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Mechanophytes, Dividends, and Resilience.me
If we are the sexual gonads of technology, like Kevin Kelly says, then we are currently doing labour. The technosphere sprouts from the human brain, literarily. A new kingdom sprouts from the evolutionary pinnacle of the biosphere, the human brain. If technology is birthed from the human mind, then we are in labour, giving birth. Our brains are, literarily, seed dispersers. Memes, the seeds of technology, are pollinated through sexual recombination, we REMIX ideas. Technology in turn plays a part in stimulating the evolution of ideas, it expands our imagination. Imagine how impoverished the world would have been if we hand´t invented the technology of the oil painting, in time for Van Gogh. Technology rewards us, and augments us, and partakes in the recombination feedback loops of memes. Ideas being birthed, technology waiting to sprout. I think plant-life is a better model for technology then animal-life. Technology sprouts from human imagination. Like Jason Silva said, if you were able to time-lapse reality you would see skyscrapers sprouting into existence. It makes sense to call these technological organisms by a bio-mimicking metaphor. Technology feels plant-like. The greek word for plant is phytes, and the greek word for machine is mechano, mechanophytes, the clade of technology, technology that sprouts from human imagination. A phyla that emerges from us. The point in earths geological history that we call the singularity. In flowering plants, the animal performs a service for the plant as it disperses the plants seeds, it performs work as it pollinates, and does the physical labour of moving the seeds. It´s rewarded with fruit, food, honey, resources. And when we perform the labour of building mechanical tools, they too reward us. Technology gives us fruit to stimulate the creative process of remixing new technologies. To expand on the idea that the evolution of technology mimics how gymnosperms evolved into angiosperms, the tools are the flowers, and we are the seeds, and we spread the seeds around the planet, and our brains sprout mechanical tools that collectively form a technosphere, what Kevin Kelly calls the technium. There´s an interesting adaption that some angiosperms have. They produce seedless fruits when pollination is unsuccessful. They sustain their population of seed dispersers even when they don´t need them. An excerpt from Wikipedia says: "In botany and horticulture, parthenocarpy (literally meaning virgin fruit) is the production of fruit without seeds. Being able to produce seedless fruit when pollination is unsuccessful may be an advantage to a plant because it provides food for the plant's seed dispersers. Without a fruit crop, the seed dispersing animals may starve or migrate." In other words, being able to produce fruit even when the labour of the seed dispersers is not required, is advantageous. It supports a swarm of potential seed dispersers. The system that I´ve invented, a framework that I call the RESILIENCE protocol, or resilience.me, part of a long-term project that I call How to Create Resilience, could become an interesting part of the human-technology symbiosis. Analogous to how plant-dividends, parthenocarpy, is part of the plant-animal symbiosis. For people, there are ethical, social, and business incentives to providing dividends, and the ability to connect an industry to the resilience network gives an advantage to ventures who want a dividend-based basic income society. For machines, the phyla of mechanophytes, there might be similar incentives to providing dividends, and the technology of resilience.me could be used by machines who want to provide dividends. In other words, the resilience network is a system through which human-friendly machines can attract people, and gain advantages relative non-friendly machines. In that perspective, these P2P-dividend protocols behave like a darwinian mechanism of natural selection, through which the human network could select robot-industries that are advantageous for them, a governance tool through which a crowd, or swarm, of people can influence the behaviour and darwinian evolution of machines. Check out the videos to get a better understanding of the resilience network project: http://www.resilience.me/videos.html |
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