Meeting notice: The 00.05.02 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: Social economies and NT One can sort social economies -- or at least their productive modes -- into command, market, and gift. In a command culture (like the Army) workers are assumed to be entirely alienated from their work products; they work because they are told to. (They might in fact not be alienated at all; they might love to shoot people and blow things up, but the system makes no assumptions in that direction.) In a market economy, workers work because they are paid. They are assumed to be somewhat less alienated from their work, because they can quit if they wish. In a gift economy, or what I am calling one for the purposes at hand, people work because that is what they want to be doing. Examples within this culture might be artists or scientists. (I am using the term 'gift' because compensation is usually an afterthought in these communities, even if not very far after. Of course the idea of conforming to orders from above is even more remote.) In a command economy status varies by rank; in a market, by income; in a gift, by professional reputation (usually) or possibly the number of people consuming or enjoying the product. Command economies are predictable and stable but unproductive, both because they are economically irrational and learn slowly. Gift cultures, on the other extreme, are enormously productive, not because they make efficient use of material resources, which they do not, but because they tap the potential inherent in human creativity and passion. They are, however, chaotic; goods and services are likely to appear and disappear without warning, which in many contexts makes their higher productivity purely theoretical. Market cultures fall somewhere in between, imposing more order than a gift economy but permitting more unpredictability than a command economy. Of course real world cultures are blended of all three productive modes: the Soviet Union had its black market and there are artists even in Switzerland. However for some cultures, if not for all, it is possible to pick out moments when certain modes are representative. When people set out to consider the downsides of nanotech they often imagine the technology in the hands of a Command culture. While it is true that nanotech in the hands of a Stalin or Mao would be a serious matter indeed, but there are reasons to think this particular dystopia is unlikely. If we accept that traditional cultures, with their noble and clerical hierarchies and confining traditions were a species of command culture, the trend in our time (for whatever reason) has clearly been from Command to Market. The fate of socialism emphasizes the point. Further, the internet appears to be dragging the market culture -- kicking and screaming, in many cases (viz, the Recording Industries Association of America) -- through the next transition, into a gift society. The internet's great powers of connectivity and selection have allowed it to compensate for the chaotic nature of the Gift economy with a huge range of inputs. Whatever you want, given a hundred million sites, or however many there are, someone is going to offering it in Gift economy mode, which means with verve, dedication, humor, and passion, and very cheaply. This is a difficult package for conventional market-mode producers to compete with. If you have a hundred sites offering a given good, all equally accessible, it no longer matters if one or two disappear because their maintainers grew bored. There are always others willing to step in to replace them. Thus it seems more than likely that nanotech will emerge in what will be a Gift economy. If we want to be prudent, and plumb the darkside of nanotech, we really should ask ourselves if there are any risks in that combination. Typically the idea of a nanotech-enabled Gift economy has been presented as very close to a Utopian ideal, but this is not necessarily the case. Gift economies run on reputation and reputation is an elite good. A person living in the middle class in a market society can have a good life; it is not at all clear that a person living the middle third of a gift culture will have much of a life at all. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Worth checking out: recent developments in programmable s elf-assembly. (The good stuff is towards the end.) http://www.techreview.com/articles/may00/regalado.htm <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg-d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and you must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti-spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com