Relevant: “Whole-genome sequence analysis of a Pan African set of samples reveals archaic gene flow from an extinct basal population of modern humans into sub-Saharan populations” Comas et.al in Genome Biology volume 20, Article number: 77 (2019) Full text: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1684-5
True last common H. Sap ancestor is 500k - 600kya due to crosses with other hominins. All the African races, but particularly Bushmen and Pygmies, had much larger population sizes than the non-Africans over the period from ~15 kya to ~50-100 kya.
*
"Wide-Ownersihp Workshop Industrial Ecology", my proposal for the next level of human coordination:
Yeah, the more we look into ancient DNA and population and genetic movements, introgressions, and replacements, the more complex the picture gets.
Which is expected, on the one hand - but I've always wondered from the high level - how on earth did we have all these more or less distinct hominins running around for ~1M years and occupying the same ecological niche??
I mean, if you look 500kya, you have H Erectus, Homo Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Archaic H Sap, H Naledi, several ghost lineages, the Harbin Man and Dragon Man populations (although I'd personally bet on Dragon Man being a Denisovan) - it's madness!
And naturally, they're all mixing and replacing each other and basically fermenting away in a bubbling cauldron of hominin lineages and population mixing. But why so much differentiation? Why so much incipient speciation? Sure, Neanderthals had cold adaptation, and Denisovans altitude adaptation, so there was likely environmental niches being filled, but it's not really what you'd expect - wouldn't one find some package that dominated the others? This is 500k years!! They were ALL equally balanced for 500k years??
And then the Cognitive Revolution happens, and culturally modern H Saps wipe everyone out in an eyeblink. Kind of a surprise ending from one perspective, but also, why didn't this happen hundreds of thousands of years before then? How were all these hominin species basically equally culturally and technologically powerful? That's certainly not the pattern that we see in H Sap pre-history and recorded history.
> my proposal for the next level of human coordination:
This is a really interesting idea - owning and trading specialized manufacturing capability as a basis for post-scarcity income.
I actually really like it, but fear it might be one of those "this will work for the top 10% smart and conscientous folk, but regular people are boned" style things.
One thing that worries me about it is specialization. Like what do these people actually DO all day? There are benefits to specialization, and "owning and trading different manufacturing capabilities" is probably a specialized discipline. How do you avoid people getting really good at that and buying all the plebs who aren't as interested out, and establishing Gilded-age style monopolies and oligopolies? Because that's where I'd predict it to go pretty fast.
Sure, the plebs get a one-time payment, but what do they invest it in? The company that just bought you out? Many of them won't invest it, they'll use it as a windfall, and then what of them when older or their descendants?
I think we pretty much have to bet / hope for a UBI paid for by the post-scarcity capital and machine owners. And sure, the top 10% of smarts / conscientiousness can be owners, as suggested in your gedanken experiment, and they'll be paying UBI taxes while spending their days furiously optimizing their machine outputs and trading production derivatives.
Here are what I think are some key quotes from the original paper, which together summarize the kernel of the WOWIE idea:
Vision: to encapsulate a manufacturing base in a minimum investment, to make factories that can economically produce factories and almost any other product, to create automated market-based mechanisms to run such a factory complex, routing tooling and partially finished work among a network of hundreds or thousands of owners of co-located equipment bought with equipment-secured loans, so to distribute the profits of real capital and sustain demand, while also eliminating the succession of profits, marketing and tax markup of middlemen.
...
Each business has an incentive to pay as little as possible in wages, which today is becoming more and more possible through automation, but when everybody does this, demand dries up because fewer people have enough money to buy. The challenge is to not only make things people want, but also to have an economic environment in which they are paid enough to buy to buy the things made.
...
Each business has an incentive to pay as little as possible in wages, which today is becoming more and more possible through automation, but when everybody does this, demand dries up because fewer people have enough money to buy.
...
Have the machines located together in a factory in a district of factories, but have each machine owned by a single person...each own... enough to pay the equivalent of a middle- to upper-middle- class income from the machines' productivity, perhaps supplemented by machine-tending and repair work for those on the lower end of the capital range. Owners buy these machines with low-interest rate loans secured by the machines themselves.
...
Owners swap time on their machines with owners of other machines,
...
Machine time-swaps and loans valued in notional hours give a parallel monetary system inside the factory
...
Having the production network be composed of small entities means that they are not subject to most of the burdensome and counterproductive reporting and regulatory requirements that apply to larger firms,
...
The advantages in efficiency, sustainable growth, and social benefits are obvious, as is the potential to transform the economy into a better one, increase independence, national and individual security and apply some of the backlog of yet-unused technological advances to improving life.
...
Seed factories are factories with small, general-purpose toolsets which can produce most of the equipment for both ... conventional factories and for more sophisticated general- purpose factories. Using a small ... shop with general-purpose tools to build more specialized tools to make a full factory, then expanding into a partially co-located / partially distributed network of semi-independent production shops and factories, the Seed Factory system gradually vertically integrates its suppliers' capabilities into its network.
...
a person who owns part of one machine, ... would have a corresponding share of the use of that machine, valued in hours (which actually may vary in their correspondence to machine hours depending on demand).
When [he] decides he wants a product, he can make it himself. Using an open-source design which also contains the instructions for its own manufacture,[he] can edit the design, make whatever changes he wishes and get a custom product at a low price.
...
Through automated software which creates an internal market, [he] swaps the hours on his machine for hours on several other machines, schedules when he will use those machines, and buys materials, .... The raw materials to produce the product are owned by [him], as is the right to use all the equipment needed to manufacture it. Any additional labor [he] needs along the way is handled by direct personal contracting facilitated by the same automated software using standardized contract terms. ...
There is no succession of taxes and multiplication of profits, overhead, shipping, storing and marketing charges for each step of production and distribution as there is in conventional distribution. Both production and direction of production are thus distributed, bottom-up and market-optimized.
As the system grows, positive network effects emerge from owners having access to greater numbers of specialized tools.
I think concentrations of ownership can be headed off by setting the terms of the standard contracts and pricing criteria for insurance and loans on machines so that more concentrated risks are penalized. If that isn't enough, then the time-swap market software can priotitize bids from size-compliant market participants. There are going to be some participants who fail or withdraw, and perhaps similar measures could set a lower limit on ownership stakes, maybe having a base level below which ownership goes into a conservation trust system.
Last night I tried to get Deepseek R1 671B to write an essay on the idea. The first stumbling block was getting it to understand the need to sustain consumer demand, to have a population of people with the ability to afford the products produced by increasingly automated production. Trying to make a concrete numerical demonstration quickly became very complicated, so I didn't get to the more difficult problems of preventing monopoly and monopsony and IP valuation and compensation.
I think the ability to intuitively see the need for a way to maintain a broad income distribution to allow a market for the products of automated production is one of those things that requires a threshold of systems intelligence that AI, and perhaps most economists don't have. (Tyler Cowen turned me down for a Thiel Emergent Ventures grant; he funds some USAID-level BS projects. He's not dumb, but this idea requires a different kind of thiking from someone committed to orthodox theory, also likely threatens some interests, including everybody with sunk capital invetment in conventional manufacturing.)
Relevant: “Whole-genome sequence analysis of a Pan African set of samples reveals archaic gene flow from an extinct basal population of modern humans into sub-Saharan populations” Comas et.al in Genome Biology volume 20, Article number: 77 (2019) Full text: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1684-5
True last common H. Sap ancestor is 500k - 600kya due to crosses with other hominins. All the African races, but particularly Bushmen and Pygmies, had much larger population sizes than the non-Africans over the period from ~15 kya to ~50-100 kya.
*
"Wide-Ownersihp Workshop Industrial Ecology", my proposal for the next level of human coordination:
https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/wowie-factories-programmable-like-pcs-to-make-anything/4663
Yeah, the more we look into ancient DNA and population and genetic movements, introgressions, and replacements, the more complex the picture gets.
Which is expected, on the one hand - but I've always wondered from the high level - how on earth did we have all these more or less distinct hominins running around for ~1M years and occupying the same ecological niche??
I mean, if you look 500kya, you have H Erectus, Homo Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Archaic H Sap, H Naledi, several ghost lineages, the Harbin Man and Dragon Man populations (although I'd personally bet on Dragon Man being a Denisovan) - it's madness!
And naturally, they're all mixing and replacing each other and basically fermenting away in a bubbling cauldron of hominin lineages and population mixing. But why so much differentiation? Why so much incipient speciation? Sure, Neanderthals had cold adaptation, and Denisovans altitude adaptation, so there was likely environmental niches being filled, but it's not really what you'd expect - wouldn't one find some package that dominated the others? This is 500k years!! They were ALL equally balanced for 500k years??
And then the Cognitive Revolution happens, and culturally modern H Saps wipe everyone out in an eyeblink. Kind of a surprise ending from one perspective, but also, why didn't this happen hundreds of thousands of years before then? How were all these hominin species basically equally culturally and technologically powerful? That's certainly not the pattern that we see in H Sap pre-history and recorded history.
> my proposal for the next level of human coordination:
This is a really interesting idea - owning and trading specialized manufacturing capability as a basis for post-scarcity income.
I actually really like it, but fear it might be one of those "this will work for the top 10% smart and conscientous folk, but regular people are boned" style things.
One thing that worries me about it is specialization. Like what do these people actually DO all day? There are benefits to specialization, and "owning and trading different manufacturing capabilities" is probably a specialized discipline. How do you avoid people getting really good at that and buying all the plebs who aren't as interested out, and establishing Gilded-age style monopolies and oligopolies? Because that's where I'd predict it to go pretty fast.
Sure, the plebs get a one-time payment, but what do they invest it in? The company that just bought you out? Many of them won't invest it, they'll use it as a windfall, and then what of them when older or their descendants?
I think we pretty much have to bet / hope for a UBI paid for by the post-scarcity capital and machine owners. And sure, the top 10% of smarts / conscientiousness can be owners, as suggested in your gedanken experiment, and they'll be paying UBI taxes while spending their days furiously optimizing their machine outputs and trading production derivatives.
How to make factories programmable like PCs to make anything
(I sent a message to @performativebafflement with a Drive link to my original white paper.) For other readers who may not have time to follow the link earlier in the thread ( https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/wowie-factories-programmable-like-pcs-to-make-anything/4663 ):
Here are what I think are some key quotes from the original paper, which together summarize the kernel of the WOWIE idea:
Vision: to encapsulate a manufacturing base in a minimum investment, to make factories that can economically produce factories and almost any other product, to create automated market-based mechanisms to run such a factory complex, routing tooling and partially finished work among a network of hundreds or thousands of owners of co-located equipment bought with equipment-secured loans, so to distribute the profits of real capital and sustain demand, while also eliminating the succession of profits, marketing and tax markup of middlemen.
...
Each business has an incentive to pay as little as possible in wages, which today is becoming more and more possible through automation, but when everybody does this, demand dries up because fewer people have enough money to buy. The challenge is to not only make things people want, but also to have an economic environment in which they are paid enough to buy to buy the things made.
...
Each business has an incentive to pay as little as possible in wages, which today is becoming more and more possible through automation, but when everybody does this, demand dries up because fewer people have enough money to buy.
...
Have the machines located together in a factory in a district of factories, but have each machine owned by a single person...each own... enough to pay the equivalent of a middle- to upper-middle- class income from the machines' productivity, perhaps supplemented by machine-tending and repair work for those on the lower end of the capital range. Owners buy these machines with low-interest rate loans secured by the machines themselves.
...
Owners swap time on their machines with owners of other machines,
...
Machine time-swaps and loans valued in notional hours give a parallel monetary system inside the factory
...
Having the production network be composed of small entities means that they are not subject to most of the burdensome and counterproductive reporting and regulatory requirements that apply to larger firms,
...
The advantages in efficiency, sustainable growth, and social benefits are obvious, as is the potential to transform the economy into a better one, increase independence, national and individual security and apply some of the backlog of yet-unused technological advances to improving life.
...
Seed factories are factories with small, general-purpose toolsets which can produce most of the equipment for both ... conventional factories and for more sophisticated general- purpose factories. Using a small ... shop with general-purpose tools to build more specialized tools to make a full factory, then expanding into a partially co-located / partially distributed network of semi-independent production shops and factories, the Seed Factory system gradually vertically integrates its suppliers' capabilities into its network.
...
a person who owns part of one machine, ... would have a corresponding share of the use of that machine, valued in hours (which actually may vary in their correspondence to machine hours depending on demand).
When [he] decides he wants a product, he can make it himself. Using an open-source design which also contains the instructions for its own manufacture,[he] can edit the design, make whatever changes he wishes and get a custom product at a low price.
...
Through automated software which creates an internal market, [he] swaps the hours on his machine for hours on several other machines, schedules when he will use those machines, and buys materials, .... The raw materials to produce the product are owned by [him], as is the right to use all the equipment needed to manufacture it. Any additional labor [he] needs along the way is handled by direct personal contracting facilitated by the same automated software using standardized contract terms. ...
There is no succession of taxes and multiplication of profits, overhead, shipping, storing and marketing charges for each step of production and distribution as there is in conventional distribution. Both production and direction of production are thus distributed, bottom-up and market-optimized.
As the system grows, positive network effects emerge from owners having access to greater numbers of specialized tools.
I think concentrations of ownership can be headed off by setting the terms of the standard contracts and pricing criteria for insurance and loans on machines so that more concentrated risks are penalized. If that isn't enough, then the time-swap market software can priotitize bids from size-compliant market participants. There are going to be some participants who fail or withdraw, and perhaps similar measures could set a lower limit on ownership stakes, maybe having a base level below which ownership goes into a conservation trust system.
Last night I tried to get Deepseek R1 671B to write an essay on the idea. The first stumbling block was getting it to understand the need to sustain consumer demand, to have a population of people with the ability to afford the products produced by increasingly automated production. Trying to make a concrete numerical demonstration quickly became very complicated, so I didn't get to the more difficult problems of preventing monopoly and monopsony and IP valuation and compensation.
I think the ability to intuitively see the need for a way to maintain a broad income distribution to allow a market for the products of automated production is one of those things that requires a threshold of systems intelligence that AI, and perhaps most economists don't have. (Tyler Cowen turned me down for a Thiel Emergent Ventures grant; he funds some USAID-level BS projects. He's not dumb, but this idea requires a different kind of thiking from someone committed to orthodox theory, also likely threatens some interests, including everybody with sunk capital invetment in conventional manufacturing.)