Philanthrocapitalism or philanthrobabble?

My libertarian socialist sensibilities were both tickled and agitated this week when I learned that Warren Buffett, the world’s second richest man, donated virtually his entire $31 billion fortune to the Gates Foundation. Buffett is known for his philosophical opposition to dynastic wealth, but the donation was also emblematic of his support for what is coming to be regarded as "philanthrocapitalism" – the increasing trend toward entrepreneurial approaches to philanthropy.

This latest trend has me both delighted and concerned. I’ve always had a problem with conspicuous money hoarding, and it’s good to see some considerable coin being tabled for humanitarian needs. But at the same time I have to question both the sincerity and the motivation of the so-called philanthrocapitalists. Are they truly working in the best interests of the world’s poor? Or are they merely working to further their own causes and those of other capitalists by creating entirely new targetable consumers? Is this yet another example of how corporatism is increasingly entrenching itself in global society?

Perhaps it’s all the above. The question to ask is whether or not the outcome will truly be beneficial for all.

Most people acknowledge the problems and limitations of small scale charities. These groups are often resource strapped, idealistic, bureaucratic, and stunningly ineffective. The new supercharities, on the other hand, promise to operate in a way that more closely resembles the corporate world. Prospective donors act as potential investors, looking for high returns in terms of how the donations will benefit recipients. More and more, donations are given only after cost-benefit analyses are performed to ascertain what the gifts might actually accomplish. In this sense, charities resemble capitalist economies in which benefactors become consumers of social investment.

Further, as some are quick to point out, the costs of not investing are startlingly high—-and it’s not just the human cost but the fiscal cost as well. Bill Gates calculated that had malaria been wiped out in Africa in the 1960’s its gross domestic product would have been $100 million higher than it is today. Well funded groups like the Gates Foundation can micro-manage every dollar it commits and judge the exact impact of its interventions. What I'm left wondering is, was Gates concerned that people were dying of malaria, or that a potential GDP market of $100 million was left squandered for so long?

For those like myself with leftist tendencies, there’s significant potential for concern here. The rise of philanthrocapitalism is essentially for-profit philanthropy. While I’m sure that many of the donors who are “investing” their money in charities are truly doing so with good intentions, it is clearly not an entirely selfless act. The motivations are legitimately suspicious, and one wonders if Gates, Buffett and others are merely trying to open up new markets and new demographics.

Hold on -- now am I being all sour grapes, here? Are my concerns symptomatic of my own petit bourgeois complacency and cynicism? Do the motivations and intentions of the benefactors really matter? Sustainability issues aside, if people are healthy, fed, clothed, and sheltered, while also having jobs and things to buy, isn’t that a great and noble achievement unto itself?

Well, I suppose it’s a great achievement in a Fukuyamaesque end-of-history sort of way, but it brings to light the unsettling issue of overwhelming global (and even totalitarian-like) corporatism and the withering away of governmental accountability in this domain. Given the proliferation of philanthrocapitalism, one can imagine governments growing increasingly indifferent to spending money on aid. Why bother, after all, when the capitalists are doing such a good job? What a great opportunity to lower taxes and shrink government even further!

Unlike philanthrocorporate interests, which are self-serving and subject to cost-benefit analyses, states and their governments – which are supposedly working on behalf of the public interest – are in a special position to gauge the worthiness or urgency of certain causes and broader social interests. While the philanthrocapitalists can arbitrarily choose which humanitarian battles to wage, governments can be better persuaded (ie democratic due process) to enter into those arenas that may seem unpalatable to the capitalists but are worthy and important problems nonetheless.

I’m not opposed to supercharities. In fact, I think it’s a remarkable development in the history of philanthropy and the affairs of the obscenely rich. What I’d like to see, however, are strong governments and international bodies who will stand up to the corporatist tsunami and offer a guiding voice.

The goal, after all, is to create healthy, happy, and prosperous people – something most people agree is a good thing. The risk, however, is the demise of democratic and participatory values that are replaced by a corporatist world in which all aspects of human existence are shaped by capitalist urges.

Tags: philanthrocapitalism, charity, gates foundation, warren buffett, corporatism, capitalism, humanitarianism, philanthrophy, globalization.

When did intelligence first emerge in the universe?

Here’s a question that has a direct bearing on both the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox: When did life first emerge in the universe? More important to the SETI discussion, however, is determining the earliest point at which a radio-capable or Singularity era intelligence could have emerged. My initial suspicion is that the conditions required to support intelligent life have been established for quite some time now – a conclusion that will only reinforce the Fermi quandary rather than diminish it.

A lot of hand waving goes on when people dismiss the Fermi Paradox. The fact that the universe isn’t already teeming with ETI’s and machine intelligences is more disturbing than most people realize. One such person is Ray Kurzweil who believes that we are the first (or among the very first) intelligences in the universe to approach the Singularity. I find this absurdly improbable, but it’s an hypothesis that I’m willing to entertain.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s set aside Ward and Brownlee’s Rare Earth hypothesis and invoke the self-sampling assumption about our conditions here on Earth. We can heretofore assume that the circumstances on Earth are extremely typical in regards to how life emerges and evolves.

According to cosmologist Charles Lineweaver's estimates, planets started forming 9.1 billion years ago. Obviously, radio-communicating or pre-Singularity intelligences didn't emerge overnight. So, how long does that take? Using the Earth as an example we can come up with a rough idea.

Life on Earth first emerged about 600 million years after its formation (that’s awfully quick – a strike against the Rare Earth hypothesis, I would say). Consequently, given similar conditions in other parts of the universe, I’d say that life could not have arisen any earlier than 8.5Gyr ago. What I’d be interested to know is, in what way, if any, were planets and solar systems different 8.5Gyr ago as compared to those which formed 4.57Gyr ago (which is when the Earth formed)? Would any of those differences negate or retard the processes of life?

The next factor to look at is the complexification of life. On Earth, it took RNA/DNA about 3.7Gyr to get to the point where it was able to express complex land dwelling organisms. This is the time when, about 220 million years ago, that dinosaurs emerged. It’s conceivable that hominid-type creatures and their attendant civilizations could have emerged around this time instead of super-predator dinosaurs. Let's work with this assumption.

Now, I suppose we should account for the mass extinction events that characterized the early phases of Earth. Given the short period of time in which it’s taken Homo sapiens to emerge from beast to virtual cyborg (less than 2 million years), it’s safe to say that the high frequency of mass extinctions wouldn’t have been a factor.

That said, NEO impacts and other mass extinction events have been the cause of drastic evolutionary re-starts, but have decreased in frequency over the course of our solar system’s history. The solar system is stabilizing. A fair question to ask is, were mass extinction events necessary for the emergence of intelligence life, and if so, why?

Given the length of time required to go from the ignition of life through to complex life, the earliest that civilizations could have emerged on Earth is 220 million years ago. I'm going to conclude that natural selection requires 3.7Gyr before it can express creatures that are morphologically sophisticated enough to resemble humans. As an interesting aside, that doesn’t necessarily suggest that organisms could have evolved the cognitive capacity of humans at that time. For all we know, the mammalian brain requires the 200 million years of evolution and accumulated/refined DNA data to get to the sophistication it has today. I’ll admit, however, that that’s a stretch; time-to-evolve is not a fixed rate and is largely dictated by the severity of environmental stressors.

Using the 3.7Gyr metric, the earliest that complex humanoid life could have emerged in our universe is 4.72Gyr ago. That figure does not negate the Fermi Paradox. Given the potential emergence of intelligent life in our galaxy around that time, and given Fermi’s estimate that an ETI could colonize the galaxy within 10 million years, our galaxy could have been colonized nearly 500 times over by now.

Let’s try to whittle the figure down even further. Assuming that an advanced civ could have emerged on earth 220 million years ago, what would they have used to fuel their industrial revolution? Working under the assumption that fossil fuels are a necessary prerequisite for an industrial revolution to occur, how many years of accumulated biomass is required? By the same token, how much biomass is required to get to the Singularity?

Today, considering the threat of peak oil, we don’t know the answer to that question ourselves. We know that human civilization had enough to get to an industrialized phase of existence, but we don't actually know if we have enough energy to get to the Singularity (although I'm inclined to believe that we do).

Let’s assume here, however, that we have enough energy to make it. Vast forests of clubmosses (lycopods), horsetails, and tree ferns started to cover the land 300 million years ago – biomass that decayed and eventually formed coal and oil. Let’s use that as our metric for the time required to establish energy needs. That knocks our figure of 3.7Gyr down to 3.4Gyr – barely a dent.

I’m making an assumption, here – that the presence of oil and coal are a necessary condition for the emerge of radio-capable and pre-Singularity intelligences. I remember getting into a discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky about this a number of years ago who begged to differ. He essentially claimed that 'where there’s a will there’s a way,' particularly given long enough time frames (I think he used the example of solar power).

I’m still unconvinced and would argue that fossil fuels are absolutely necessary. I'm going to use that in our calculation to push back the emergence of complex civs in the universe from 4.72Gyr ago to 4.42Gyr ago.

There are undoubtedly a plethora of factors I’m either omitting or exaggerating. The exact conditions required for the emergence of human-like intelligences may be more complex than it appears, and the universe may only be intelliphillic at this unique time (a violation of the Copernican Principle, I know, but one that should be considered; is the universe entering a phase transition?).

Formalizing my argument about when intelligences could first emerge in the universe, I'm going to use this as a starting equation:

[y.a. planets formed (P)] – [years it takes for life to emerge (L)] – [years it takes for DNA to become hominid-expressible (H)] – [years it takes to accumulate required biomass for energy (E)] = [y.a. radio-capable civs first emerged in the galaxy (A)]

P – L – H – E = A

Using my figures (in Gigayears):
9.1 – 0.6 – 3.78 – 0.3 = 4.42Gyr

So, it’s conceivable that Singularities and outward galactic expansions could have happened as long as 4.42 billion years ago. This is still an immense amount of time, keeping the Fermi problem deeply relevant.

So, where is everybody?

Tags: SETI, fermi paradox, drake equation, origin of life, astrobiology, astrosociobiology, cosmology, life on other planets, singularity.

World Future Society Conference: Toronto, July 28-30

In late July I will be attending the World Future Society's annual conference which is going to be held at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto. The theme for this year's conference is "Creating Global Strategies for Humanity's Future." Featured speakers include Ray Kurzweil, Joel Garreau, Walter Truett Anderson, and many others.

I, along with Simon Smith (editor of Betterhumans and VP of the Toronto Transhumanist Association), will be manning the table for the World Transhumanist Association and the TTA. Please drop by and say hello if you're going to be there.

Go here for more information about the conference.

All Together Now II

Okay, time to call it a night; my mind now resembles a bowl of pudding. After returning from Stanford and receiving a ton of feedback about my presentation on animal uplift, I decided to seriously revise my paper. I've significantly revamped it and tightened my line of argumentation. Once complete, it will be published by the IEET along with other papers that were presented at the HETHR conference. I'd like to see it get published elsewhere as well.

Here's the abstract in its current incarnation (feedback welcome):

As the potential for enhancement technologies migrates from the theoretical to the practical, a difficult and important decision will be imposed upon human civilization, namely the issue as to whether or not we are morally obligated to biologically enhance nonhuman animals and integrate them into human and posthuman society. Precedents for intra-species cultural uplift abound in human history, providing both sobering and edifying episodes showcasing the possibilities for the instigated and accelerated advancement of technologically delayed societies. As a number of scientists, philosophers and futurists have recently argued, there is mounting evidence in support of the suggestion that these historical episodes are symptomatic of a larger developmental trend, namely the inexorable and steady advancement of intelligence. Civilizational progress necessarily implies increasing levels of organization and refinement across all realms of activity. Consequently, the status of nonhuman species and the biosphere will eventually come under the purview of guided intelligence rather than autonomous processes. That said, a developmental tendency towards uplift does not imply that it is good or right; more properly, it can be argued that uplift scenarios do in fact carry moral currency. Through the application of Rawlsian moral frameworks, and in consideration of the acknowledgement of legally recognized nonhuman persons, it can be shown that the existence of uplift biotechnologies will represent a new primary good and will thus necessitate the inclusion of highly sapient nonhumans into what has traditionally been regarded as human society. In addition to issues of distributive justice, the Rawlsian notion of original position can be used to answer the question of whether or not there is consent to uplift. Finally, it will be shown that the presence of uplift biotechnologies in the absence of the legal recognition of nonhuman persons and a mandate for responsible uplifting will ultimately lead to abuse, adding another important consideration to the uplift imperative.

Hey, deep ecologists: the planet is not your nature preserve!

In the absence of a Creator a number of people have taken to worshipping the next best thing, creation itself. This phenomenon has been exemplified by the rise of Gainism and the Gaianists. Given the poor state of the environment today this sentiment has mutated into the kind of reverential desperatism and misanthropism that is now the all too familiar opium promoted by the deep ecologists. God may be dead, but religious sensibilities that showcase the unworthiness of man have been retained by these radical environmentalists, resulting in a worldview that perpetuates defeatism, shamefulness and self-loathing.

The deep ecologists and Gainists ascribe divine status to nature—a kind of neo-pantheism--and like their religious forbearers, have insisted on keeping humanity outside the gates of heaven. In their view, man is dirty, irreverent, and profane. His sheer presence is an affront to the divine processes of nature, the very cause of paradise lost; terms like ‘biodiversity’, ‘symbiogenesis’, ‘biosphere’, and ‘homeostasis’ have replaced the old religious canons.

The Earth, they would argue, would be better off without the meddling of humanity and their omnipresent disruptive technologies. The deep ecologists are on a self-prescribed mission to recover paradise and turn the Earth into a giant nature preserve where the only observers would be those creatures trapped in endless cycles of mindless selection and procreation. Birth, life, death, birth, life, death—the perpetuation of the Darwinian cycle as an end unto itself, a cycle with no other purpose than to satiate the aesthetic sensibilities of the nature worshippers.

But there is a cure to the new quasi-religious environmentalist fervor: humanism. And it doesn’t matter what kind of humanism, be it secular humanism, Christian humanism, Buddhist humanism, or transhumanism. Even better are those humanistic codes, like Buddhism and transhumanism, which are nonanthropocentric and demand the respect of all life. Humanist sensibilities work to ensure that it is the quality of life that is maintained rather than pseudoscientific and quasi-religious abstractions.

One can be an environmentalist and a humanist. The key is to make this planet habitable, sustainable and humane. It is this last crucial point that the Gainists and deep ecologists have failed to grasp, and in so doing, have come to represent a dangerous and misguided ideology.

Tags: environmentalism, radical environmentalism, deep ecology, misanthropy, humanism.