Why the Paralyzing Fear Over Exploring Options?

Here's a curious update.  The inscrutable secret to the evolving universe is no longer "64" but rather "welcome the symbiosis going on behind the curtain."

Why?  First, Warren Mosler famously sums up nearly everything by asking "How do you get people to explore their options?"

Historically, the answer is "Let their kids and grandchildren outrun their Luddite parents."  As Max Planck and countless others have observed, paradigms change as cemetery plots get filled.

The obvious corollary, summarized by people as diverse as Clausewitz, Wallace & Darwin, is that "tempo" counts, and that surviving species or groups are those who manage to further accelerate adaptive rate, not just adaptations. Overwhelming evidence suggests that the race to accelerate adaptive rate is what tunes everything about complex systems, down to the lifespan of their regenerated, recombinant components (e.g. us).

If any and all forms of recombination constitute the answer - whether quantum, chemical, molecular, sexual or cultural-recombination - then why all the sturm and drang over change? How did the most advanced culture in known history come to be paralyzed with fear over something as trivially welcome as extra spare time, aka "Unemployment?" Here are just a very few of countless examples - choosing some of the more interesting ones.

Unemployment In A World Without Jobs

Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK: how to survive the economic collapse and be happy

Future of Work: Custom Printed Bodies and the End of the 9-to-5 Job

Are you only worried about the Luddites momentarily surrounding your house, occupying your republic, and uselessly constraining your options? Or are you actually seriously worried about what humans could possible do with additional free time and accumulating resources?  The only proper response is to ask your maturing kids & grandchildren how worried they are, as they politely back away and vote with their feet. As situations change, new adaptations in recombinant systems arise from starting points about 5 layers beneath the surface of the existing processes. It's called "selection" - and it's how adaptive systems explore their infinite cloud of emerging options.  That demand for selection constitutes their Traveling Entrepreneur Task.  Don't fret, it's always been this way. Our kids & grandkids will effortlessly move on to explore the NEW OPTIONS exposed as they're freed from our OLD CONSTRAINTS.

I'll post the same symbiosis comment here that was posted to the Seeking Alpha story.

***

For Pete's sake! Coolies & muleskinners once rioted because the auto was going to un-employ workers providing other means of local transportation.

20 years later no one remembered what all the sturm & drang was about.

Those that find better things to do with their time will have a job. Those earliest to see better things for people to do, will be in policy positions.

How's that different from anything in the past? Only the details and scale or organization change.

Can you imagine the first eukaryotic cell, 3 billion years ago, arguing with it's distributed workforce of molecules & organelles?

Molecular Workforce: "If we allow those robotic mitochondria in, to automate all oxidation & electron transfer, then we'll all be out of a job. It'll be different this time! DOWN WITH SYMBIOSIS!!!"

History: "Sure was different, alright, but not along the dimensions you imagined. Now we have orders of magnitude more and more diverse 'workers' in millions of species - and whole ecologies - that none of us could have possibly imagined. Get over it."

The story of evolution is non-stop return on coordination.

It's not like it wasn't always this way. The tools invented the last 3.5 billions years allowed selection of the species & cultures existing today.

Ergo, those human cultures & nations that figure out cheaper/faster/better ways to do MORE with emerging tools ... will survive.

The Luddites won't - one way or another.

Will Rogers nailed it pretty well. Virtually sitting in the road will only get your current avatar 'dissed & ignored .. nowadays by a virtual robot truck. :)

Bottom of this rabbit hole is a simple truth. Human capital is more valuable than any other form of capital. It's better to horde coordination capabilities rather than any static commodity.

Yes, we as a people currently show worrying signs of doing nothing with our commodity assets than keeping our compatriots from using them in innovative ways. We explicitly discussed 2000 years ago that the Midas Touch only kills. Obviously, we knew that implicitly over 100,000 years ago, or we wouldn't have become an increasingly social species.  Not to worry.  Our kids & grandchildren will forget our limitations as fast as we allow both ourselves and - increasingly, the lagging adaptive rate of our customs - to populate cemetaries, real or virtual.

Yes, how we educate our youth is where we'll burden or accelerate their ability to explore their emerging options. OpenSource innovation looks like one of our few rays of sunshine at present.  Forget standardized Luddite testing, get your kids more practice at group coordination.   Americans used to have a "can-do" attitude.  We've simply exchanged it for a "can-not" message from faux economists denying the existance of public fiat.  You know the answer:  coordinate, then ask the faux economists "whose your Employer now?"