Just thought I'd post the link for this project I came across:

http://sensearray.com...

Please give your thoughts!

Travis,

I think it wise and fair that you offer your own thoughts before you ask others to do so. Otherwise it looks for all the world like you are bating, marketing, or are wanting others doing the work of thinking, prioritizing and assessing for you. Honesty is both a risk and a shared responsibility. Don't ask for something you have not already done. Fairness and complete honesty is the most important social contract. The truth will set you free.

Randall Reetz

Interests in extreme liberatarian ideas including Seasteading (people who what a tax shelter so badly that they are willing to live on a giant floating platform or ship) should be exposed as the rhetoric that drives or at the very least colors some people's angle of interest in AI and other topics. This needs to be examined carefully and publicly. Without understanding and being aware of the deeper motivations that are driving membership and actions, we are all of us just fodder for manipulation.

Please read the following article for a peek into the extreme selfishness and self-superiority of this group of exclusivity advocates… how far libertarians are willing to go in the pursuit of helping themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.

Floating Utopias: In These Times

There are several members of this group with sinister (and unstated) motivations. Be aware. Ask questions. But above all, if you are interested in fostering a fair and honest community… do your part, be honest and fair your self. Make this the de-facto standard for membership within any group. Expose your rhetoric. Expect it of others. Ideas and motivations that have to be hidden are ideas and motivations in the greatest need of exposure. Truth and transparency have a way of filtering the absurd and the perverse and the selfish. If you think something, say it out loud (to everyone)! If you can't, you might want to think hard and long about the motivations driving your thoughts.

Randall Reetz

Randall,

My first reaction to your two postings above (responding to Travis) is to wonder if you've been having a really bad day? Granted, netiquette holds that when posting a link on a board like this, it's polite to include at least some indication of what it's about. Browsers aren't instantaneous, and it's certainly annoying to open a link, only to discover it's something in which one has no interest. But it's easy to simply ignore the link. What Travis posted is a pretty minor offense. And at least the link is to something that does have marginal relevance to "practical" AI.

OTOH, your comments about seasteading and libertarians seem to come from "out of the blue". They strike me as off-topic for an AI interest board, and certainly for this message thread. What's going on? Your comments about "truth and transparency" are well and good, but how does a member's incidental interest in seasteading and libertarianism translate to "sinister (and unstated) motivations"? That seems like quite a leap!

As it happens, I'm one who is quite interested in seasteading. Though I don't consider myself a libertarian -- I'm non-ideological and reject most "-ism"-s almost on principal -- I understand where they're coming from. I'm sympathetic to what they espouse. Not that that's saying much. I'm also sympathetic to much of what communists, socialists, conservatives, and even (gasp!) Republicans espouse. The devil is in the details.

One of the details I'd mention is that none of the members of the Seasteading Institute with whom I'm acquainted are in a position to benefit from a tax shelter. They aren't in that kind of tax bracket, and in any case a seastead wouldn't qualify. The rather snarky article you linked to, however, seems to employ a very liberal defininition of "tax shelter" as anyplace one might live and work without paying taxes to a central government. If there's anything wrong with that, I'm afraid I don't see it.

Well, it IS surprising when someone will risk social ridicule and actually express a well thought through and explained opinion. I do it because it matters. If causal content is ignored, only style and hubris and emotional resonance remain. I am afraid that, as a rule, surface wins over substance. Sad. I am not having a bad day. I find it insulting that you would say so. Let's stick to the issues.

Escaping, the urge to escape, to find a utopia away from the general public or society is arrogant and destructive. Period. My own private Idaho… isn't. And it never will be. Neither mine, nor private. There is no "outside" of a system. Study up on your thermodynamics if you think I am talking philosophy here.

We might all want to escape… to someplace better… to some place with people just like me! But it ain't going to happen, and if it did, we'd all be in trouble.

I looked into the guy who posted this private advertisement (started this message thread). He is exactly as I have indicated. I will not put up with bullshit anymore. If you can't tell the difference between BS and information, well I feel for your situation. But What has happened all to often in human culture is that selfishness respects selfishness (even if it is selfishness pointed in a completely different direction). Alistar Cook thought this was a uniquely American trait. He said, something like: "the problem with americans is that no matter how poor they are, they vote as though they are rich or are about to become rich" (sic).

It floors me that people who grew up in a country that provids the greatest infrastructure support and freedom to the individual (along with the lowest tax rates of any developed nation), have become the most likely to feel burdened by expression and taxation oppression! How in the world did that happen? Are we that spoiled? That arrogant? That entitled? That precious? That "god blessed"?

It is embarrassing.

The focus on the self. The ignorance of the struggle to get here.

Are you arguing for the right to be a selfish brat? The right to build a private island (from the funds and materials made available by the collective populist work of humanity as a whole)? Obsurd. Shameful. Maybe we all need a grandma. Maybe Silicon Valley, is too removed from the kind of reality checks that ground us to RESPECT for the billions of people who have toiled to give us the luxury we seem so intent on claiming as the result of our own pitiful and self centered me me me me me me lives.

I am going to have to be your grandma if you or anyone else acts like they don't have one or don't care.

OK? We all share the limited resources on this planet. The elite few of us that have absurd access to the lions share, better realize that our access isn't the result of manifest destiny or the work we have done. It was chance. And we have a larger responsibility to do with this access to opportunity that which will benefit those not so lucky. There are far more of them's than us's.

Do you really want to argue with me that building an even more resource hungry (per/capita) island, is the best way to spend your absurd happenstance access to resources and responsibility?

We all need to stop acting like bratty kids at the mall. Time to grow up. This is real.

Randall Reetz

Seriously people.

Sovereignty as consumable? Restaurant quality kitchens, theater quality entertainment rooms, hydraulic shop lifts in the garage, granite and marble countertops and floors. Owning the same shoes as movie stars. Fine leather seats, eleven speaker sound, heated seats, and automobile cockpits more luxurious than private jets. None of this is enough? Have to own your own country? Is anyone watching this crap? Paying attention? And we wonder why the world economy is crashing? Top economists holding press conferences about "consumer confidence". ??????

If you could show me that (or even cared if) funding, building, and living on your own floating country, would have some positive influence on the global economic, social, political, scientific, etc. future of humans or the planet… man I would be all for it as an experiment. But I will bet almost anything that the factors motivating interest in "seasteading" have nothing to do with concerns larger than ego and selfish pleasure.

It shouldn't matter in what context selfish and consumptive behavior is referenced. But living today, in the shadow of 7 times the extinction rate that happened when the six mile wide meteor crashed into earth 65 million years ago, ending the age of the dinosaurs.

What we choose to do with the very expensive resources at our disposal has direct consequences on the very existence of entire lineage's of biology. This causal link to our actions may even directly effect the survivability of complexity (at the level of sentience). Sure, given enough time, and enough resources, (tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of millions of years), smart things might re-emerge to continue this conversation. But do we really want to carry the responsibility that goes with deciding that fate… and doing so in the pursuit of pleasure or some silly childhood inferiority complex?

Add value to the world, or buy your way into some sort of floating hip-hop video, or adolescent wet-dream oblivion, the choice is now obvious and the implications a moral imperative.

Does this floating sovereign tax-shelter of an island make my ass look big?

Randall Reetz