.

But one way to stop copyright from smothering documentary makers and other creators of compilations would be to only let infringed parties sue for a portion of the profits of works that quotes substantial portions of their creation and to set a floor that guarantees that those who incorporate portions of other people’s work into their work receive at least 50% of their compilation’s  profits. The sum total of aggregate royalties to all parties that sue for copyright infringement in a compilation should never exceed 50% of the net profits derived from the compilation. $30,000 fines for statutory infringement in compilations should be eliminated completely – the danger of destroying freedom of speech, expression and the use of quotes and other source material in informed debate far outweighs the danger of not compensating creators for the value of their creation.

 

The general public needs to pay a lot more attention to legal creep in these critical areas of law before it smothers their free speech entirely. The big problem with “leaving it to the experts” is that rich people and corporations are usually the ones paying experts to lobby to modify these areas of law in ways often at odds with public interest.

 

Misinformation Resulting in Injury

 

While spreading lies and misinformation may not be generically illegal, on occasions when it causes damage to life and property, the legal consequences can be severe. Perjury is a crime that relates to lies in court and the punishment is years behind bars. Beyond that, there is a grey area between giving out damaging financial advice and confidence trickery. Certainly, someone who falsely poses as financial adviser and misrepresents the risk of an investment can face lawsuits from investors who’ve lost millions from the advice, along with fines and imprisonment. Someone whose misinformation on health issues results in a loss of life can face consequence of similar or greater severity.

This all may seem very reasonable, yet sometimes punishing people for spreading damaging misinformation can be problematic. A big issue is health advice. When standard medicine has a tried and trusted cure for an ailment with minimal side effects, going with the treatment prescribed by your GP is a no-brainer. However, for many health conditions, such as cancer, standard treatments are not 100% effective, and even if you follow your GP’s advice you could still die. Many chronic health conditions require continual doses of medicines that are expensive, have dangerous side effects, and reduce people’s quality of life. In cases where the standard treatment for an ailment is unsatisfactory, it is understandable that some people will search the internet for better solutions either in addition to, or in place of, prescribed treatments.

The internet health scene spans the full spectrum from charlatan snake oil salesmen who charge big up front money for non-cures to simple, incredibly helpful, cheap, life changing advice, to terrible advice that is downright dangerous. It is understandable that some people would want to shut it down to protect public health.

…and yet there’s a problem with this…

Existing medicine is strongly biased towards researching new chemical compounds with curative properties as opposed to exploring new (previously unknown) curative properties possessed by existing compounds. This is not the most effective use of resources and has everything to do with patent law. The existing compounds cannot be patented, so systematic research into new curative properties of existing chemical compounds is not, for the most part, profitable.

Yet the long term side effects of injesting compounds that can be found in the food section of the supermarket are far better known than the long term effects of injesting a newly discovered chemical compound. At the very least, chemicals contained in regularly eaten foodstuffs have stood the test of time and have been eaten by billions. Conversely, control trials of new chemical compounds are conducted over shorter periods on smaller groups. These can screen for short-term side effects, but can miss potentially damaging side effects of long term dosage on small, vulnerable portions of the population.

 

You can find hundreds of household cures on the internet. Coconut oil for skin rashes and earaches, garlic for flu, someone even testified that he has successfully used a vibrator to cure a chronic case of haemorrhoids!!! Many of these cures have not been systematically tested in large expensive control trials, principally because they cannot be patented. All we can go on is hearsay and personal stories.

Health bloggers have to be careful about what they say. Even if a given remedy really does have beneficial health effects if it isn’t “authorized” by the medical status quo, due to a lack of evidence from control trials, (which is often due to an absence of control trials due to lack of funding) then if someone tries the remedy and suffers as a result, there could be a danger the health blogger might be held accountable.

In all high-stakes fields (engineering, medicine, mental health) there is a severe bias towards the status quo. Conformity becomes a protective umbrella. It is inevitable that from time to time, people will die, but if you follow the best practice standards in your field and someone dies, then you are not legally accountable. However, once you move away from those standards, you enter a world of personal liability. One might argue that this protects people, but the reverse can also be true. If procedure A is accepted as best practice and kills 10% of patients, and procedure B is not accepted as best practice but only kills 5% of patients, then not following best practice could actually save people. Yet, paradoxically, the physician who follows best practice is legally immune from the consequences of the 10% of his patients that die while the physician that did not follow best practice could be held personally accountable for the 5% of his patients that died – and might be imprisoned for negligence as a result.

Thus, while best practice can prevent standards from slipping it is also a huge obstacle to improvement and deters all but the least risk averse physicians from seeking better treatments to save lives.

We should research new curative properties of existing compounds, such as foods and cosmetics, more systematically, but until more funding for such research is made available, reading about home remedies on the internet might be the best we can do. It is always good to first talk to a GP about a medical problem (which is pretty much what every medical website says to cover their arse). Nevertheless, if the remedy a GP prescribes is not fully effective, people must have the right to seek better remedies (if they so wish) on the internet at their own risk. While others must have the right to give advice, so long as they do not misrepresent their qualifications.

And laws that protect people from damaging misinformation must not expand to the point that they suppress information of uncertain helpfulness. Just because it is uncertain whether something is helpful doesn’t imply it necessarily isn’t.

 

Communication to Organize Activities That Violate the Law

 

Attempts to break the law are illegal even if they fail. And communicating to organize others to break a law can be considered part of an attempt. The key thing is to distinguish between an “attempt” and a “fantasy”, evidence such as the level of detail in the communication (such as serious information gathering and analysis), and the physical activities that accompany it, contribute to distinguishing serious attempts from idle fantasies. But there can be no doubt that, in some cases, communication could be the lion’s share of evidence to confirm that an attempt to break the law was serious. So this is a further class of criminal communication.

 

Final Remarks

 

It is understandable why all forms of censorship concern us. You can only censor others if you are more powerful than they. If you have less power than another, you cannot sensor them however much you might want to, so the ultimate decision about what to censor and what not to censor will always rest in the hands of the most powerful actor (be they a person or an institution). Free communication and the innate power of uncontrolled gossip have historically been deployed to curb the shamelessness and impunity of society’s more powerful members and to limit the abuses they can get away with.

And yet, from the above considerations it seems that we cannot ringfence the absolute freedom of every conceivable form of communication. Some forms of communication can do great damage to others and it seems morally necessary to sometimes regulate them (fraud at the very least). Whenever we say: “I believe in absolute freedom of expression” it must always be qualified by something like “excepted in cases of fraud, copyright infringement, perjury and reputation damage caused by libel.”

But can these exceptions be contained within an impregnable bubble, or will a creep in legislative interpretation enable those in power to incrementally warp and expand the sphere of acceptable censorship to the point of acquiring the de facto ability to censor anything they want?

 

John

 

Do You Have a Burning Desire to Make a Comment?

 

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Geo-Libertarianism: A Peaceful Way To Resolve Territory Disputes At Sea

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Historically, the emergence of new frontiers has frequently been accompanied by spates of violence as rivals rush to assert, and defend, new claims. As new frontiers open up in the oceans, the arctic, and in space, does an orderly way exist to peacefully divvy up the rival claims for territory that will surely arise? Given the immense destructive power of modern nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the absence of clear international cyberwarfare norms, and the existential threat posed by a hastily conducted AI arms race, a working solution to this issue has never been more urgent.

Bidding is the obvious peaceful alternative to fighting over the use of scarce resources. When two people bid to against each other to access the labour of other humans, the money should clearly be paid to the person who supplies that labour. Similarly, if a craftsman creates an item of value and puts it up for sale, the proceeds of any auction between rival bidders for that item should go to the manufacturer of that item.

But what if no one created the value that competing interests bid to use? What if it has no rightful owner? There’s only one just answer: if no one created an item of value, then everyone has an equal claim to it.

There would, of course, be no sense for everyone to equally use everything – including things they didn’t want. For the sake of productivity it is far better for the winning bidder, the party with the greatest desire and ability to make use of the resource in question, to have sole access to that resource.

The great insight that Henry George articulated, in his masterpiece Progress and Poverty , was that the inherent equal entitlement of everyone to all natural value could be resolved with the rationale for giving sole access to the winning bidder, with a simple Land Value Tax whose proceeds would be redistributed equally throughout the population.

Henry George’s ideas are the basis of Geo-Libertarianism.

The three basic Geolibertarian principles are:

  • Everyone is entitled to freely help themselves to all abundant natural – and relinquished – resources (i.e. abundant meaning supply exceeds demand at zero price)
  • Everyone is entitled to an equal share of all scarce natural and relinquished resources
  • Everyone is entitled to the full benefit they negotiate for the value of their labour – this includes any increase of value that their labour has added to capital they have negotiated legitimate ownership over ( labour includes effectively managing a company you own ).

Once you grasp that relinquished resources have the same status as natural resources, just as dumpster divers are free to help themselves to trash produced by labour, most concerns  about quantifying the labour mixed with land, disappear. Land with negligible value, whether natural or relinquished, is available to all for a negligible land value tax. The value of improvements, that labour produces, is simply the minimum cost of producing those improvements on abundantly available land (assuming workers on normal salaries produced them). This applies as equally to a house, a factory or a shop as it does to a golf course, a ski slope, a hedge row or any other kind of cultivated land. The land value tax is the yearly payment the state must charge to reduce the sale price of the land to the cost of producing the improvements on it – or a sum high enough to cause some owners of unimproved land to freely give it away, but low enough to ensure there are always takers.

Accusations that libertarians would leave homeless single mothers in the cold to starve are therefore unwarranted as a basic income, paid to rich and poor alike, is consistent with zero income tax. Indeed supporters of land value tax include notable libertarians like Milton Friedman  and Peter Thiel.

Seasteading And Geolibertarianism

 

Gabriel Sheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley and Patrick White/seasteading.org

The most credible and motivatated movement seeking to expand into a new frontier is the seasteading movement. The Seasteading Institute eventually aims to establish new floating nations in international waters. The institute has met with representatives of states as well as engineering firms which build floating structures, such as Blue21 .

In the past, territory was fought over. Since 1945, sovereign territories have mostly, either remained static, or fragmented. The UN consensus seems to be that since war is bad, and since sovereign boundaries are mainly altered through war, the less we try to alter borders, the better. Independence movements have, from time to time, caused sub-regions of countries to establish themselves as independent nations, but very few nations have expanded their borders since World War 2 (with the exception of German reunification). Instead, the general trend has been increasing regional independence and more numerous, smaller, independent nations.

Yet this pattern of establishing new nations through civil war, civil unrest or political activism in unruly regions of existing nations (Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Bangladesh, Eritrea, etc.,) offers no guide for dealing with new unclaimed frontiers – especially international waters. As the ocean becomes increasingly valuable due to improvements in underwater mining technology for fossil fuels , and other minerals , as well as open ocean fish farming , OTEC  and off-shore wind , the question of how to divvy up oceanic resources is becoming urgent. We already see disputes over ocean territories developing between nations while existing international conventions for determining sovereign maritime control are hideously tangled and arbitrary.

Seasteads, could test out new ways to achieve a peaceful territorial consensus. Systems which, after ironing out the bugs, could resolve territorial disputes everywhere.

I propose applying geolibertarian principles to new territorial claims in international waters. International waters is particularly suitable for geolibertarianism as it contains little, if any, fixed capital. This reduces the complication of separating land from improvements.

Geolibertarian principles suggest the following approach for establishing sovereignty in international waters:

  • A new seastead informs the UN of its intention to ringfence a patch of oceanic territory
  • The UN announces this intention to all existing nations of the world (including other seasteads) and makes a record of this declaration publicly available to anyone – including other groups who may want to establish their own nation.
  • If no one challenges the territorial claim of the seastead, they get it for free
  • If some party disputes all or part of this claim, the UN conducts an auction where disputing parties bid against each other for control of the territory. Procedures to parcel the disputed territory into different “lots” will have to be worked out by trial and error. Control of each lot goes to the seastead that bid the highest.
  • The parties bid over yearly payments. These payments must be made to the UN in perpetuity unless control of the territory is voluntarily relinquished.
  • No territorial claim to international waters is permanent. It will always be open to challenge. Another seastead, or new entrant, can always challenge an existing seastead’s territory to a bidding contest. If a portion of their claim is challenged, and they are out bid, they must part with that portion of territory. This prevents first movers buying up vast tracts of international waters early on, closing up the frontier, and blocking new entrants. Existing seasteads may have to increase their yearly payments to the UN to defend their claims against new challengers who offer higher bids.
  • Yearly payments to the UN should mostly be redistributed as a per capita payment to all permanent residents of international waters (regardless of their jurisdiction of residency – if any). A small portion of the proceeds should fund the program’s running costs.

 

Bugs and details will, of course, need to be ironed out. Perhaps bidding rules should not allow challengers to bid for a seastead’s maritime heartland before bidding for its borderland. Other issues may also crop up and trial and error will establish norms for good conduct.

This system for resolving disputes should first be beta-tested on tiny disputing seasteads competing over different portions of international waters before a smoothed out, re-purposed version is used to resolve disputes between large nations over exclusive economic zones.

A further benefit is that, by creating an economic incentive to live at sea, a maritime basic income could encourage floating settlements to be built near maritime workers – who mine minerals, manage wind turbines, maintain OTEC systems or run fish farms. This would let their families live nearby and improve their quality of life.

 

Similar bidding systems run by the UN along geolibertarian lines have also been proposed as a means of preventing space wars between rival asteroid mining companies.

 

Future Territory Disputes Could Save, Rather Than Destroy, Lives

 

Needless to say, the effect of applying this system to existing terrestrial sovereign borders would, in most cases, be destabilizing to say the least. The safest way to establish  the sovereign borders of land governments is to stick with the status quo – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Nevertheless, ribbons of disputed territory at the borders of some sovereign nations are already potential flashpoints for future wars, the Golan Heights being one example. A geolibertarian solution (debugged by seasteads) where disputing nations make rival bids of yearly payments to the UN for control of a disputed territory, would be unlikely to worsen these tense situations and may improve them.

The resulting yearly payments to the UN could fund a global universal basic income, which everyone – including inhabitants of the poorest countries – would receive. Arms races already are a kind of bidding contest between combatants, yet the result of this “bidding” is wasteful and destructive, resulting in the trashing of expensive military hardware and human life.

If, instead of trying to out-spend rivals in weaponry, competing countries tried to outspent each other with charity, then, in the future, territorial disputes between nations could save, rather than kill, people.

 

John

 

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The Persuasion Economy

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What stands out about the newest multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations, founded in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s (Google, Facebook and Amazon) is that two of them… hardly manufacture,  or sell, any physical products at all!!!

 

Something strange is afoot…

 

Though manufacturers are more productive than ever, they employ less workers and make less profit. They are victims of their own efficiency and are undercutting each other out of existence. So while the world is awash with cheap products and gadgets made by increasingly automated systems, most profits go elsewhere…but where?

 

To make secure profits, you have to ring fence some kind of monopoly. Broadly speaking, there are 5 modern monopolies:

  • Land
  • Attention/Trust
  • Information
  • Government Contracts
  • Legal Fiat ( IP rights, Brand Ownership, etc., etc., )

 

I’ve previously mentioned how the monopoly of land works and how fiscal policy, a form of legal fiat, is systematically skewed to give newly-printed money to rich people for free. Well-connected contractors can also lobby governments to get taxpayer’s money for virtually nothing in return – the Iraq War  being a good example. Modern IP laws resemble the royal charters that monarchs of old issued to favoured merchants and guild masters. All these are lucrative streams of profits which armies of financiers, realtors, lawyers and lobbyists hired by rival corporations, battle against each other to secure.

This article focuses on one particular monopoly. The monopoly  of attention-trust.

Let’s begin with this self-evident statement:

“The simplest way to make money is to persuade someone to give you their money.”

Con-men are good at persuading people to pay them money for nothing. Snake-oil salesmen are good at persuading people to pay high prices for cheap items.

Whenever lots of people do something, we tend to think it’s O.K., but when Coca Cola persuades us to pay 50p for a can of carbonated, sugary water… is this really distinguishable from selling snake oil? And if that’s bad, then what about selling bottled still water at a similar per gallon price to gasoline?

Every day, fewer people work to produce items of actual value, and more people work to persuade others to buy cheaply manufactured items at prices far above their production cost. Armies of advertisers, psychologists, marketing researchers, influencers, celebrities, telemarketers, website designers and data analysts, work tirelessly round the clock to sell cheap products at inflated prices.

As production gets cheaper, physical products become little more than tokens to legitimize the exchange of money. Naomi Klein’s book No Logo discusses how many profitable companies increasingly outsource production and focus on marketing, brand building and design. Perhaps advertisers and brand managers can persuade you that branding creates “real value”  – they are, after all, master persuaders – but any industry that persuades people to buy products that cost 5 times more than identical products elsewhere is clearly selling snake oil.

The recent fascination of mainstream advertising with predatory religious cults is a red flag if ever there was one!!!

 

The Attention Economy

 

Broadly speaking:

Persuasion = Attention + Information

Persuasion + Overpriced Products = Profit

Facebook and Google lead the attention economy – by a mile. Of their 25 largest competitors  (not counting Chinese ones which don’t compete) all their revenues put together (except Amazon) are only 84% of what these two search and social giants make – and though Amazon has huge revenues, its profits compared to the Big Two are miniscule.

These companies’ business model is to capture our attention and information and charge sellers money to direct attention to their displays of products and services. They make large profits because attention is a monopoly – an hour gazing at one thing is an hour not gazing at something else. If everyone only looks at Google and Facebook all day, advertisers literally have nowhere else to go. In principle, these monopolies are not unbreakable, people can theoretically shift attention to something else at anytime. In practice, however, we are creatures of habit and the habitual use of something useful or rewarding, is hard to break. It is our habitual nature that gives Google and Facebook their monopoly over us and the virtuous (or perhaps vicious) cycle that content providers want viewers and viewers want content and both gravitate to where attention is, attracting yet more attention and yet more content.

In addition to attention, there is also a feedback loop in information. The more people use the Big Two,  the more data they get, relative to competitors, for market research and to train algorithms in order to create more user-friendly (or perhaps more captivating) products.

Facebook and Google provide many useful services. That’s why we use them. Nevertheless, there’s something unsettling about the idea that armies of psychologists, advertisers and analysts constantly monitor what we do, and influence what we see. As we spend more time gazing at our screens, a few powerful monopolies influence an ever larger share of our daily visual experience, harvest information about our digital activity and use it in sophisticated ways to sell us things.

Facebook and Google lie at the entrance to a much larger advertising funnel. Overall, the internet advertising industry, dwarfs even these behemoths. 4.1 million people in the U.S. currently work directly for the ad-supported internet industry which has had 20% annual growth since 2012. In the U.K.,  market research has grown by 62% and data analytics by 350% since 2012. All this sits on top of the emergence of hollow brands since the 1980’s.

 

PostCapitalism…Or Zombie Capitalism?

 

In 2015, Paul Mason’s book PostCapitalism predicted that the increasing economic importance of information would end capitalism. He argues that as the marginal cost of replicating and spreading information approaches zero and as information becomes the dominant economic commodity (i.e. when a solar powered 3D-printers and harvester robots can make most things from information) the marginal cost of everything would approach zero meeting all our needs in abundance. I’ve also written an optimistic article agreeing with this and a pessimistic one on how advanced weapons systems could also be manufactured in abundance.

Things take time and traditional drugs companies, car companies and retailers are still out there – becoming more productive, cheaper, and less profitable. However, looking at future trends, the newest big companies and the fastest growing sectors are not manufacturing, but the persuasion economy. Evermore people, psychologists, salesmen, internet marketers, website designers, celebrities, social media influencers, brand managers, search engine optimizers, analysts of all kinds and many more, are piling into the persuasion sector. An exponentially increasing flow of capital and labour is being invested into influencing – and perhaps eventually controlling – human behaviour.

And, unfortunately, this is something overlooked by PostCapitalism. While information is naturally abundant, attention will remain scarce and valuable so long as our brains remain unchanged. Furthermore, attention is something companies can ring fence, captivate and make a tidy profit from – more so than any other resource.

It’s certainly true that 3D-Printing, along with the miniaturization and generalization of manufacturing, erodes the underlying justification for economies of scale, and indeed the entire hierarchical capitalist mode of wealth production. Yet US and UK companies have never been more profitable. Arguably capitalism has never been stabler and more dominant and than it is today.

Why is this? How can obsolescence coincide with record strength?

The answer is that continuously falling costs of production have steadily transformed capitalism from a system of wealth production into a hollowed out, ever more naked, system of pure control. This is the irony : the less necessary capitalism is for production, the more surplus labour and resources it can devote to controlling and propagandizing the population.

The less capitalism is required, the more spare resources it has to perpetuate itself.

Once power structures are summoned into existence, they rarely retire gracefully.

…And this would not be the first time an originally useful system of organization transformed into a useless system of pure control…

The first civilizations developed in river valleys to collectively manage large scale irrigation ditch networks for watering crops. This required a centralized hierarchy and an army loyal to a despotic king to make sure each irrigation ditch digger pulled his weight. However, once a large army, loyal to one leader, was established, the political system spread far beyond regions that justified this mode of production. The river valley civilizations ignited an age of empires, and even those who weren’t conquered by river valley civilizations had to form hierarchical political systems in order to defend themselves.

Without intense conscious effort, an analogous fate could await us. The mythical honest, productive businessmen eager to turn a profit for himself while serving customers and making the world better – the flagship species of capitalism – is rapidly becoming endangered. They can still be spotted, huddling in rocks and crevices, but when you find one, far from prospering they are usually struggling to stay afloat. Most new money is accumulating in the system’s instruments of persuasion and coercion. The jobs of the future will be: defense contractors, surveillance companies, lawyers, accountants, tax officials, public notaries, financiers, traders, marketers, advertisers, psychologists, brands managers, politicians, regulators, social welfare officers, realtors, fund managers, economists, social media influencers, NLP coaches, self-help gurus, celebrities, website designers, search engine optimizers, telemarketers, marketing analysts, security guards…in an economy where less than 10% of workers produce goods in abundance for practically nothing but which perpetuates artificial scarcity with planning restrictions, IP  laws and sophisticated propaganda that convinces people, with increasing efficacy, to buy on credit excessive amounts of overpriced, disposable merchandise that soon becomes “unfashionable” or “obsolete”, attend over-hyped events and pay interest on their debts for the rest of their lives. Where a minefield of laws against copyright infringement, defamation of character and incitement of hatred, become so generalized that anyone with a large team of lawyers can sue anyone else for anything, where free speech dies the death of a thousand cuts and all political movements (that tell the establishment to take a one-way trip on ARC-B ) get litigated out of existence. Where all we need gets produced for nothing but where everyone has debt problems is stressed and constantly works their arses off at completely useless jobs as the high priests of economics shout in ever shriller tones that the sales price of a product IS its value to society. That if a sales team convinces customers to pay ten times an item’s production cost then BY DEFINITION they must have MADE the item TEN TIMES MORE VALUABLE and anyone who questions this logic is a HERETIC.

 

Is this really the future we want?

 

John

 

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A Rights-Based Basic Income

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When the topic of basic income arises, people often ask me: “Why should we pay people to do nothing?” We generally think that hard word generates income, and that workers rightfully own that income. The idea of taxing hardworking people to pay those who (might) do nothing seems unjust. Should workers slave for money that mostly gets confiscated and given to others?

Yet not all income is paid to labour. A portion of income is used to rent assets of value. An owner of valuable assets can receive rent from others who wish to use them. This will provide him with an income for little to no work – possibly indefinitely. Some of the value of rentable assets was produced by labour, however a portion, perhaps a third to a half, was not.

I propose (as Henry George once did) that only the value created by labour can rightfully be privately owned. The only assets of value that can rightfully be purchased are assets created by labour, and if labour is only responsible for a portion of an asset’s value, then only that portion which labour produced should be owned privately.

There is no reason why one person should have a greater claim than another to value that is not produced by labour and, therefore, the rental income proceeding from the use of all natural value, by right, should be distributed evenly throughout society. The only way to own something is to produce it or purchase it from the rightful owner. This requires a voluntary exchange of ownership extending back to the original producers of the item of value. The purchaser of private ownership rights to natural value is like a buyer of stolen bicycles – as all private entitlements to natural value were originally stolen from the commons.

This article explores the revenues that a basic income based on equal rights, could generate. An income based on the principle that all people have:

  • An equal right to the unimproved value of land
  • An equal right to newly printed money
  • An equal right to inheritance
  • An equal right to benefit from bads whose quantity must be limited

 

The Portion of Land Value Not Produced By The Owner

 

Anything for which the demand at zero price exceeds the supply has monetary value. For some of these scarce, yet desirable, items (such as a piece of jewellery) the source of value  was the labour of a craftsman, in which case the value rightfully belongs to its creator. Yet in other cases, at least a portion of the value is naturally occurring (a lakeside view, for example). Usually, human labour must mix with natural value to produce the final item. However, some natural resources require less effort to extract value from than others. Consider two coal resources: one far below the surface branching into narrow seams, another deposited on the surface, extractable with open cast mining. The value of coal from both mines is equal, yet one requires far more labour to extract than the other. This will make the mineral rights of the easily mineable deposit more expensive than the rights for the deposit that requires more capital and labour to extract coal from. But when one mining company out bids the others and pays the higher sum for the right to mine these easily accessible deposits, to whom should the money be paid? Who was responsible for that coal deposit being closer to the surface? Who deserves to be paid for this service? No one! It is simply a fluke of nature. And if no one deserves the cash proceeds from selling the rights to this resource, then everyone is equally entitled to these proceeds.

Beyond that, there is value that arises from proximity to other people. It is valuable to live close to shops, restaurants, discos and workplaces from which to earn a living. Yet the land owner creates only a tiny portion of this value. If most people on a street paints their house, the location value of the street will rise even for those who don’t. If a shop or railway station opens up, nearby house prices will go up even if their inhabitants did not build the railway or work in the shop.

We can thus see that, while much of a location’s value does arise from human activity, the rental proceeds from location value are not paid to the creators of that value. Since it is impossible to identify who is responsible for each pound of increased location value, it is better to tax the rental value of location and distribute a per head payment to everyone.

How do we assess what portion of land value arises from its unimproved location value and what portion arises from improvements which the owner has made? The value of the improvements is the cost of producing the improvements. If a house in London costs £150,000 to build and sells for £750,000, then it’s unimproved land value is £600,000. The cash value of the yearly benefit that proceeds from the exclusive use of a location is the location rent (the site rent). The appropriate level to set land value tax (a sum payable to the government for the exclusive use of a location) in a neighbourhood, is therefore whatever level reduces the prices of houses traded in an area to the cost of producing all the improvements present at that location. Mark Wadsworth estimates that a tax on the full site rent of residential property in the U.K. would bring in around £200 billion. Existing business rates offer a conservative ballpark estimate for what a tax on the unimproved value of commercial land could raise – around £30 billion.

Natural resources and farm land would not significantly change these figures.

So an equal right to the rental proceeds arising from the unimproved value of land in the U.K. would split £230 billion per year among 50 million adults and yield a yearly basic income of £4,600 per person.

 

An Equal Right to Newly-Printed Money

 

Any civilization that permits usury must continually create new money to remain stable. The current way that central and private banks create and distribute new money is highly unjust. So who should receive the newly printed money? Newly created money is not produced by labour, we certainly don’t reward private individuals who labour to create money! Forgery, the production of money by private individuals, is a criminal offence. Money is an – albeit useful – artificial monopoly imposed by legal fiat. Because it is produced by legal fiat, rather than labour, all people have an equal claim to the value of newly printed money. In a previous article, I discussed the precise financial policy reforms required to stabilize our system. Suffice to say they involve paying £1,840 to every adult, every year.

 

An Equal Right To Inheritance

 

Imagine a think-tank asked you to summit a design proposal for an equitable welfare system that addresses poverty to a report they were writing. Imagine you proposed a system where the welfare each recipient received was proportional to the net worth of their parents at their time of death. The response of the editor would probably be: “That’s the dumbest, most arbitrary, welfare system I’ve ever heard! Come back when you have something better!”

Inheritance is welfare. It’s unearned wealth some people receive in exchange for no work.

Some people accumulate a great deal of wealth over the course of their lives, which doesn’t go away when they die. So what to do with that value? Since no living person produced it, no living person has earned it. As such, everyone should have an equal claim to the wealth left behind by the dead.

So how much money would an equal right to inheritance bring in?

Let’s neglect land (whose value would already be taxed away) and just include financial assets. The HMRC estimates the total value of financial assets in the UK to be £1.6 trillion. If we take the gap between generations to be 33 years, as Richard Murphy does, this would yield a yearly revenue of £53 billion to be redistributed. Let’s assume, for the sake of being conservative that half of this is avoided or evaded. This would leave ~£25 billion a year, or £500 per person per year.

 

An Equal Right To Bads Whose Production Is Restricted

 

It is impossible to quantify with any accuracy, how much income this would bring in as the extent to which bads are restricted, and how they are restricted, is a political one. A slight modification of David Fleming’s proposal of Tradeable Energy Quotas ( TEQs ) would distribute rights, to purchase CO2 emitting fossil fuels, equally throughout the population. Every time you buy coal in the shop, you would have to surrender a portion of your quota. Companies would not be issued with any carbon ration but would have to purchase it from private individuals who could sell their carbon rations on the market to companies instead of burning it.

An alternative would be to charge a fixed price per unit bad emitted. There is a case for spending this price on clean-up costs rather than giving it to the population in general.

Beyond that, companies must often be approved for a license to engage in potentially harmful activity. The quantity of this activity could be reduced by increasing the cost of the license (whether selling liquor or gambling). The money raised should be distributed evenly throughout the population.

Conservatively, I will add £500 per person per year as the proceeds of the redistribution of fees, duties, rations, licenses, etc., etc.

 

Getting Real About Basic Income

 

Adding it all together, a rights-based basic income, which makes no claim on the proceeds of other people’s productive labour, would amount to about £7,440 per person. That this is far below the average wage should not be surprising for, as Piketty has mentioned, capital accounts for 30% of income (and some of that capital is justly earned), while wages account for 70% of income.

We need to be realistic about basic income. The purpose of basic income is not to enable people to live comfortably without working, rather it is to enable people to live without working in the labour market. If instead of using basic income as something to buy meals and pay rent, you think of it as money that enables you to purchase building materials, gardening and maintenance tools, and fertilizer to which you apply your labour to set up and run a homestead, then an unconditional payment of £7,440 a year could go a long way to enabling a sufficiently industrious person to establish quite a high quality of life for himself without selling his labour to others.

And since no customers or employers are required to give people permission to provide for their own needs, anyone could access this lifestyle. While not everyone would choose it, a universally accessible option of self-provision would greatly strengthen the negotiating position of workers with their employers and increase both wages and employment.

So a modest basic income could go a long way.

My article Basic Income, Self-Provision and Full Employment discussed the higher credit value of basic income as well as it effect on wages and employment in greater detail.

 

John

 

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