James Martinez produced another hour of far-out radio in his recent Ca$h Flow interview with Ron Miller of www.technocracy.org.
Download full .mp3 April 7 interview with Ron Miller from the Cold Fusion Radio Audio page.
Defined by Wikipedia:
“Technocracy is a form of government in which engineers, scientists, health professionals and other technical experts are in control of decision making in their respective fields. The term technocracy derives from the Greek words tekhne meaning skill and kratos meaning power, as in government, or rule. Thus the term technocracy denotes a system of government where those who have knowledge, expertise or skills compose the governing body. In a technocracy decision makers would be selected based upon how highly knowledgeable they are, rather than how much political capital they hold.”
Ron Miller is a retired engineer who now educates about technocracy conducting workshops for kids at schools and colleges. One of his students described technocracy as “a cross between Star Trek and Nova”, which may be as accurate as Wikipedia.
James, whose show looks at issues of money and society, asked about the support shown for a “no money society” from technocracy.org poll participants. Mr. Miller responded:
“What the organization proposed was that the amount of energy that is required to produce every single thing that society needs should be accounted for, and everyone would be given their share, simply by dividing between the population, of the amount of energy over a given budgeting period.
An then when you go into a store, that amount of energy would be deducted so that we could keep track of what’s going where, and so on and so forth. You still have to have a feedback mechanism, for instance, so that the warehouses know that their beginning to run out of a particular product and the warehouse can tell the manufacturer they need more and the reason we chose energy is because energy is the most fundamental constituent of anything physical.
In the universe, there is really only two things, matter and energy, and without energy there is no motion and no movement. It requires energy to dig materials out of the ground, it requires energy to turn them into products, and so forth. Most of the time we don’t measure it, but we certainly could.
One of the real problems, too, that you have when we talk about money, and this is one of the things that I make sure to explain to kids in the classroom, is that money is not wealth. Money is not wealth at all.
Wealth is the chairs they’re sitting in, the buildings they’re sitting in, the houses they go home to, the cars they drive in. That’s wealth. Money is just a pile of paper.”
James asked Mr. Miller what would life look like with this different type of living arrangement, and how would a country operate under this system?
“There would be numbers of things that simply wouldn’t change much,” Mr. Miller said. “People still have to have homes, some place to live, they still have to eat, and so on and so forth, and go about their business.”
“But when you no longer have a price system, there’s a whole bunch of things that you don’t need anymore. You don’t need Wall Street. In fact it becomes worthless, pointless, it can’t exist. Neither can corporations exist. The banking systems becomes obviously non-existent, just an empty building. Most of the financial structure that we have now essentially would disappear.
We certainly wouldn’t need the advertising that we have anymore. There’s going to be huge numbers of things connected with the financial system that we are not going need.
A great deal of what is left can and should be automated, very quickly in some cases. Immediately, what the organization proposed was that a person should start work about the age of 25 and retire by the age of 45. I think that even with a framework of only 20 years of working, I think you’d have trouble finding work for alot of people.
Now, that having been said, we’re going to have to completely rebuild our infra-structure. It’s at a minimum inadequate, if not downright dangerous. It needs to be drastically converted into something that uses far less energy.”
Mr. Miller offers solutions like transportation systems like high-speed magnetically levitated trains, which would replace polluting airplanes. People would work only 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, leaving more time for them to engage in creative pursuits. He describes “an explosion” in the arts and sciences “because people will want something to do with their time and lives of value.”
He believes the transformed society would have personal transports that are diesel-driven, which means there is a huge hole in this model, but he does say overpopulation is the biggest issue that must be dealt with whether or not a technocracy was established.
M. King Hubbert was an original Technocrat. We recently wrote about Mr. King’s interest in nuclear power and his time at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, then the Atomic Energy Commission. Those who claim Carbon Currency is an outgrowth of the Technocracy, Inc are missing the point by limiting credit to carbon, though perhaps it is not surprising that this is so in a world where governments are indistinguishable from fossil fuel corporations.
A free-energy society operating on energy credits may sound radical, but low-energy nuclear reactions LENR technology is poised to drop on world culture within the next couple of years, and questions such as how our economy can and should be shaped will be important to stabilizing the effects.
It was Marshall McLuhan whose theories of communication expressed the importance of understanding our technology so that we do not become slaves to it. Laws of Media, written with his son Eric McLuhan, models a system that allows an inventory of effects when new technologies are introduced in society, in order to better mitigate the inevitable disservices.
In the discussion of how to create a new living arrangement on a planet-wide scale using cold fusion technology, one model is proposed by Technocracy, but you decide. In a no-money society, how would we operate with free-energy credits?
Download full .mp3 April 7 interview with Ron Miller from the Cold Fusion Radio Audio page.
Are you a Californian or a California wannabe? You go along just fine until issues related to other souls sharing your, or Californian’s, superficial or soulless values of boring weather and over-hyped scenery are encountered. If you’re politically incorrect you blame all problems on “immigrants” or “illegals” or what have you. If you’re trying to be identified with the educated, or the know-it-alls, you blame the many flaws in the West Coast “paradise” on overpopulation. After living in Japan and feeling less crowded than in California with the same land area but less than a fifth Japan’s population, it was very clear that what makes the difference is how people treat each other and how they value the fact of other souls sharing the world with them. Even if you are not “Californian”, how can an intelligent person not know that proposals requiring the kind of ignorant and unenlightened technocratic measures for population control or reduction for their success will instead be complete failures, especially if based on specious arguments using overpopulation as the great bugaboo and scare tactic, as if improvements to the condition of humanity will not result in a more natural reduction in population growth, as it has in many countries. This is an effect of improving human condition noted by even the Rockefeller Foundation in studies discovering such things as the correlation of increasing women’s literacy with decreasing birth rates. You are very disappointing for what I took to be a thinker, not one who just accepts whatever dogma there is regarding energy generation or other widely accepted but erroneous beliefs.
State funded and controlled science in the service of the military industrial complex is pretty much what Mr Hubbert was about, whether or not he cared to think about it, but it may be nice to dream otherwise. Nuclear power today is antiquated and still too much an appendage of nuclear weapons development after WWII. That is why only limited fuels are even considered, mostly fissionable materials needed for bomb making. It’s always uranium, or plutonium or what have you, not thorium (how many thorium bombs have been made?) or oxygen with two protons attached, as in water.
Energy credits are still a form of money by fiat or coercive social ordering. So basically my answer to you is a question: what, other than lack of practical imagination, is causing you to still ask the wrong questions? When technology and other human efforts are directed to providing good food, appropriate homes, real health, enhanced learning and meaningful occupation, then money (or “credits”) to apportion out once scarce wealth will be less interesting, more of value to some kind of Star Trek Ferengi playing old-fashioned money games than to most real people. Policy elites of decades past considered a guaranteed minimum income, an economical and simpler way to assure people of the five foundations of a good, or at least adequate, human life as touched on above. It would not be needed but it could be a transitional approach so that people will not be driven to destructive behaviors, like signing up to kill people overseas, by fear of starvation, homelessness or illness. Education in such a new world would also be different. A small sign of such education, examples of which I have already experienced, would be that “homework” is never assigned as punishment but only as a reward for curiosity when the system of teaching or learning educes it. People would learn at least five times more and better in less time, so that, for example, temporary ignorance of a language would not lead one to feel threatened by immigrants or people different from oneself. The proper response to the unknown would not be anxiety so much as seeking to learn more. Also, “tests” or exams would not be given even for self diagnostics but only to confirm to the student that they have indeed learned what they have learned. On the issue of meaningful work, of course what is meaningful can vary immensely with the individual but a philosopher might find maintaining floor sweeping robots at the local educational gathering place, or “school” a meaningful opportunity to consider his thoughts.
Hi Dr. Laureate, Thanks for your comments. I believe it’s true that when this technology is released, our world will change so much that money will be unrecognizable, and obsolete as it functions now. I don’t know how, when, or even if, we will make to Star Trek times where humans no longer use money between themselves.
I’m just asking questions because there’s already too many (wrong) answers.
Ruby
Technocracy’s Universal Identity Card, or Distribution Certificate, is not analogous to “energy credits” “carbon credits” or any other credit-debit scheme. That information does not present an accurate portrayal of Technocracy’s unique social design. You might have gotten your information from a pseudo-Technocratic website, sorry.
This is real Technocracy information from the North American Technate:
“Now you might think that the Energy Certificate is merely the substitution of one kind of money for another.
But that’s not so.
Money is a debt token, it is a promise to pay a debt.
The Energy Certificate is part of a measuring system.
There’s a vast difference between the two.
Money is a medium of exchange, and it has value.
The Distribution Certificate is a medium of distribution and it is used for measuring.
There’s quite a difference.
Let’s consider how they differ.
The Certificate is issued for a specific time period and then it is canceled.
Not so with money.
The Certificate is issued to a specific person, and only that person can use it.
Money, by the way, or otherwise, is negotiable by anyone!
The Certificate identifies this person, or the owner.
It tells who you are, where you are, and what you are.
Money doesn’t do that.
The Certificate also records when you made your last purchase, where you made it, and it even describes the item that you bought.
Money doesn’t do any of those things.
Now the Certificate is also part of a 24 hour inventory control.
Money isn’t.
The Certificate helps to maintain a supply of stock on hand at all times, and it’s an intrical part of the system for planning production schedules.
Further, it is a guarantee of security because it is issued to every person male and female alike, not so with money.
The Certificate is issued to everybody as a right of citizenship and no one can deny you that right.” -Arvid Peterson
Hi Dr. L, I am looking around and wondering how you are drawing some of these conclusions from this post.
The Earth does have a problem with scarce resources such as fossil fuels for a civilization who is demanding more and more of them.
Note, population increases have directly correlated to the oil age which allowed increased production of food due to fertilizers and herbicides.
Japan is crowded. That’s why they have (before Fukushima) 55 operating nuclear fission power plants. Not a good situation for a highly-poplulated island sitting on top of a huge fault zone in an extremely seismically active region of the world.
Population reduction has occurred in countries that are “educated” in the western hemisphere, and will continue in those countries as their populations age. Population increases in China have been reduced by force. I believe an enlightened population will voluntarily acclimate naturally to sustainable levels, but that remains to be seen.
The history of our energy technology is wrapped in a hierarchical structure of civilization derived from a visual-space bias due to the phonetic alphabet and printing press.
This is the environment that Marshall McLuhan exposed, and what we must emerge from, this time with our eyes wide open, to create a new world based on equality and living within the limits that our beautiful Earth can provide.
Incredible. Utopia.