Thanks! It's on my "get" list.
I was quite keen on Pern at one time , and long before that, my first taste of an imagined utopia was Islandia (Not Huxley's Island; that was pedantic.)

As one of the "steering media" (Habermas) money has unique and definite influences. — Pantagruel

I already stipulated its influence, and its role in screwing up civilization, but direct usefulness means that a dog would understand it.

I recall that cartoon! https://anticap.wordpress.com/tag/trickle-down/

the rest he will be obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of,

Except for the vast majority of luxuries he distributes among his several other dwellings and bank-vaults and off-shore accounts, sharing with no-one, not even the government that gave him license to gain his wealth.

They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society

Has anyone ever ever observed this to be the case? It's not even true of the most basic necessities: people are still starving and freezing to death, even in prosperous societies. People are still denied life-saving medicine and clean water.

Adam Smith was seriously full of shit. An Economist, was he?

It certainly might look that way, but people have to accede to that authority on a continuing basis. — Pantagruel

They were made to accede to it the first time a ruler stuck his face on a coin and demanded it back as tax, tithes, tribute, toll and license fees. Once it was established as the medium of all transactions, they had no choice. And of course, a very few always had more of it, and were always happy to lend some at interest. So much for helping a neighbour who's fallen on hard times: let him get a payday loan!

As I see it, money has become a resource. — Pantagruel

It's the metric by which all actual resources are evaluated, while itself having no direct usefulness and no reliable or predictable value. Everybody lives in a "marketplace", selling their time and effort to get money so they can give money for the things they need. Or else buying other people's effort and time in order to sell those same people the essentials of life.

Resources must be regulated, the more stringently the more essential they are to life. — Pantagruel

Must or should? Like air, water, food and shelter? They're regulated only sporadically and and then not strictly or effectively.

but what is one way one might engage in collective and cooperative effort at a global scale? — NOS4A2

Move the UN headquarters to Indonesia.

I started watching that video. The narrator spent ten minutes telling me how old it is and what-all we don't know about the period, so by the commercial break, my SO was bored and asked for a soccer game. I'll try again when I'm alone.

It's almost like money makes you stupid too. — Pantagruel

Money makes the system stupid - or at least, irrational. Money-as-profit has a logic of its own, which has no connection to human logic, or fulfillment or satisfaction. When money is made the driving force of a society, everything else yields to its logic; all other faculties serve its interest.

Ay-yup!

I'll look at the civilization one, of course: that's exactly the kind of thing we watch at lunchtime (unless there is a current bakeoff or sand sculpture competition) It'll take about three days. I
ll pass on the Peloponnesian war - have had it up top here with Greece and its internecine squabbles. I prefer Bettany Hughes' presentations.

PS I just added a new unword to my peeve list: imagineer. It from Disney-speak, is it?

Those assertions do not account for the objections raised (again) herein — 180 Proof

I know. I never thought they stood up to mine, either, but what the hey. Wasn't making an argument, just trying to fill you in on Athena's ... uh... theme song, as it were.

On Wikipedia, for example, I have found advanced mathematics pages to be very accurate, but elementary pages not necessarily. — jgill

This is probably why wiki is not recognized by academic institutions. I've been on a couple of forums where it wasn't accepted, either. It's easy; it's handy; it makes you feel guilty about once a month when you don't donate, but its best feature is the links to original sources.

Once you have (or someone else has) explicitly addresse the questions I've raised to you, — 180 Proof

She did, numerous times, in the first few pages. The 1958 thing is about Eisenhower and education for technology.

The Cold War stimulated the first example of comprehensive Federal education legislation, when in 1958 Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. To help ensure that highly trained individuals would be available to help America compete with the Soviet Union in scientific and technical fields, the NDEA included support for loans to college students, the improvement of science, mathematics, and foreign language instruction in elementary and secondary schools, graduate fellowships, foreign language and area studies, and vocational-technical training.

She is convinced that, prior to that change, US education promoted Greek style values and good citizenship.

Well, the chatty robot can do a lot of the searching for you and provide a quick answer. — jgill

How do you know the quick answer is the correct answer?
I suppose your search criteria will depend on your reason for seeking the information. If you're a student, a quick answer to a specific question might fill in one tiny gap - but it won't help much in understanding the subject or retaining enough to pass exams.
If you're looking to score a point in a forum discussion, a quick answer is great - so long as your interlocutor accepts your source as authoritative. While the robot's sources may well be impeccable, you can't prove it.
If you're just doing research for a story, or can't recall something you knew, or need a precise measurement for something of which you know the approximate dimension, a quick check may be all you need.

The implication of calling it "the information age" is that it should have value. — Pantagruel

Why? Did the stone and iron and dark ages have particular values? It's a description; as such it's either accurate or inaccurate.

Just because we have a bad track record, doesn't me we couldn't succeed. — Pantagruel

And my point was that "we", as is often used for all of humanity, don't have such a bad track record as the historical records of civilization would indicate.

Left to our own state-capitalist (plutocratic) devices, IMO, "global governance / unity" is thereby manifestly improbable — 180 Proof

I agree.
We can, and we have, formed quite reasonable, well-functioning societies, and we'll do it again,after the collapse of this civilization. We'll also form some crazy, dysfunctional ones, just as we have before. None of them can be global again, unless and until one very successful predator society eats up all the rest.

History records ad nauseam that we, as a species, have hitherto failed in our efforts of deliberative self-governance — Pantagruel

Somebody may have recorded that, but it's not true. Humans have been capable of deliberative self-governance for far longer periods of time (more sustainably) than most of the recorded civilizations lasted. In every case where an attempt at reasonable egalitarian democratic organization was made, you can trace the reason for its failure to a handful of self-interested actors, who either sabotaged the experiment from the beginning, or tilted its structure toward the acceptance of some animals being more equal than others. (A clever monkey was that Orwell!)

And yet supposedly we live in the information age. So if information does not foster communication, perhaps that is a value also which as been corrupted through commoditization. — Pantagruel

Not necessarily. Information is a one-way process. A teacher lecturing a class conveys information to the students, but gets no information from them. A book does the same: the student is a passive recipient of information. Communication, otoh, is a dynamic two-way traffic, which can convey information, or feelings or ideas or judgments. I don't know that information itself has a value; it would depend on whether the recipient can use it constructively.

do you believe we posses an idea/concept of our individual self? — Daniel

Yes.

I would like to focus your attention to this idea and ask you if you think that the existence of such idea is dependent on the formation of some other concepts, or if it can be formed without the need of any other concepts, — Daniel

I think it begins as an idea too internal and primitive to articulate. It forms long before the infant acquires language. If that's a concept, then it is the original concept, to which many other concepts - 'me' 'mine', 'you' 'girl' 'dog' 'brother' are later added.

(I wanna know if you understand what my purpose is) — Daniel

Not entirely. But then, I hardly ever understand why philosophers complicate simple facets of creature existence.

Is the self and the idea of it two distinct things? — Daniel

An idea is not a thing. It's a product of the mind. The mind describes - in words and images - what it experiences and encounters, in order to process information to make sense of the world.

Wouldn't a distinction imply conceptualization? — Daniel

Okay, that's a reasonable way to look at a primal sense of being a discrete, self-aware physical entity. But then your whole car analogy is inapplicable; that's a very much more sophisticated concept.
Intuition comes after sensation and before thought or idea. Intuition may be considered as sensation groping for words to describe itself.

you mean that there is no need of the capacity to conceptualize to generate a self? — Daniel

That's right. A sense of self - that is, an awareness that inside here is separate from outside there - precedes any concepts.

Or have we simple ceased to talk about questions of reasonable — Pantagruel

Have "we" ever discussed that topic? It seems to me, humankind has had many agendas, divided into many factions, and some of them were quite reasonable. But could the more reasonable factions ever have discussed this with the unreasonable ones? Communication seems always to have been an insurmountable obstacle to consensus.

That's because 'no significant achievements' is true for dinos but not for humans. — universeness

From your perspective, not the perspective of ASI.

Well, a more accurate comparison might be that in 3023 BCE, there was probably far more slaughter between human groups than there is today. — universeness

No wars recorded for that year, according to wiki. Probably more slaughter? Undocumented for then, pretty ugly for now.

I think us low bioforms are already far more moral and useful in the universe than the ASI you have imagineered, could ever be. — universeness

Useful to whom or what? A micro-organism can be regarded as potentially beneficial or pathogenic and will be treated accordingly.
You just can't peer over that anthropobsessive barrier, can you?

When you think of yourself, there is a concept with which you can play with; I am referring to such concept. The idea would be to explore the concepts necessary for the formation of the concept of the self, whatever the true nature of the self is. — Daniel

It forms as the infant's pre- and post-natal neural networks forms: gradually. Concepts are a fairly late addition to the mental development of any intelligence. First, there are only physical sensations, then instinctive responses to environment, then emotions, then recognition of external objects, then recognition of one's own limbs as separate from external objects, then recognition of other animate entities, then one's interaction with both kinds of external entity. Everything to this point is discrete, specific, singular: this thumb, this food, this blanket, this mother - non of these perceived external objects has a name or a category. Generalization is a result of many encounters, memory and association. From generalization comes categorization, and then image-retention, conceptualization and abstraction - that is, the ability to 'play with' an idea, aka imagination.

There are many many experts in that field, working very hard, to create an AGI that 'learns' what humans are discovering/identifying/exemplifying as the most desirable aspects of the notion of human morality. — universeness

And just as many, if not more, teaching it how to invent more effective weapons. The programmers' idea of desirable isn't necessarily mine.
If, if andif.... Evolution has a way of blurring and eventually erasing the values of of long-past progenitors. That's something you're proud of when pointing out progress in human ideals and laws - that we have left behind, or at least will have left behind at some future time - the rules by which our ancestors lived. But refuse to see that it could apply equally to a machine intelligence. If it's given human values now, there is no reason to expect it to consider far primitive species any more significant than we currently do.

So you predict a future based on lies? — universeness

I don't think those are lies from your POV: it's what you told me regarding dinosaurs.

The vast majority of the human cities currently existing on this planet, were not bombed today! — universeness

Oh, goodie! Only 110 armed conflicts. Come to think of it, even fewer cities were bombed - or attacked by any means - on this day in 3023 BCE. Progress?

I am sure a Borg drone would agree with you, if any existed, do you think Borg drone, is a good prophecy for the future of humans? — universeness

What has that to do with the question at hand? Alien life-forms, whether biological, artificial or some combination, do not require my approval and do not operate according to my preference.

Do you consider that a good or bad decision for a future ASI to make, or do you think like an imagineered Borg drone, that such thoughts are irrelevant? — universeness

I'm not in a position to make those decisions.

I do appreciate their existence, as they exemplified that the conditions on Earth allowed for life to evolve, long before humans ever existed. — universeness

So, there's your answer. The future life-forms will be aware that we once existed, contributed to their evolution, ceased to make progress and went extinct.

I hope that such is an absolute fact about humans at some point in the future, however. — universeness

I know you do.

A code of ethical behaviour of course, do you think an advanced artificial intelligence such as 180 Proof's presentation of an ineffable future ASI (at least from the reference frame of us poor wee bioform incapables) would face the issue of morality? — universeness

No. I think our notion of morality would be irrelevant to it.

then in the opinion of this wee incapable bioform, such an ASI would be inferior and doomed to extinction as it would have developed poor precedence on which to base its future goals, and purpose. — universeness

... which would also be irrelevant to it.

A need to establish good reasons for continuing to exist — universeness

H. sapiens - and not all members of this species - are the only creatures I know of that can't see existence as sufficient and need to give themselves excuses to keep living. I see no reason for this psychological anomaly to infect an artificial intelligence.

Do you not think such an advanced ASI would have to appreciate that, if it is so intelligent? — universeness

The way you appreciate dinosaurs?

on the possible reasons behind Gandhi's particular advice towards this desperate man during such awful events. — universeness

I got the rationale, several times over, thank you both. I have read one or two inside accounts of that period. Neither changes my initial gut reaction to hearing that line, decades after the events had taken place.
Isn't it nice to have more proof of how far we've come since the stone age? No humans would slaughter one another's children over land, water and religion anymore, right?

New York would have been almost unimaginable. — Existential Hope

Yeah - it would be magical enough for an American movie. 1947 was quite the year. Two ex-colonies getting partitioned into perpetual war, the princess royal of England getting married, the century's best vintage year in France, the birth of Smarties and myself. Anything could happen!

At least by giving him the chance of being adopted, Mahatma Gandhi allowed for the existence of the possibility of not one, but two lives seeing a new day. — Existential Hope

Okay. Everyone was being horrible to everybody else, so why not save one man's conscience? He already felt bad, while many who committed worse crimes for less reason never made any atonement at all. The lucky kid would be alive, in whatever conditions. Maybe he ran away at 16 and made his fortune as a taxi driver in New York.

I think that Mahatma Gandhi's primary aim was to generate understanding. — Existential Hope

I get that, too. The hating man would have to learn all about the hated religion in order to bring a child up as Muslim, and that would be good for the country and good for his soul.
But I would not sacrifice an unwitting child to the experiment.

My insurmountable hurdle was this one:

The closer a system gets to the 4 omnis, the more moral it would become. — universeness

What does 'moral' mean in this context? By what standards? For what reason? What would impel it?
Especially when bolstered by this:

Does 'with great power comes great responsibility,' not ring true for you? — universeness

Not as it has applied to human agents through history. Certainly not to human sentiments regarding insects. Why would it apply to a non-human?

He killed the child not just because it was a child but because it was a moslem child.
I think Gandhi's challenge was to prostrate yourself before that which you came to hate so much, that you would choose to equal the atrocity committed against you, by committing the same atrocity to a random child, labelled as, moslem. — universeness

I got the rationale. It may have been fine karmic reasoning as regards the man and his sin, while ignoring the other people involved. I think it was poor psychology. Penance usually is. Prostrated people tend very quickly to become either self-hating zealots, like medieval monks, or bitterly resentful. Humiliation does not cure hatred. Good works, involvement and kindness might.

Who do you think he might have grown up to suicide bomb, moslems, hindus or just 'people?' — universeness

If it was too late for Gandhi's house, I guess the British embassy.

What advice would you have given the man? — universeness

Adopt as many orphans as you can provide a safe and loving home for. Why complicate things or perpetuate religious indoctrination?

Which, of course, is not to say that one shouldn't make use of on-line information sources (including dictionaries and encyclopedias), especially for updating statistics and recent scientific advances.
I prefer government departments, university and professional organizations, but there are solidly researched and well organized websites dedicated to history, climate change, engineering - all kinds of specialty subjects. It's a big, ad-infested goldmine of knowledge - why restrict yourself to a chatty robot?

So, with that in mind, we keep talking to each other, until we stop wanting to kill or war to impose our will and we can finally dump our garbage leftovers, from our ancient 'survival of the fittest' imperative, forever, and good riddance to it. — universeness

People who kept learning and talking to one another, who had no urge to kill or dominate, have always been among humankind. Sometimes they were teachers, healers and sages; sometimes they were leaders. The range of physical and psychological characters has always been represented, in every iteration of huminid. The survival of the fittest was never a question of might over reason; it has always been a question of having the set of attributes most useful in a particular circumstance. Competition has been handled in many different ways in many societies, far short of open conflict.
Your view of 'ancient' peoples seems to be as caricaturish as your vision of future man. As if there were some kind of chronological line from inferior to superior forms of man, continuing on into a future we can't really foresee.
I don't believe we have changed all that much in the last 30,000 years: there was no need to select for a better survivor, once we were numerous and powerful enough to change our environment rather than adapt ourselves to it.

We have adopted social organizations that naturally form pyramid structures, raising a small elite above an obedient mass and pushing a large miserable underprivileged class to the bottom.
This led to a number of unfortunate but inevitable outcomes, including the need for surplus labour and population, economic and geographic expansion, a class system that generates internal strife; pressures which periodically erupt in violent conflict. In that kind of organization, the voices of sanity go largely unheard - if they're lucky.
We still have that organization. It is still in the cycle of internal and external conflicts. It is so entrenched, in fact, that - contrary to the optimistic notion entertained by early SF writers - even a shared existential threat cannot deflect its factions from warring among themselves.

None of our chatter makes the slightest impression on the juggernaut of global civilization, nor alter its by a fraction of a micron.

Do you think Gandhi's solution was a wise one? It's certainly wiser than anything I could have come up with. — universeness

When I heard that line in the movie, I was appalled. I imagined the life of that child, forced to be Muslim in a Hindu family and neighbourhood, resented by his siblings, reviled by his cohort, disdained or actively loathed by the mother in whose life he was thrust in place of her own child, daily, hourly reminded of his differentness. I wouldn't be surprised if he grew up to be a suicide bomber.

I have always found you to be more open and not restricted to 'my own experience, observation and understanding of human behaviour.' — universeness

What else have I got to go on? Wishes? Dreams? Science fiction?

I don't like the term 'versions of truth'. I accept different observers can report different truths about what they observed from their reference frame, but those are part of the same truth imo, only the different frames of reference, create the badly termed 'versions,' of the same underlying truth. — universeness

With which you are properly aligned, while the rest of us are not? I don't believe there is an 'underlying truth' that can be encompassed by human knowledge or translated to intelligible human communication. Many facts add up to some internal model of reality in each of our minds. If you want to call that a frame of reference, fine, then we each have one: a version of the truth. We each have some information, observation, experience and reflection on which to build this model, which is a work in constant progress, fated to be forever incomplete.
My model doesn't match you model; therefore, one of us must be out of alignment.

What is important is which of us is more in line with the truth. Do you think being fanatical about truth, is a negative, if what is professed does turn out to be true? — universeness

Another very big, unattended if.

I think the word fanatic should be applied more accurately. — universeness

Not in jest, then, as I was doing? If I were more serious, you'd just accuse me of despairing again. If I'm wrong either way, I would rather err on the side of levity.

Stop trying to steal Jamals descriptions of my psyche. — universeness

My response was neither to nor about you. Sorry.

No, at least not in the style of 'the charge of the light brigade.' — universeness

I didn't say that. It's simply that you seem committed to a version of the truth that doesn't very closely resemble my own experience, observation and understanding of human behaviour.

Your level of conflation here is rather disappointing and way below your usual standards imo. — universeness

Yes, sorry I threw a little mud on your idol. I did like him. I suppose I was annoyed by your frequent use of the quotes in big fat letters. Plus, I'm not a fan of monuments. I didn't tear him down, though,
and that little dab of mud won't stick. It's plain to see how much of a change in the attitude of those "powers" his testimony made.

What is important is which of us is more in line with the truth. — universeness

Pick your Truth, raise your flag, look not to right nor left. Charge!
Some of us find your central assumptions... let's say, not squarely grounded. So we're looking to different sources for little truths to assemble an image of the world as it actually is.

I’m much more fanatical and unhinged than anyone here! — 0 thru 9

Except me!

Ah!

When?

I for one, am overjoyed by that timeframe. — universeness

Don't forget the Maybe. If. Would that work better for you in bold, with a Sagan quote appended?
Maybe IF

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.

Don't ask how it will be used or by whom, for what purpose; shut up and calculate.

No fight needed, nor 'plundering' suggested. I choose not to anthropomorphise the planets in the solar system but I do want to give them new purpose and significance, in ways that allow our species to move beyond this little pale blue dot. — universeness

Yes, I understand this. Impose your meaning, your purpose on everything.

So far I have not heard any compelling reasons against. — universeness

Only because you don't want to. The arguments have been made, though this one does not even touch on the pragmatic issues: what it costs, where the funding and resources come from, what is cut to make them available, who directs the project(s), who participates, who benefits, how much of space is likely to be weaponized as a result ... None of those arguments are compelling to someone who keeps saying "We just have to make the right choices." or words to that effect. Humanity's record of choice-making does not bide fair for such an undertaking at the present time. Maybe in 300 years.

Yes, I do know neither of us will be around when that happens, but, it will happen! — universeness

Maybe. If the Russians and Americans and Chinese leaders and statesmen don't blow us up in the next couple of weeks, and the climate doesn't burn/wash/sweep us away in the next couple of decades.

I could be persuaded that building human communities that looked more like Hobbiton or Rivendell, would be nice and more ecologically balanced, but only if such could accommodate a population such as Tokyo or New Delhi. — universeness

That can't happen. Only the well-off will be saved; the slums will be washed or burned away.
No, Venus cities can't absorb New Delhi, either. The proposed floating ones including that bizarre skyscraper, still look like prisons.