Thought Experiment:

Imagine a large cohort of reasonable, well intentioned, creative, knowledgeable and empowered people came together and asked each other this question:

How can we as Homo sapiens, organize society, design and deploy systems, create technologies that allow us to live and pursue the lives that we want on a day to day basis.

More urgently, how can we as well save ourselves from eventual but certain destruction, in the event that we are too complacent to venture outside planet earth, remaining fragile to cosmological scale events that other evolved animals couldn't survive?

Run a 1000 simulations in 2014 January, include whoever you think is smarter than you or Obama - say Gates, Page, Musk, Zuckerberg, Jobs - Snowden, Theil, Kurzweil, Hawking, Dawkins or anyone who you think is competent.

Solution: First - Invent the Nation State. Create ~200 Nations of random sizes, resources, people, but create a bureaucratic institution that nobody takes seriously called the UN. All nations will be treated equally. Then create armies, spend billions on mutually assured destruction. Create a fake crime called 'sedition', create concepts of espionage. Use the nation state to justify everything, like a modern religion. Inspire democides and dictatorships. Prevent access and create isolation. Prevent Spotify from running anywhere, make ibooks store in most countrues have only titles without book covers from the victorian era 'because they are in public domain'. Have people blocked or restricted access to BBC because they are not in britain so they can't appreciate a neuroscience documentary. Create visas and passports and foreign embassies and diplomatic immunities. Restrict movement on land air water and radio waves or optic fibres. Have people do paperwork to see Niagra falls or prove their nationality before they are allowed to apply for a ONLINEprogram...

Then finally restrict and kill access to knowledge, with NO paywalls.

Can someone please tell me if they think this solution would show up?

Common, we have to recognize that the best invention since the wheel was not a stupid technology like the nation-state. Even if it was, this is ample proof that we've lived with it to a point where it's maladaptive. I hope we can see the writing on the wall and convince ourselves that we need to dissolve and bury this human invention, like most religions.

Our survival is literally at hand.

user:	shashikiran
created:	January 29, 2014
karma:	1