A wonderful essay—I think it’s one of his finest—from our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, over at his Of Two Minds blog:

I am optimistic about the future because the status quo is doomed and better options abound.

One of the characteristics readers seem to like about oftwominds.com is that fundamentally I am an optimist about the future, even as I trace out the inevitability of the status quo’s devolution and implosion.

The two are inextricably bound in a yin-yang, electron/proton field: I am hopeful for the very reason that the status quo is doomed. Instead of being terrified of its devolution, I say “good riddance.” We all know it is unsustainable, rapacious and based on an interlocking net of lies; why should we mourn the passing of debt-serfdom and the dominance of interlocking webs of deceit, corruption and exploitation?

I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.

Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.

Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.

Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”

Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry.

This feedback loop has a consequence the Status Quo fails to understand: rather than toil ever longer to pay exploitative taxes, the productive can choose to opt out. As I have ceaselessly explained here, the Protected Fiefdoms of the Savior State simply cannot grasp that entrepreneurs and small business owners have a choice: they do not have to work long hours and endure hardships just to support the Savior State and its numerous Protected Fiefdoms. They can simply call it quits, close the doors and opt for a simpler lifestyle which generates no taxes and much less stress.

Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.

Maintaining or improving the infrastructure of the U.S. requires a mere slice of the GDP. Maintaining or improving sewage, water, rail/transport electrical and Internet systems requires very little money compared to the trillions squandered on Empire, bailing out various Financial/Power Elites and the 70% of the GDP squandered on “consumerist paradise.”

Were priorities to be re-ordered, a Third World GDP would be more than adequate to fund a functioning, efficient infrastructure. The money wasted on Empire and sickcare alone could rebuild the entire nation’s critical infrastructure.

No one is forcing us to be debt-serfs. That is a voluntary choice. Nobody has to work two jobs to pay the bloated mortgage on a house which is high in cost due to large-scale financial manipulations by the Savior State to benefit various financial Elites. Nobody has to agree to buy a bloated house and take on a bloated mortgage, or pay $3,000 per month for a crummy studio apartment in Manhattan to toil for a parasitic financial corporation.

Interestingly, much of the Counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s was founded on the understanding that a “Third World country” lifestyle was inherently more humane and worthy than the commuter-debt-serf model of Empire.

The Counterculture was voluntary and incremental. You could pick and choose which parts of it to join. You could be a “straight” and buy your food at the co-op. It existed in parallel with the status quo, which quickly co-opted whatever features gained widespread appeal. (“Natural” products appeared as if by magic on the shelves of supermarkets.)

Nobody has to change agribusiness dependence on growing corn and producing high-fructose corn syrup to inject in essentially every packaged and fast food; as the Savior State founders, its subsidies of agribusiness will decline, rendering growing corn for sugar unprofitable. Those pursuing that model of “farming” will either go bankrupt or they will pursue some other model of growing food that is not mandated by subsidies for Protected Fiefdoms.

When people become ill from self-destructive diets and lifestyles, and the Savior State no longer pays for sickcare treatments of these lifestyle ills, then they will choose other lifestyles. Choice isn’t capitalist or “free market;” it is human. We all have choices, and when the trade-offs and subsidies and incentives change, so will the choices.

When opting out of the work-harder-to-pay-more-taxes rat race becomes recognized not as “failure” but as freedom and blessed relief, then more people will opt out to do something else with their lives.

Read more of Why I am Optimistic at www.oftwominds.com

Notice the high number of capitalized terms and labels (Big Oil, The Remnant, Savior State, Protected Fiefdoms, Counterculture, Power Elite) used in the author’s essay. This use of such categorically tinged “code words” and undefined terms undermines the credibility of the argument.

I think ‘Big Oil’ is a generally accepted term.

I found the whole thing pretty inspiring. I have no love for killer commutes and debt serfdom.

I’m optimistic cause cynics don’t have a ‘realer’ perception of the world - they just have a cynical one. History as a whole seems to indicate liberty increases as time marches on. Dark ages noted. But hell, maybe even that served some greater purpose we are unaware of, of course now I’m just theorizing.

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I found the whole thing pretty inspiring. I have no love for killer commutes and debt serfdom.

Patrick H. Winston

I believe that we can discover the computational basis of natural intelligence during the next ten years or so.

Several sources of optimism contribute to this optimistic view, and support the collective view expressed by the authors of materials to be found in The Human Intelligence Enterprise.
The Paradigm shift

From the engineering perspective, Artificial Intelligence is a grand success. Programs with roots in Artificial Intelligence research perform feats of mathematical wizardry, act as genetic counselors, schedule gates at airports, and extract useful regularities from otherwise impenetrable piles of data.

From the scientific perspective, however, not so much has been accomplished, and the goal of understanding intelligence, from a computational point of view, remains elusive. Reasoning programs still exhibit little or no common sense. Today’s language programs translate simple sentences into database queries, but those language programs are derailed by idioms, metaphors, convoluted syntax, or ungrammatical expressions. Today’s vision programs recognize engineered objects, but those vision programs are easily derailed by faces, trees, and mountains.

Why so litte progress? Since the field of Artificial Intelligence was born in the 1960s, most of its practitioners have believed—or at least acted as if they have believed—that vision, language, and motor faculties are the I/O channels of human intelligence. They believe that if we are to account for intelligence, we have to understand the reasoning engine that stands behind those faculties. Some suggest that people interested in vision, language, and motor issues should attend their own conferences, lest the value of Artificial Intelligence conferences be diminished by irrelevant distractions. Some write textbooks that devote no space whatsoever to vision, language, and motor topics.

Of course, one could argue that 30 years is not much time for a science to develop. It might be that vision, language, and motor faculties indeed are just I/O channels, and another 30 years, or another 300 years, will be required to develop the theory needed to understand what lies behind them. It is hard to argue against such a more-time-needed view, because it is easy to fall into what Seymour Papert once called the unthinkability fallacy: you can’t do it that way because I cannot think how anyone could do it that way.

To me, there is an attractive alternative: I believe that our intelligence is in our I/O channels, not behind them, and if we are to understand intelligence, we must understand the contributions of vision, language, and motor faculties.
Evidence from watching the brain at work

Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography, researchers can determine which brain areas show increased energy consumption energy as you think various sorts of thoughts. If you throw a ball, your cerebellum lights up. If you watch the ball fly, your occipital lobe lights up. And if you hear the ball land, your temporal lobe lights up.

Nothing in those observations surprises. All are in accordance with classical theories of brain function. You hit perceptual apparatus with stimuli, and peripheral parts of your brain process information.

Remarkably, however, those same peripheral parts of your brain can light up without the benefit of perceptual stimulation. For example, if you close your eyes, and someone asks you to think about an alphabetic character, your occipital lobe lights up in a way reminiscent of what happens when you look at an alphabetic character. And if someone asks you to think of a verb that goes with the noun hammer, and you think of pound, several parts of your brain associated with language understanding light up, as well as the the right side of your cerebellum. What? Your cerebellum? That part of your brain that sits on top of your spinal cord is supposed to be for fine motor control. What is it doing lighting up during what might seem to be a task for the language faculty alone?

Such experiments force the conclusion that vision, language, and motor areas—once viewed as exclusively for processing external stimuli—are involved in just plain thinking.
Evidence from neuroanatomy

Of course, it is not really surprising that much of the peripheral brain lights up when you think. Neuroanatomists have found much evidence to the effect that for every bundle of nerve fibers projecting one way, there is a complementary set that projects the other way.

Of course, projections toward peripheral parts of the brain might be there only to control or tune the processing done by those peripheral parts. Such explanation does not easily account for the number of fibers projecting toward the peripheral parts of the brain. There are so many such fibers, you cannot avoid thinking that the peripheral brain is not only heavily used in perception, but also heavily reused in just plain thinking.
Inspiration from armchair psychology
Visual problem solving

Ask a small child to add 2 and 2; she will convert the problem into a visual finger-counting exercise. Ask an adult to name the 10th letter in the alphabet; he will hold up his hand and start counting, just as if he were a child adding. Ask a physics student to solve a problem; he will draw a diagram.

There is no doubt about it: vision makes it possible to solve problems that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. To be sure, visual problem solving is not the only kind, but it is hard to imagine how we can understand how the brain thinks unless we understand how it sees.
Linguistic problem solving

Danny Hillis once asked me if I ever had the experience of explaining an idea to someone, only to have the idea misunderstood into an idea that was actually better. Sure, I replied, it happens every time I try to explain something to Marvin Minsky.

Danny’s point, of course, was that the inner conversation many (all?) people have when they solve problems may play the same role as a conversation with someone else. Processing thoughts expressed as word sequences must excite important thinking mechanisms buried in our language-processing hardware. Thus, the thinking lies in the language-processing hardware, not behind it.
Inspiration from landmark papers

One way to explain a point of view is to cite a set of landmark papers that seminally point the way. Unfortunately, the position I take is relatively new and relatively rare, at least to me. Accordingly, only a handful of papers seem seminal, and they really do not point the way in the absence of explanation. So far, those papers are the following:

  * Marvin Minsky: “K-lines: A Theory of Memory,” Cognitive Science, vol. 4, no. 1, 1980. Many of the ideas also are to be found in Minsky’s book, Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Minsky argued that thinking is largely a matter of reusing states previously established by perception.

  * Shimon Ullman: “Sequence Seeking and Counter Streams,” Chapter 10 in Ullman’s book, High Level Vision, MIT Press, 1996.

Ullman offers a theory of visual recognition in which alternative transformations produce two highly branching search trees that extend toward each other from new perceptions and from a previously-stored model. When the bi-directional search produces a match, the perceived object is recognized. His paper draws some of its inspiration from the established bi-directional nature of neural connections.
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  * Kenneth Yip and Gerald Sussman: “A Computational Model for the Acquisition and Use of Phonological Knowledge,” widely circulated, but as yet unpublished manuscript.

Yip and Sussman exhibit a theory of how certain English phonological rules might be learned and put to use by mechanisms that make heavy use of a bi-directional constraint propagation mechanism. Their paper argues for the central importance of sparsely populated phonological spaces, and may shed light on why acoustic signals seem to become words, and more generally, on why signals at the neural level seem to correspond to symbols at the thought level.
Sudden revolution or another brick wall

I do not believe that the I/O channel view equates to believing that understanding intelligence is a simple matter. The computations that produce intelligence are surely sophisticated, and unlikely to be understood via incremental progress.

Nevertheless, I believe progress in Artificial Intellgence, based on the view that our intelligence is in the I/O, will be either rapid or nonexistent; it cannot be slow. I believe that today’s reasons for optimism either will fuel a revolution, or those reasons will play out and prove unworthy.

Thus, after five to ten years, if there is no substantial progress toward understanding intelligence, I will have to conclude, reluctantly, that the ideas on which I base my optimism were unequal to the task.

Critics could say that they have heard all this before, citing perhaps rule-based systems or neural nets as examples of highly hyped ideas offered by over-stimulated proponents as the answer.

In response, little can be offered, because until the strength of the new paradigm is demonstrated, the contest is really just between a new dream and a variety of already played out dreams.

Of course, with energy, the new paradigm could be compared and contrasted with the old. I prefer to expend that energy in the direction of research leading toward experiments and demonstrations, rather than scholarship leading toward arguments, because I believe that one success has far greater force than speculation about whether any success is likely or possible.

Thank you to everyone who have contributed this article

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what a optmistic blog

i think big oil sore are right

The American economy and Way of Life has been broken for at least 20 years.

Anyone with a brain could see that the dot com bubble was a delusion and then the real estate bubble was a delusion.

The Middle East military invasion is a disastrous waste of money, a logistic nightmare and a ethical morass.

The present collapse is simply that.  It is a collapse brought on by a morally bankrupt excess based on turning out backs on the wisdom of the past.

If this dried out drunk starts drinking again he’ll die this time.

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This is not a presenting a case for complacency but rather an attempt to highlight that while the threat is real there is still time to avert it at the European level, which is really what counts. It is perfectly legitimate for the BNP and others to generate apocalyptic scenarios as a conscious-raising exercise but they have to be prepared for the statistical basis for their prognostications to be challenged.
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Your article is much more informatics for all of the visitor. I am very happy to read it. This is really very nice. Thank you for it..!!!

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Charles, I want to thank you for all your hard work and your incite. The world needs thinkers like you very very badly.

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