Ben Goertzel suggests general technoprogressive principles for a political party programme
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/goertzel20151107
He also has an interesting budget proposal:
An extra $1T or so per year to supply every US citizen with a basic income around $11K/year.
This would simplify social welfare now, and simply be the more
compassionate and moral thing to do. And it would lay a foundation for
the future – because as AIs and robots take over more and more jobs, a
basic income will be the only alternative to mass starvation and death.
$400B per year for improved education, including free online
education at all levels for all citizens, and a federal system providing
official certification based on online courses
$100B per year for development of alternative modes of exchange
(including but not limited to cryptocurrencies), with a view toward
creating economic mechanisms that are more democratic and decentralized
and do not involve a huge parasitic financial sector such as the US
currently possesses. Fixing the parasitic nature of the financial
sector would save the economy vastly more than $100B per year
$500B per year for direct foreign aid to the developing world,
with a focus on boosting advanced science and technology there. This
will benefit everyone including the developed world, because the current
situation wastes a huge amount of the brainpower of the human race
(since too many folks in the developing world have to spend too much of
their brainpower just surviving, rather than contributing to the radical
advancement of humanity). This would expand foreign aid from
the current level of less than 1% of the federal budget to around 6% of
the federal budget. (Note that most
Americans already think foreign aid constitutes a much higher percentage than this.)
And last but not least—$2T per year for a new National Science and Technology Administration
(NASTA – yeah, OK that sounds sorta like a third-rate reggae rapper or
something, but we can live with it for the moment….), subsuming the NIH
and NASA and taking over much of what DARPA and IARPA etc. now do
And here’s my comment on the whole post:
Congratulations on your well balanced post, Ben! It will serve as inspiration for many!
Though, I think the budget could be balanced even further between
“social” and “science” – the idea of balancing those seems to be rather
new, I think. I would increase the budget for an unconditional basic
income to 1.5 T a year, and take the funds from the NASTA budget, so
that both would get 1.5 T per year.
Why? Because I believe that people can create amazing stuff, if they
are free to do what they want, and self-organize without oppressive
economic or political constraints (sure, some constrains will always
exist, but reducing them seems to be very desirable from a libertarian
perspective). Combine that with government support for the most
innovative start-ups and watch amazing things happening!
However, I must agree with the concerns of feasibility of such
dramatic political changes. I wouldn’t want to bet everything on the
entrenched politics of today actually changing. My hopes were high when
the Pirate Parties started implementing liquid democracy, open-source
policy-making, and radical transparency in Europe. Politics is harder to
change than most people are willing to accept. In the end, this means
that the exponent of our current exponential curve will stay the same,
if no big political shift happens.
My highest hopes lie in changing our economic system from the inside,
which will then change everything else. Having companies who Implement
innovative attention economics, reputation economics, and more social
business models could be the levers which make big changes possible.
Politics is slow to innovate. Getting businesses to innovate looks more
realistic , from my point of view. Interestingly, this would mean that
we should promote technoprogressive views in the business world, rather
than in the realm of politics!