Singularity University

[ to email to University contact: http://singularityu.org on March 12, 2009 ]
[ to blog and quotes on Singularity University]

Bruce J. Klein

Dennis Blair has warned us all that a global economic failure could mimic the course of the period from 1918 through 1945 when fascism and world war grew out of the destruction of middle class economic security.

We have enormous investments in data gathering and analysis at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. We obviously might benefit from something like these agencies specifically charged with creating models for Congressional and Central Bank interventions in the global economy to prevent economic failures-- including slow-downs that robbed national and international optimism, of the type associated with Singularity and Futurism, and tended to allow fear and loathing of enemies to dominate significant portions of the global Zeitgeist.

I realize that extremely detailed data and plans would represent a hardening of the economic intellectual arteries similar to what happened to Marxist experiments in nation building that were so costly in blood and treasure in the 20th Century.

At the other extreme, very general theories, like those of Keynes and Abba Lerner, although helpful (perhaps beyond measure,) do not take full advantage of the revolutions in progress that promise exponential change, as explained by Ray Kurzweil and, I believe, that animate Singularity University.

It seems to me that your studies planned for ethics are not the only area that your University must cover. There is another area with which law and economics are deeply concerned: it is diagramming and explaining, to and for the body politic, the real economy that is untouched at the start of a recession, depression, or crash. The formal study of logistics covers this real economy.

Now it is not the real economy, per se, that Singularity U. must worry. Nor must you target the financial economy that governs economic growth of the real economy, when the latter is overcome by debt and misadventure.

Rather it is the connections .between the two that represent our golden opportunities to bring artificial intelligence into play--to help in reordering and restructuring legal, monetary and accounting facts on the ground, so to speak--in order to move rapidly from crash or bursting bubble, to renewed growth in the real economy, by applying new and better numbers to our failed financial accounts.

One starting place for this sort of study and incipient plan of action is Functional Finance, as advocated by Abba Lerner in mid-20th Century. Others are being discussed daily, especially today by Martin Wolf, in his focus on demand deficit disorder that must, in the end, involve quantitative analysis of the real economy to some degree.

Because all of the above is normally mired in ideological disagreement and vehement emotional attachment to the left or to the right, I believe there may be a place in your curricula for an off-campus virtual activity that tried to further define an Economic Intelligence Function or Demand Deficit Disorder cure, etc., or other revolutionary need-- more quantitative and qualitative than the metaphysics of ethics and good conduct in business and commercial law.

Were you to think favorably along these lines, I would like to participate in the virtual activity. Not as an investor or employee--but as a thinker.


john.gelles@gmail.org
indexed-savings@sbcglobal.net
www.ustaxreform.us
earn.wikispaces.com
virtual-recovery.wikispaces,com