Abundant Systems
Kindness has unlimited upside.”
James Clear • 3 Ideas, 2 Quotes, 1 Question (December 26, 2019) | James Clear
More proof of ideas
AI is aggregated human intelligence. So it’s better to call it collective intelligence than artificial intelligence.
Emphasizing the collectivity (something built on the commons) over the artificiality (a feat of technology) gives us an entire new way to see, perceive and relate to the technology.
-via Holly Herndon, in conversation with Ezra Klein
This is exactly what abundant systems try to do. It takes the individual efforts as part of the collective, not in isolation.
What is the value of work in a world on the cusp of automation, and how will humans redefine their relationship with it?
Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report
Work isn’t valuable. People are. People can set a value on the work that is done, therefore, they are the most valuable piece of the equation. Work for the sake of work has no value.
it's important we don't rush.
Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community
Things need to evolve on the timelines that information is returned.
When a Collective joins a Fiscal Host, they get a clear service: we'll hold your money, you don't have to go get a bank account and form your own legal entity, we're going to take care of some really annoying paperwork stuff for you, and we'll give you this nice online tool that lets you share your budget transparently and pay your expenses. On the... See more
Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community
Abundant System Example
The chief challenge, as Lee sees it, is how to make AI smarter without just throwing more data and computing power at it. His hope rests on the iterative tweaking of algorithms that improve the performance of AI at a “geometric pace.”
noemamag.com • Will AI Bring Plentitude or Further Imperil the Planet? | NOEMA
This is the goal of subminds
Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.
Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
It requires different thinking to take advantage of abundance. Abundant systems teach people to think abundantly.
But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle , because it’s about closely matching the
... See moreMandy Brown • Against Optimization
Optimization of scarce systems is about past measurement. Optimization of abundant systems is about future outcomes.
I like the term economism . It describes how economic thinking and practice have become ingrained into all sorts of aspects of our lives, even non-economic ones. In today’s world governed by economism , everything seems to need to be measured by economic logic: am I using my time efficiently?
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #78
Haven’t heard this term before, but I think it follows from the collapse of things into measurements. We started with measuring money as a collapse of information, and that led to collapses of other aspects of the world as a proxy for money where money isn’t available to measure value.