Abundant Systems

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

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

Abundant Systems beat scarce systems

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.

Yet, one of the superpowers of connected technologies - networks - is that they will remove scarcity if at all possible. Connected networks by definition make things abundant that were once scarce.

Andy Weissman • On art and business and context and mirrors

This isn’t actually true by default. Networks of scarce systems end up creating winner take all situations from abundance.

H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

. . .

When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings

Austin Kleon • KURT VONNEGUT ON THE NEED FOR BUILDING EXTENDED FAMILIES

Extended Family is important. Why not choose the extended family we bring in?

If a commons is being managed successfully, individuals feel like they're getting back more than they're putting in, that the thing is more than the sum of its parts, that running it together means we have something more powerful than any of us could on our own.

Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community

As Brian Merchant argues in his book, Blood in the Machine , the rebellion was more nuanced than we realize, standing “not against technology per se but for the rights of workers above the inequitable profitability of machines.”

Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report

This is what abundant systems recognize. It’s not about the machines or the data, it’s about the humans. When we build abundantly, we ensure that everyone is taken care of, because that builds the best possible long-term future.

And more than anything, it feels particularly, uncomfortably, acutely uncertain.

Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report

The biggest thing we can do is give people a sense of a secure present from which to explore potential abundant futures.

In practice, a startup nonprofit has several important distinctions from traditional nonprofits: 1) it begins with a large goal and works backwards to identify incremental steps to achieve that goal, 2) it has an iterative, experimental mindset, and 3) it is an internet first organization.

marklutter.com • Startup Nonprofits

interesting framing. I’d been focused on the concept of eliminating the distinction between for-profit and non-profit, but this is an alternative way to examine the same problem, looking like it could have similar outcomes.