Meeting notice: The 02.April.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. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: It is not uncommon in NSG circles to run into the argument that once NT & strong AI begin to cut in, capitalism will fall apart, since that system is based on setting prices for products and services, and prices assume an environment of scarcity. In an era where all products and services of any desired quality can be created on the spot, where is the scarcity? Without prices, how will society organize itself? What will happen to the primordial competitions for attention, respect, and position? How will we know whom to interrupt and whom to fawn over? The customary reply to this is to point out that prices of many products and services have fallen enormously over the past few thousand years and appetites have simply adjusted themselves upwards. Most of us would feel our lives painfully cheapened if we had to live even the way our parents did, let alone as poor Louis XIV, who had to get along without toilets or modern dentistry. What reason is there to believe that this dynamic will not continue as it always has? And besides, NT can't create everything. It can't create space, for instance. Why shouldn't people compete by comparing the volume of space they control? For one thing the UN already owns space and is unlikely to consent to a general privatization, if only because the details of how the competing claims would play out are vexed. The scenarios one often hears about, in which individuals or companies end up owning galaxies or even large fractions of the visible universe, seem unlikely. On the other hand, allowing habitats (whether around the Sun or the Galactic Center) to occupy uncontested orbital slots pose no political or legal problems. It seems possible that in space private property is going to mean enclosed space, not lot coordinates. In theory people might be able to compete over how many cubic miles of space are enclosed by their habitat, but the counter is the same for any other collectible: the easy of copying. It this case, all mansions look the same when your main access is through a computer- enhanced hologram link. So it seems as though in the NT era the scarcest resource of all will be scarcity itself. Fortunately (?) there might be a technological fix. Imagine products and services containing logos that are networked back to the vendor. Each millisecond that vendor sends out an encrypted logo varient. If Alice is interested in whether a product worn (for instance) by Bob is 'authentic', ie, actually cost money, she could use software agents to check out whether the logos that were displayed a few seconds ago by the products Bob makes accessible for such monitoring were the right ones. If they were not, or if Bob does not open himself to a sufficiently fine-grained level of inspection, she will pass. Reduced to its essentials the 'product' in this case is really just a certified statement of Bob's net worth. Up until now, as important as competition via financial assets has been in this society, that competition has always been indirect, through the display of products. The reason, presumably, is that a boast, or even a bank statement, has always been easier to forge than an actual Lexus. However, a world with both NT and realtime encrypted communications with financial institutions reverses this balance of conveniences. Such a regime will force people (who want to compete) to walk around the way public corporations do now, making a complete report of their financial condition, including risks and prospects over the next year, available to everyone interested. One might imagine that the forces for social equality, strong in every society, agitating to prohibit the general publication of this information. The lobby for the rich might reply with an assertion of a "right of publicity". In time, the right of publicity might displace the right of privacy as a center of political controversy. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> "Even though the challenges to bring the space elevator to reality are substantial, there are no physical or economic reasons why it can't be built in our lifetime." http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_elevator_020327-1.html <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> The food cabinet emerges on the horizon... http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/fish_food_020329.html <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. 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 must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.