[FRIAM] Drones to detect wildfires

[Steve Smith]

In most of the trajectories through the postCapitalistic subset of my
imaginarium, maximizing profit or even gross production is eschewed in
deference to satisficing the commodity stocks (including liquid
currency) required to support the flows we might consider necessary and
good.  

I agree with the sentiments specifically spun on the list that "none of
us are smart enough to figure all this out ahead of time".  Kurt Godel
warned us about that already.  I am not a proponent of an engineered
econo-socio-political system, but I *am* a proponent of setting high
level ideals to strive for (e.g. a humanist, biospherist, terran,
Sol-system, Milky-way Galaxy-ist value system) and doing enough
measurement and modeling to monitor how well we are doing and if we need
to "nudge" the knobs on our models.  Engineering IS a part of our
evolving nature, I can't change that.  What does it mean to obtain
enough collective coherence on those values, the models that represent
them and the data to gather?   I'm not sure...  I think the "culture
wars" right now are a part of that and maybe it never will be anything
but cacophanous dissonance.  

Technological Innovation is sure to be part of our future (short of a
stone-age collapse), I just hope those of us who have a stake in how
that unfolds include some humanist (etc.) perspective rather than
letting the neoDarwinian stylization of manic hypercapitalism continue
to be the dominant driver in *what* and *how* we innovate.

On 5/26/21 12:23 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> Yeah, OK. I agree. As with the FinTech payment plan band-aid I posted, our nudges can, at least, demonstrate some good faith attempts to "do good". But I'd like it better if we were more aggressive in our attempts ... aim high so that when you inevitably fail, you'll end up slightly higher than you would've if you'd aimed low. But I doubt focusing on profitability is the way to aim high. The space of profitable enterprises is *heavily* biased to the low hanging fruit. As Eric pointed out awhile back, the majority of high impact innovation is launched via non-profit efforts. In that perspective, profit limits high impact innovation by diverting resources to low impact innovation.
>
> On 5/26/21 8:59 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> To clarify, by "remediate" I mean that some consequences are created (e.g. a pandemic, harm to the biosphere), and then there is a problem to solve.    Pfizer is a remediator.  
>> Ford is a potential remediator with the F-150 lightening, solar panel manufacturers are remediators, Impossible Burger is a remediator, etc.  Yes, I recognize some will debate whether some of these are really remediators.   Nothing short of sitting around watching fungus grow will satisfy these people.