The hybrid economy: Why UBI is unavoidable as we edge towards a radically superintelligent civilization

 

“Basic income is not a utopia, it’s a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.”  –Jeremy Rifkin

 

Unconditional Basic Income (also called ‘basic income guarantee’ or ‘social dividend’) is a system of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money from a government regardless of any other income. Pilot programs have been introduced in a number of European countries, that are aimed at replacing outdated bureaucratic welfare systems altogether. In the U.S., various tech leaders including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg are supporting the idea. In the coming Age of Superintelligence [and automation] everyone should be entitled to social dividend, “free” money such as UBI, just for being alive. We should not forget that the wealthiest of us would not be as fortunate without civilization. Otherwise, Jeff Bezos would have to forage for food in the Amazon jungle all by himself. Being a human today is more than enough of a fair contribution to receive free money from the government. Going forward we'll see more and more prominent voices vouching for UBI.

The Case for Teleological Evolution

 

“Each of us appears in the divine play in a dual role of creator and actor. A full and realistic enactment of our role in the cosmic drama requires the suspension of our true identity. We have to forget our authorship and follow the script.”  —Stanislav Grof

 

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ur human minds are fractals of the larger cosmic mind and consciousness is all that is. Information, which physicists now claim to be fundamental, requires consciousness to assign meaning to it. In other words, Universal Mind is the sole ontological primitive, what we would call the “Multiverse” is in actuality a “matryoshka” of networks of entangled conscious minds, and our experiential reality emerges from confluent digital data streams. So, what’s the basis for such radical claims, you might ask. 

The Economic Singularity: From Capitalism's Unplanned Obsolescence to the New Transcendent Economy

           

"The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organizing production and distribution and culture will emerge."   —Yanis Varufakis

The current economic system distributes wealth in a very focused manner that prevents a vast majority of humans from being adequately rewarded by the technologically advanced civilization. These factors undoubtedly condemn today’s system of suboptimal economics to the realm of classical models of history as a result of impending obsolescence. In brief, the current faltering economic model is suboptimal, hinders economic growth, and is not sustainable going forward.

Gaia 2.0: A New Grand Extension to the Original Hypothesis

 

“The basic pattern of life is a network. Whenever you see life, you see networks. The whole planet, what we can term ‘Gaia’ is a network of processes involving feedback tubes. Humans are part of the larger whole, Gaia.”      -Fritjof Capra

 

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hen studying Earth’s global biosphere, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock recognized that it has certain qualities of a life form. Many of Earth’s life‐sustaining elements display phenomenal stability, dynamic equilibrium and self-regulation, known in biology as ‘homeostasis’. The temperature range of the climate; the oxygen content of the atmosphere; the chemistry and salinity of the ocean — all of these are biologically mediated. All have, for hundreds of millions of years, stayed within a range conducive to life. 

Lovelock and Margulis hypothesized that the totality of life is interacting with its environment in ways that regulate these global properties. They realized that Earth is, in a sense, a living organism. They named this creature Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess.

Futurist Neologisms You Should Know As We Enter the Cybernetic Era

 “A powerful work! As a transhumanist, I especially loved one of the main ideas of the book that the Syntellect Emergence, merging of us into one Global Mind, constitutes the quintessence of the coming Technological Singularity. The novel conceptual visions of mind uploading and achieving digital immortality are equally fascinating. The Chrysalis Conjecture as a solution to the Fermi Paradox is mind-bending. I would highly recommend The Syntellect Hypothesis to anyone with transhumanist aspirations and exponential thinking!” -Zoltan Istvan, futurist, author, founder of the U.S. Transhumanist Party

Terms such as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘Neurotechnology’ were new some time not so long ago. We can’t evolve faster than our language does. We think in concepts and evolution itself is a linguistic, code-theoretic process. Do yourself a humongous favor, look over these 33 transhumanist neologisms. Here’s a fairly comprehensive glossary of thirty three newly-introduced concepts and terms from “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist and philosopher of mind Alex M. Vikoulov, yours cordially. In parts written as an academic paper, in parts as a belletristic masterpiece, this recent book is an exceptionally easy read for an intellectual reader — a philosophical treatise that is fine-tuned with apt neologisms readily explained by given definitions and contextually:

A Note from the Future: Becoming a Cyberhuman

 

"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."    -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today is a special day for me. My AI assistant Ava scheduled a few hours aside from my otherwise busy daily lineup to relive select childhood and adolescence memories recreated in virtual reality with a help of a newly developed AI technique ‘Re:Live’. Ava is my smart home assistant, too. I can rearrange furniture in any room, for example, just by thinking. Digital landscape wallpaper is changed by Ava by knowing my preferences and sensing my moods.

How Our Minds Construct Perspectives and Simultaneously Perceive Manifested Patterns of Reality

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth." -Simone de Beauvoir

Absolute truths are hard to come by, which is the basic premise of ‘hyper-perspectivism’. Rather, truths are always in the eyes of the beholder, truths are always observer-relative, truths are “made” by a “truth-maker.” You can approach our multifaceted reality from an incredibly large number of angles. Everything is perspectival, in other words, it all depends on your perspective, your frame of reference.