Jacque Fresco has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Fresco paints a gloomy picture of the now and the future, but the facts are that "on average", humans are living better lives than they ever have. This progress has not yet stopped.
Hence, Fresco predicts we need to wait for the next "bust".
I think we have taught ourselves that we rather suffer and keep things as they are rather than actually improving them in a radical way like in trying out new economic models.
I think it's just a matter of this, demonstration. It won't attract everyone, there's a lot of very confused people in a lot of nations who think their way of life can't be topped (especially the US).
The likelihood of 1 person like me who agrees with Fresco's vision netting billions of dollars to begin is higher than a bunch of people on their iPhones suddenly agreeing to the idea in an awakening. It can happen, without a nuclear holocaust "awakening" too. Just need the Elon Musk of the Venus Project to start small.
Jacque did a lot of hard work to get the idea out there.
Also material betterment doesn't scale, we can't focus on material betterment for all because until we figure out fusion and get our own Dyson Sphere going, we have finite resources.
Is this actually established? It's my understanding that the work-leisure dichotomy didn't really exist in medieval Europe. Also, considering how much of the fruit of your labour ended up supporting local and distant aristocracy, I can't imagine mental health being particularly high for a lot of people.
* For source, I've seen Yuval Noah Harari and Peter Gray writing about it.
As Oscar Wilde put it:
Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation.
That hasn't changed. If you're referring to the poorest in your particular nation state, consider they're probably not the poorest in the world, which we're all using in some way.
I don't think I have an overly rosy picture of the present. Rather I think your picture of the past is too romantic.
There are more people (in real numbers) starving than ever before. Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading
Um, per capita is the important metric.
If there are 2 million people on your planet and 1 million of them are starving, then in a few generations there 100 million people and 2 million of them are starving you have drastically reduced the rate of starvation. Malthusian predictions of the past have said that the rate of starvation/bad things happening would increase as the population increased. It has not.
The true number of starving people is not an important metric?
The architecture proposed has no individualism about it, this is like a cartoon version of collectivism where there is no opportunity for self-actualization.
I wouldn't want to live in that world, but even if I did I'm sure it would quickly morph into something else entirely.
The resource idea is nice at first glance, but it only considers needs and not wants. The Soviet Union had the issue where production was always lagging behind trends and demands, China started growing when they cut loose entrepreneurial forces (though those are still heavily guided at macro scale, much like seen in postwar developed countries during the Keynesian era).
Basically poor Jacque was 40 years ahead of his time.
If progress has taught us anything is that we often spend too much time arguing at the leaf level when what is needed is to back a branch or two toward the trunk and make a change there.
Moving out of Monarchy and Feudalism to Democracy was a sea change that overthrew everything before it. We managed it and are much happier because of it. While I don't agree with Fresco's vision entirely, it's not because fundamental changes aren't feasible or even, possibly, necessary.
I believe we need to take that a lot of that techno-communist stuff to some degree and actually combine it with decentralized perspectives. Because we _are_ currently doing a horrible job of measuring and acting holistically -- and certainly on some level we need to be able to have sort of total measurements of things and limitations in different regions, etc.
And we can use technology to make gathering these holistic measurements, as well as acting cooperatively, more feasible, to the degree it is wise. For example, common information systems or schemas for large-scale public data mining of natural resource usage, or simply fair tax reporting, etc.
But at the same time, I feel that the biggest pitfall of both competitive (capitalist) and cooperative (communist) approaches is over-centralization. Here we can also look to new technologies like block chains, Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. that enable decentralized large-scale trust/databases.
The problem we have now is that we actually do have a smooth transition to basically what Fresco was envisioning, except he forgot how problematic it can be to have massive governments or corporations or AIs with a centralized monopoly on production. We are headed towards that actually now -- Google for organizing and searching all information, Walmart for distributing goods in stores, Amazon for everything else, youtube for video, Uber for getting around, etc. Because these monopolies are so powerful (I call them 'technopolies') they are basically de facto government entities -- except worse.
So anyway again the way out of this is to decentralize all the things again, using technology so that we can have a common platform, common total measurements, etc., but also do it in a robust way that has room to evolve and is not dependent upon over-powered nodes.
I think a better analogy might be "reading a single article on the internet, then projecting yourself as an expert".
I fully expect that the Pope could debate your average atheist into submission.
He will be missed.
Roxanne Meadows penned a lovely open letter concerning this: https://www.thevenusproject.com/
Their vision and ideology is an interesting one, but may take a few hundred years before viable for implementation. Too many growing pains still involved in earth culture.
My personal favorite would be something in the way of a Wiki-like consensus engine with "many-eyeballs" checks and balances. All planning is public, all planning can be corrected by anyone. Sabotage can be avoided by there effectively being significantly more 'reviewers' than editors or through some other mean of making sabotage harder than correction.
It works for Wikipedia, why not for societal planning?
By the few remaining accounts we have, it worked just as Fresco described. But too many details were destroyed by the Spaniards.
This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.
"Look communism failed, capitalism produces more wealth"
"Well if everyone has everything they need, who's going to work?"
It sounds like the music industry asking who's going to record songs if copyright isn't strictly enforced.
What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain, that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.
The evidence suggests that adoption of market institutions boosts wages for all classes and is the most effective way to alleviate poverty:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-pol...
I would argue this is because the sum knowledge of society is NOT accessible to any one party. Knowledge exists in a diffused pattern, across billions of individuals. The only way for the entirety of that knowledge to come to bear is for all the individuals that constitute a society to participate in market decisions, with rules that punish bad decisions with a reduction in capital and reward good ones with an increase in capital.
In other words, a government will not be able to intelligently invest with anywhere near as much skill as billions of independent individuals investing their own capital.
Every individual has unique knowledge about specific domains, and when empowered and incentivized to invest, will utilise that knowledge to find and invest in opportunities within these domains that the vast majority of the population would overlook.
It's billions of individual investment decisions, each utilising the unique knowledge of the individual investor, that combined, can create a highly effective economy that rapidly grows and produces significant returns for the population.
Sounds like a circular argument to me? I would agree with the notion that the ideas seem naïve. But how could grandiose ideas not be that?
edit: Sure I realize that you can start with something smaller and fund able by smaller means. But how long until you can fund what you really want to create?
Money isn't magic. Its an abstraction. Remove it and possessions become currency.
So if your better world does not make "money" (read: food, water, shelter, doctors, raw materials, etc.) then your "better" world will kill all of its inhabitants.
Citation needed...
We had "resource based economies" for hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, millions starved to death.
Clearly a hidden variable exists... North Koreans starve under a monetary system. Americans waste billions of pounds of food every year under a monetary system. How could money be responsible for both outcomes? Surely there are alternative explanations.
Then we realized there was a whole other "city" of young people living in the "temporary" construction housing down the hill. These were young people eager to move the vision forward, but were generally stifled because Soleri himself (or his supporters who were older and "full citizens" of Arcosanti) didn't want to deviate from The Plan.
I think this is what kills most of these intentional communities... They create a class structure where the in group has privileges the out group doesn't, which leads to inevitable ideological calcification, which leads to inevitable decline.
The solution, in my mind, is to build on the idea that every person is a potential contributor, but for health issues, and that we live in a time of plenty.
This changes "no that won't work young one" and "no get out of here bad man" to "how can we marshal the resources to do that too?" and "let's get you some health care services".
Gene Roddenberry was inspired by Fresco's ideas. A world where people could focus on personal development and nobody would have to be in this rat race anymore, enabling a higher standard of living for all people.
Jacque was a great visionary, inventor and systems thinker - he will be missed.
You should watch his documentary Future by Design [0]. He was talking about 3D printed houses, holistic transportation systems, smart cities, etc
Thank you Jaques Fresco for opening my eyes to this and RIP.
I'm all for more people supporting socialism (even under a weird name), but I never understood the point...
Also, he accurately predicted driverless cars and the connection between wireless communication, computing, and avoidance sensors!
"We must stop constantly fighting for human rights and equal justice in an unjust system, and start building a society where equal rights are an integral part of the design."
Most people's experience with Mr. Fresco likely came from the Zeitgeist films, which were sort of a phenomenon and many people's first experience with the "vast, global conspiracy" (right as the world economy imploded in 2008). I count myself as one of those people.
Reminds you of someone you know?
Fresco was right on the mark.
RIP wise man.
It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war. By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world, and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments want to hear about what you want to say.
It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.
He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became normal.
We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want to. Every country has interests to keep one of the factions involved in power. How can the conflict terminate if one country gives weapons to a faction while another bombs them?
In 2016 he was awarded by UN for "City Design & Community". And he may receive other awards post mortem.
If you look more deeply there is little ideology in Fresco's view.
I learned about this project in 2009. It's idealist by nature. It's great, but it doesn't really account for the reality of how politics work.
> He believed competition is a product of scarcity.
Good luck keeping that nice living standard by removing competition off the table. Corruption is why we win.
> But we don't want to.
Geopolitics at play, there is so little people can really do about it. Ultimately, people will choose to be able to afford another lollipop to their kid, rather than maybe care about people thousands of kilometers away. We'd rather save 10 cent on the gallon of gas or get marshmallow than let our neighbor have shelter. Husbands will gladly shit in their neighbor's yard just to content their wives.
The intricacies are so complex and people don't really have time to really care at all, but ultimately, at the larger scale, we still are competitive because that's how the first world get comfortable. It's crazy how people can eat organic but won't try to be informed about the middle east and how the world is poor.
I have respect for his project, but it seems to make abstraction of the politics of what he is proposing. It says "beyond politics". You cannot remove politics from the equation. Politics is how the world works.
He also envisioned centralized (and distributed) computing and governmental computing systems, something that will have widespread implementation within the next half century.
1. Humans don't have a capacity for reason
2. If reason existed it couldn't lead to any truth
3. That people only find scientific discoveries via chance
So I wouldn't expect him to be dissuaded by a rational argument.
He also believes in the blank slate theory, so not exactly up to date in the science world.
I agree with you on the blank slate theory and that Fresco was not up to date on this. Genetics has an impact on skull formation, brain tissue, etc.
So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic have no way to use reason and logic. Got it.
>Citation needed
Here's one example of his opinions on reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0
>Correct, they react to stimuli.
If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts. His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole in the wall. Without reason, you
1. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall causing the effect
2. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to the act of a divine power
And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.
Correct. Perfect example would be Casinos, a person knows the hard odds are against them but continues to not use logic and reason. Perhaps our individual concepts of the words "reason" and "logic" are not synced, thus causing the disparity.
> Here's one example of his opinions on reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0
I must have misunderstood your original stance on this. I believe we are actually in agreement on this topic. What part of this video do you disagree with?
> If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts. His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole in the wall. Without reason, you...
In his example of the hole in the wall, you claim it was not by accident and that they were purposely looking for the intended output in the configuration? It seems the information Jacque was attempting to convey was that through observation and "accidental" tries, output is generated. Edison and Tesla did the same exact thing, only difference being Tesla narrowed his "accident" tests down to less cases. It all comes down to if-statements. If a hand "accidentally" covered the hole, the picture disappears... then another if-statement executes in their mind... if another object obscures the frame, what happens? Everything evolves from these "accidents".
> 1. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall causing the effect > 2. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to the act of a divine power
-Yes, what we call Science -Yes, what we call Religion
> And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.
Behavior is mutable. Genetics plays a large factor as well. We both seem to agree that the blank slate theory is blown out of the water. His thinking can seem to rely on behaviorism, but more aptly he would refer to it as "operational conditioning".
He would likely say it all boils down to Scarcity (lack of resources), Extensionality (what we currently refer to as "love"), and the Technology to manage and distribute them.
Also, I would refer to the system as a "Cybernated Resource-based Economy". Difference being that there is a global center which aggregates and manages the total known planet resources and the most effective means to use those resources to offer the redistribution of those resources to people that desire them to lower crime, hunger, scarcity, the need for war, etc.
I wish this were more well known, because the ECP is touted as some eternal show stopper for Socialism, when it's really not. It's based on a few false premises.
- Epidemiology: you have everyone in this nice dome sharing objects. But one of them has a serious infectious disease. Now the entire population is at risk.
- Defense: An adversarial force including but not limited to extremists would just target the center dome, a place accessible by everyone.
You could argue that everyone would have what they need because of this egalitarian system, and there would be no violence. But take a look at communist countries and see what happens in practice.
However, it is true though that we are very inefficient and wasteful in terms of how resources are used.
He was very much into behaviorism (B.F. Skinner) and similar concepts.
The question whether such an environment can be designed and sustained is still open. However, if it requires a "societal collapse" to have his ideas adopted, then I'd rather expect the outcome to be more like a totalitarian communist regime.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT.
He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization.
Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.
I read this sort of claim by the 'serious and sober' and realize they're even more gassed up than the 'idealists.'
I suppose the notion of 'all humans respecting property rights' sounds just as fantastical to me as the utopias promised by other philosophies.
https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians
I think Murphy is quite right.
"What I am arguing, then, is that in a truly free world, where we all respected each other's property, the rise in living standards would be analogous to our hypothetical boy who moves from the streets of Calcutta to the suburbs of Maine. In that fantastic world, giving someone a "free" heart surgery might be as cheap as giving someone a piece of gum in our current society."
His whole article is a huge non-sequitur and I'm deeply concerned that these "Austrians" are regarded as "experts" whereas someone like Fresco is considered a Don Quixote.
"If such a world really is technologically possible, we should cut the socialist dreamers some slack. Their fault lies not with their vision, but with their plans for achieving it."
From what I understand Murphy claim that if such a dream is technologically possible their's is not the correct way. I guess main point is that sooner or later Fresco's idea will require coercion and enter the pitfalls of central calculation issues, where as property rights approach does not.
Look at all the activities undertaken in the name of copyright and patent enforcement. This is "property rights".
Look at cable companies suing cities to not give citizens fast broadband, while they maintain their cartel. This is central enforcement.
A company like Apple can be privately owned. The app store is privately owned. Facebook, Google, Amazon are all privately owned. Disneyworld is privately owned.
The only reason you don't see central enforcement on a huger scale in privately owned fiefdoms is because so far in the real world, people have collectively banded together to have democracies.
Property is a monopoly right to EXCLUDE others from use of a resource. It can range from excluding YOU from changing the color of your FB profile to exclding you from peeing in some woods.
The real relevant thing is how the thing is governed. Democratically (eg employee-run) or command and control (top-down)?
These corporations are technically owned by shareholders in a public stock market. Collective ownership is a major feature of socialism.
Alaska has one of the first basic income checks in the world as the citizens are considered all shareholders in the natural resources of the state.
This "private ownership vs The Government" is a red herring.
Governments exist in all organizations. Rights are those things the organizations recognize as worthy of defending with force, if the peasants are lucky, they codify a consistent policy and enforce them.
Property rights also have dubious origins, and the concept deserves to be questioned, along the lines of asking what right does one man have to appropriate a certain piece of land and defend it with violence? And what of the concept of rights in general?
If one wants an alternative view of the concept of property versus possession, it's worth reading Proudhon's What Is Property?, which is a thrilling and informative read of the anarchist view, despite being a 19th century work.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...
If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the outcome of what people are proposing.
Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same problem we have now.
In developing nations, large families are used as a kind of social security. Developed nations with good social security have population growth rates below replacement (modulo immigration). The best way to curb population growth is through universal education and long term economic well being.
-To help you when you get old?
-Because my religion says so?
-My parents had many kids, so that seems natural
It all comes down to numbers. What is the ceiling number for the carrying capacity of humans on this planet?
Seems like an important question for the next 5 generations of people.
RIP Fresco.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423470 and marked it off-topic.
Second, considering that the comment I was replying to contained snark i.e. "atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions", I'm not sure why you focused on mine.
In the future, please be consistent with your application of warnings. You wouldn't want to members to believe that you're ideologically driven rather than promoting open intellectual discussion.
And please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate, which seems to be the point you're making.
It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or programmers, the failure points are the same.
> please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate
Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate. Soviet economists had a joke that went "We'll take over the entire world, but not New Zealand so we can know how much things cost". To that point, remember that when China was communistic, they had brought in thousands of Sears catalogs so they could allocate their resources correctly. These are things we take for granted today, but it's an attribute of economic freedom.
From an empirical perspective, Marxist economic systems have failed catastrophically in all of the 20th century. The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation. Soviet Russia, China, and even North Korea had to allow at least pockets of free markets for people to survive.
So while I'm not saying that Marxists economists are economically illiterate, they have a lot to account for. And from what I've read from Mr. Fresco and the Venus Projects, including debates I've listen to, they don't seem to have an answer to these questions.
Edit: For more on the calculation problem you may want to look up "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by economist Friedrich Hayek. Incidentally, Jimmy Wales has stated that that paper was central to how the wikipedia project is managed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...
That's very wrong. You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain. You may need input to predict the demand for a given product but that, again, supposes a market.
> The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation.
You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races. The US can finance its colossal military expenditure by issuing long-term titles while the Soviet Union couldn't, but that won't last forever.
This was common practice for communist countries, because they couldn't calculate otherwise. Logically, you can't calculate like the market does since the price system (or lack of system) is able to communicate vast amounts of information that socialism just can't. See The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek. It's in part why he won the Nobel prize in economics. It's a short essay that's free online.
> You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races.
It doesn't come close to explaining the catastrophic system wide failure that Marxism produces.