"Responsible Abundance"

The objective is to be a political movement in NZ devoted to reaching consensus where-ever possible with other groups, ensuring everyone has at least what they consider sufficient, and to using technology in ways that improve security and freedom for us and all other species.

The basic idea is that advanced automated technology can be used to meet the reasonable needs of every person on the planet, and work with the natural ecosystems of life that were present before we came along, and clean up all the messes we have made thus far.

Unfortunately, such an outcome cannot be achieved within a system that only or mostly uses markets to measure value, as markets require scarcity to work, and our objective is to eliminate scarcity for everyone, wherever that is physically possible. There is no shortage of materials to give everyone a nice home to their design, everyone reasonable transport (like a world trip every couple of years, if they want it), everyone with good healthcare and sanitation and food and clean water. And some few things are really scarce (like gold), but most of us don't really need much of it, so it is not a major issue. The argument that everything has a cost is already falsified.

Principles

The founding principles of cooperation and responsibility are common to most cultures and religions, and to a modern understanding of evolution, and the strategic contexts required for the emergence and survival of complexity in evolving systems.

The simple idea many have of evolution being all about competition could not actually be more wrong if it tried.

In complex systems, it is cooperation, not competition, that is the fundamental driving principle. And of course competition is always potentially present. (It really is complex!)

Every new level of emergent complexity in evolved systems is predicated upon and sustained by a new level of cooperation. And while it is possible for cooperation to emerge in contexts where there is external threat greater than the threat from others within the population, it can only survive long term if there develops sets of cheat detection and mitigation systems, and those necessarily become evolving complex ecosystems at every level.

Any level of competition that is not firmly grounded in cooperation is necessarily destructive of complexity; and with multiple levels of complexity present, that gets very complex and fundamentally uncertain (at multiple levels). Such uncertainty needs to be both accepted and minimised where possible (and there are multiple ways of doing that which also allow for reasonable freedom).

In today's world, markets are much more than simply places of exchange, they are also part of systems that perform many levels of complex and essential functions including (but not limited to):
distributed coordination;
distributed governance;
distributed network creation and maintenance;
distributed risk mitigation;
etc.

We need to create and test alternatives to all of these, and that is possible.

This is about creating a world where every person feels secure and has all their reasonable needs met and has what they consider reasonable degrees of liberty (provided they demonstrate appropriate levels of responsibility). This is a far from trivial exercise, and it is one that is entirely achievable with modern automated technology.

Games theory tells us that the easiest way to empower a new level of cooperation, is to have the threats from outside of the group be greater than the threats from those within the group. When the group under consideration is the entire population of humanity, one needs to think big.

We are the most cooperative species on the planet, but in the past cooperation was often limited to Dunbar's number - about 150 people. That is a function of the size and reliability of human memory, in identifying and recalling interactions with others. Modern digital sensors and memory allow us to identify and recall cheating across any number of individuals our sun is capable of supporting. Thus we no longer have any limit on the size of cooperative group that can be sustained.

When it comes to starting cooperation at scale, we have a lot of threats to choose from, of which Global Climate Change is one of the lesser ones, but one that has public attention and acceptance, and is probably sufficient for the task in most cases. It is big enough to be real and obvious, but not so big as to immediately send many people into anxiety attacks (like some of the others do). It is also relatively simple to solve with exponential technology and ecological awareness, created locally and applied globally.

Solutions to all these problems are possible, but only with global cooperation (between all levels, classes and instances of agents), which means global acceptance of, and respect for, diversity (all levels and classes). Having a lot of external threats actually makes cooperation easier and more stable, at least in the early phases (even if most people don't want to know about them).

We are thinking globally and acting locally!

We are about empowering diversity, not enforcing conformity. And of course, all real system have real boundaries that must be respected for the sake of survival, and there is often uncertainty about exactly where such boundaries actually are in any particular context, so eternal need for awareness, exploration, conversations and agreements.

What does responsibility look like?

It means making choices that work for you, for your family, for your community, for the nation, for the world as a whole; that work for people, for the ecosystems, for all sapient agents, and for the physical processes present; that work today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, next decade, in a hundred or a thousand years time.

Nothing simple in any of that, it will require of us all that we make our best guesses, and fix up mistakes as they become obvious (because with anything this complex mistakes are going to be very common, eternally).

We are each amazingly complex, and we live in a very complex world (even if we mostly have very simple understandings of it). There is very little here that is simple. And having everyone making their best efforts, and making allowance for everyone else doing the same, seems to hold the promise of the best possible outcome.

This is not the sort of thing that can happen overnight, and with real effort it could happen in under 20 years (under optimal conditions, perhaps under 5 years). None of the alternatives seem likely to be very pretty at all in the longer term.

If it seems impossible, it isn't, and it does require exponential technology. If we create technology that can create a copy of itself within a month (as well as potentially doing the other important things we need it to do, when we tell it to), then, if we start by simply getting each one to make more copies, it only takes three years to have made one for every person on the planet (plus a lot left in to do serious engineering projects - each 10 doublings is a factor of 1,024 increase, 33 doublings takes us beyond 8 billion). Creating the first such machine is a big job, but we only need to create one of them, then they create all the rest. New Zealand has enough talent to do that, and once we start, we will have plenty of other talents and skills from around the world eager to join us.

The Invitation!

Join the NZ political movement - RA (Responsible Abundance) - to make this happen. Anyone may contribute, and to count towards the total of 500 people for registering a political party you must be a New Zealand citizen and over 18 years of age. Send an email with your full name, age and address, and your desire to join, and pay $5 and you are a member (and if you are willing to help in any way like talking to people, then a contact phone number would be helpful also). Just joining helps. When we have 500 people registered, we can register as a political party (the name, age and address are requirements for registration of a political party). Regulations require that we charge a membership fee, and that it be payable at least every 3 years.

To join, pay a $5 fee for a 3 year membership to RA :

To donate $20 click below

To donate $50 click below

Any enquiries email Ted Howard.

Thank you for taking action to make this reality.

Authorised by: Ted Howard,
1 Maui St, Kaikoura, New Zealand
Phone: 027 442 4281