LETS marketplace from a feature ‘phone

This post follows on from a previous post: Alternative currencies – Simbi and the Flying Brick. Thinking about how alternative currencies can be designed to suit the particular circumstances they are intended to improve, I suddenly realised that it should now be possible to implement LETS in any part of the world where people generally have access to feature ‘phones – which nowadays includes many places where access to hard cash is extremely difficult.

LETS Stands for Local Exchange and Trading Scheme. LETS systems exists to enable groups of people who for any reason at all find trading with traditional ‘hard’ currencies difficult.

For instance: people without enough money, people denied access to markets, people who want to be sure that the results of their efforts benefit their community as much as possible.

LETS systems must be able to do four simple things:

Continue reading “LETS marketplace from a feature ‘phone” →

Progressive Ethics Project – Launched!

The Project for a Progressive Ethics is now a thing. At least, it’s a Meetup, we’ve had an exciting first meeting, and we have a supportive home.

The prospect we have in mind is this. A well-respected, public place (OK a website), which you can use as a sounding board for ethical considerations of any sort – from a personal dilemma, to something in the news, to a debate in the pub, to a Phd thesis. A place where you will find a richly interconnected network of ethical propositions, easy to navigate, designed so that you can easily home in on the issues that concern you, or zoom out to get a wider view – where you can ask simple, quick questions and get simple, straightforward answers – but where you can also dive deep and wide to explore things to your satisfaction. Somewhere you can engage with – where, if you get an answer you think is wrong, or misguided, you can understand where that answer came from, and challenge it – knowing that there is a community of humans who will respond – that the underlying wish of the framework is to be deeply congruent with a reasoned, progressive viewpoint.

I had no idea what to expect from the first public discussion of this possibly insanely over-ambitious project. As I’ve written before, this is something I didn’t plan to start, which somehow came upon me, from a short forum comment after a London Futurists event.

I had no way of knowing what the people who would actually turn up might be expecting, or whether there would be much overlap between a group of strangers’ views on ethics. Truthfully, it could easily have been something of a trainwreck…

Continue reading “Progressive Ethics Project – Launched!” →

Alternative currencies – Simbi and the Flying Brick

The Flying Brick was the printed directory of the Brixton LETS Scheme (this isn’t the image we used – the original is lost in the mists of time – or a cardboard box in the attic).

LETS stood for Local Exchange and Trading Scheme. Brixton LETS was started in the second wave of alternative, local currency schemes in 1992 in Brixton, South London, and I’m proud to say I was one of the founding group, and one of the team that ran the scheme in its heyday over the following few years.

The idea was that members would trade together using our own local currency – the Brick (what else?) – which was a ‘virtual’ currency – a number in a database, with no physical existence. And that this currency would have different rules to ‘normal’ money, specifically: Continue reading “Alternative currencies – Simbi and the Flying Brick” →

AI and the Zone of Hubris

AI progress and a landscape of problem conditions

I’ve mentioned this ‘Zone of Hubris’ idea in a couple of earlier posts, and it’s time I made it clear what I mean by this slightly over-blown phrase.

The basic idea is that the sort of AI we are making at the moment is being developed against a range of problems with very clear success metrics, and relatively high levels of available information. Recent rapid progress is giving rise to significant confidence in our ability to begin to address really useful problems with the aid of AI (nothing in this post relates to currently imaginary super-intelligent Artificial General Intelligence).

This is likely to lead us to seek to apply our shiny new successes more ambitiously – as well we should. But we need to be aware that we have been sharpening these tools in a particular arena, and that it is not at all certain that they will work well in different circumstances.

“Well, of course..” you might say; “we’re quite aware of that – that’s exactly how we’ve been proceeding – moving into new problem domains, realising that our existing tools don’t work, and building new ones”. Well yes, but I would suggest that it hasn’t so much been a case of building new tools, as it is has been about refining old ones. As is made clear in some earlier posts, most of the building blocks of today’s AI were formulated decades ago, and on top of that, there appears to have been fairly strong selection for problem spaces that are amenable to game/game-theoretic approaches.

‘Hubris’ is defined as ‘excessive or foolish pride or self-confidence‘. Continue reading “AI and the Zone of Hubris” →

Project for a Progressive Ethics

I’ve been going to quite a few events recently which broadly come under the heading of futurism – indeed many of them have been through a reliably high quality meetup group actually called London Futurists.

These meetings deal with more-or-less mind-boggling speculations and predictions of things like robots taking all the jobs, artificial intelligences surpassing human capacities, people hacking their own or their children’s biology through genetic or prosthetic modifications, and similar subjects. Sci-fi stuff, you might think …

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Discoverability, the semantic web and the power of patterns

Raoul Vaneigem said;

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.

But he wrote this before the internet existed. Today, we might add ;

… and is only discoverable by those with excellent search skills and a willingness to plough through endless irrelevance.

Finding information that meets your needs, is written in a language you understand, on the basis of assumed knowledge that you already possess is not at all easy – despite the cornucopia that is the internet. Or is it, because of the cornucopia…?

The problem applies in reverse for producers of content. How will your (my!) little gem of insight ever be seen by more than a few?

Continue reading “Discoverability, the semantic web and the power of patterns” →

Fairphone 2 open sources its OS

I have an FP1 Fairphone. Not the greatest ‘phone ever, but the outcome of an amazing project started by a small group of Dutch activists to develop and sell a smartphone with the best possible ethical and environmental credentials (avoiding conflict minerals, paying attention to worker’s conditions, supporting repairs and recycling, amid other concerns). The FP1 was fairly compromised, but established the outfit, and sold 60,000.

The FP2 is a significant advance, independently verified as the most ethical smartphone available. Most importantly for me, it is based on a chipset which is ‘open’ enough that alternative OS development is practical ( not the case for the FP1). This means that the ‘phone will likely have a longer practical life, with updates potentially available from a variety of sources.

Fairphone understand and support this, and the impulse to write this post is the announcement that Fairphone are going to open the Fairphone OS (an android fork) for community contributions, releasing a set of software tools to support this.

I haven’t got an FP2 yet (not buying a new ‘phone until you really, really need one is the sustainable way, folks, frustrating though it might be). So I’m hoping that, by the time I do, there will be a strong community behind Fairphone, giving me more and better options for using the hardware – which should itself be upgradeable, thanks to modular design.

Interested in Fairphone? Look here. For Computing magazine’s pre-production review, look here.