Ideas Matter

VIDEO CONTEST: What Milton (Friedman) Means to Me

Fire up your video cameras! Your iPhones! Your whatever-gadget-captures-brilliance-for-posterity!

Free To Choose Network -- as part of Milton Friedman's Century -- is proud to announce our video contest:

"What Milton Means to Me"

If you win, you could earn any of $2,500 in prizes. So what does Milton mean to you?

Education: The Inner Flame

This parent's quote sums it up: "I saw the light in his eyes dimming. His flame was extinguishing." This animated video in support of Montessori education is also a powerful critique of public education. 

Now that I have my own child, I'm starting to look more carefully at education. I am a customer. And despite my family's own rather meager income I can see that that the most costly form of education is that which is offered for "free." That's also why I believe there is currently an educational revolution in the making.

Think Different, Mate Ideas, Get Rich

I am somewhat heartened by the great outpouring of positive emotion for Steve Jobs. He was, after all, a rich guy. But why was he rich?

Transhumanism: Changing our World, Changing Ourselves

If you're the kind of person who thinks human beings are a plague on the planet, you won't like transhumanists. These folks think we can use technology to improve our world, improve our brains and interface with each other's brains more directly. Human beings will live longer, think faster and perform better at whatever they do. Is there anything wrong with that?

Steven Johnson: Combining Hunches

Small hunches + Connectivity => Good ideas. (Or something like that.) That's what Steven Johnson argues is the best way to arrive at concepts that make the world a better place. Johnson's also correct, I think, that hunches incubate. It takes a while to round them out or connect them up with other ideas that give them traction. Most good ideas are, in fact, inherently social. That is, you can't make them work without connecting up with other people who have good ideas. So connecting with others -- whether to finish a half-formed idea or to render an idea as a venture -- is a critical stage of the process.

Would you give up the Internet?

Last day of FreedomFest for the editor. I'll see you again on Monday.

The Conquest of Scarcity?

Is nanotech a key to conquering scarcity? If you believe Ray Kurzweil it could be. And Kurzweil is rarely wrong in his predictions.

But Kurzweil's predictions don't always factor in the human element: Luddism. Nano-manufacturing as Kurzweil describes above is likely, for example, to be an affront to radical environmentalists, for two major reasons:

First, if you can take a relatively abundant resource -- like clay or sand -- and transform it atom by atom into something else, you have simultaneously discovered alchemy and lowered the costs of producing just about anything. But if scarcity can be overcome to such a great degree, what will this mean for the environmentalists' Malthusian narrative? Recall that narrative goes something like this: Resources are scarce; we have to conserve; if we don't, we're doomed. Remove that narrative and you remove much of what environmentalists use to win converts and contributions. Of course, if you start messing with the gravy train with your high falutin' technology, the only thing left is to attack the technology itself.

Net Neutrality: Friday Funny, Saturday Serious

I don't want to seem too conspiratorial. But I've always felt that net neutrality was not really about "equal access" to bandwidth -- some form of bitpipe socialism. It is that, to be sure. But it's also about control. People of both a statist and strategic mind have always known that to control the population, you have to control information.

Decentralizing Money

Decentralization. It's the killer app of social operating systems. Yes, I'm optimistic. In a world that seems to be getting slowly less free, such may seem a little pollyannish. But the Arab Spring and the Tea Party movement all point to something important: Technology is connecting people in unprecedented ways. Peer to peer. Mind to mind. We are lowering the costs of collaboration and exchange in ways that would make Coase blush. We are lowering the costs of exit from territorial systems that wish to lock us in (read: governments).

Joining the Benevolent Borg and a Singularity Rosetta Stone?

Contrast MIchio Kaku's remarks with Peter Diamandis's. Both are right to a degree. The question is: to what extent can time and innovation change the equation?

On the one hand computers and brains are very different. As Kaku says: one has a CPU, the other has a cerebral cortex, for example. But the differences between computers and brains aren't so vast. So when Diamandis says we're eventually going to become more "godlike," by virtue of networking computers and brains, I think he's right. Let me depart a little from my usual fare and get a bit philosophical.