Blockchain for Global Inclusion: Enablement or Precarization?

Overall we expect that the benefits will outweigh the costs of blockchain distributed ledgers. (A blockchain (distributed ledger) is an accounting ledger (an account of who owns what) running on a distributed network, operated by cryptographic protocols, without any centralized control.) However, we should design this new class of information technology being mindful of both sides of the equation and address identifiable risks to the extent possible ahead of time. Here are some possible risks and benefits when considering blockchains for global inclusion, and the enablement or precarization that might result.

Benefits of Distributed Ledgers
Distributed ledgers could be the next important leapfrog technology for enabling human potential. Blockchains might be used to deliver peer-based services that support financial inclusion, identity-credentialing, and health inclusion. 

Globally, there are

• 2 billion under-banked (PWC, 2016) 
• 1.1 billion without an officially-recognized identity (UN, 2017)
• 70% of the world lacks access to land registries (Heider and Connelly, 2016)
• 400 million without access to essential health services (World Bank, 2015) 

It does not make sense to build out brick-and-mortar bank branches and medical clinics to every last mile in a world of digital services. Instead, eWallet banking, identity credentials, property registries and deep learning medical diagnostic apps might be used to deliver these services.

Risks of Distributed Ledgers
On the other hand, one risk of global blockchain services is that perhaps liberty is diminished if all persons worldwide are explicitly or implicitly forced to join blockchain systems. Precarization may be heightened if everyone must join the global labor market, if that means that one is subject to a constant sense of be measured and controlled by computational algorithms over which one has no control. Individuals are marketized, financialized, and precaritized.

Is a blockchain just a worse version of a FICO credit score? A blackbox over which one has no control? 

The risk would be losing the plethora of diversity in value systems, ways of solving problems, and orchestrating our daily lives if we are all subject to monolithic blockchain systems that do not support this diversity. Another risk is that economically, with blockchains more tightly integrating the economic sector, risk may become even more concentrated that it already is. At worst, distributed ledgers operated by algorithmic smart contracts might essentially turn the global economy into one giant HFT (high-frequency trading) vehicle, where there would not be any form of uncorrelated risk.

References

• Heider, Caroline, and Connelly, April. 2016. Why Land Administration Matters for Development. https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/blog/why-land-administration-matters-development 
• Pricewaterhouse Coopers. 2016. The un(der)banked is FinTech's largest opportunity. DeNovo Q2 2016 FinTech ReCap and Funding ReView. https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/DeNovo-Quarterly-Q2-2016.pdf
• UN. 2017. http://id2020.org/ 
• World Bank. 2015. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/uhc-report/en/

Cognitive Easing: Human Identity Crisis in a World of Technology

Cognitive Easing is the aim of much of our endeavor, whether explicit or implicit. We have never wavered from trying to create a life of ease, enjoyment, and fulfillment. The definition of Cognitive Easing is spending less mental effort to achieve a result.

A contemporary problem seems to be technology’s controlling presence in the world. Jobs are disappearing due to technological unemployment. News is fed to us that does not correspond to reality. Mysterious big data algorithms direct from the background. We no longer seem able to think for ourselves with “the cloud” automatically piloting our lives. What happened to caprice and serendipity, to our very humanness?

However, I argue the opposite. It is not the infantilization of humans by technology that is happening, but rather the opportunity for cognitive easing. We are not always accustomed to using our brains in the most creative and productive ways. Therefore we feel dumbed-down by technology when cognitive easing is actually freeing us from mental drudgery. Consider the amount of effort spent on “last-mile cognition problems” such as planning and coordination. Instead, cognitive load could be increasingly outsourced to algorithms. This has been the promise of technology from the beginning, easier lives.

A pushback is that lower-level cognitive tasks might seem like part of the definition of what it is to be human. However, while we have had to occupy our time this way, it does not have to be who we are. We need to challenge the false and nostalgic notion of defining our humanness by the tasks we do, and this might not be easy. Even scarier than how we will spend our time after technological automation is the question of who we are – our very identity.

Technology is forcing us to question what it is to be human. We have defined ourselves by physical labor and lower-level mental tasks, and it is abrupt to have to change this, especially because we do not know who we are. Worse, there is a timing lag with technology replacing what we think our humanness consists of before we have had a chance to redefine what it could be. We feel out of step with technology, and that we are regressing instead of greatly progressing. We think paradoxically that technology robs us of our humanity when in fact it is doing what we wanted all along, providing physical and cognitive easing.

Technology, automation, and cognitive easing are requiring us to redefine what it is to be human based on the higher-level capacities we have. These higher-level faculties include creative problem solving, artistic expression, storytelling, and quirky ingenuity. Only humans have the ability to perceive the world and react with unique and inventive solutions. We can now contemplate a new class of problems that we did not have the luxury of addressing before, deploying our creative problem-solving capability to a greater extent. The vision for the future is engaging with more of our unique humanness, increasingly freed from both physical and mental drudgery, to be more of who we really are, creative, serendipitous, problem-solving beings exploring and enacting our world in new and ingenious ways.

The Future: Ephemeralities running on Quantum Smartnetworks

The future could be one of pluralistic digital societies running on consensus-confirmed smartnetworks. There could be many kinds of entities, those with human-roots, technology entities, and any variety of hybrids. Blockchains could be the coordination mechanism between these entities, based on attestation variables like capacity and reputation. Further, eventually the digital societies of the future could be post-entity ‘entities’ or ‘whats’ – ephemeralities, presences, capacities, reservoirs, resources, like capacity in reserve: processing, memory, consciousness, ideas, associative processing, analysis, feedback, support, and critique. Perhaps all in the future is just capacity.

The ontological unit of intelligibility could be resident capacities in reserve, not resident entities already instantiated but available capacities, energy fields, potentialties. This is not even already-intentioned propensities (as contemplated by Popper ), but the uncollapsed waves and particles of quantum mechanics catalyzed into reality through intention, need, interaction, and imagination. Ephemeralities could automatically coalesce into actuality from virtuality to respond to a purpose, and continually meta-self-evaluate to monitor for ongoingness and finality of purpose.

Like photons, electrons, and maybe gravitons exist as wave packets at more than one place and time, only manifesting into reality when an observation is made, and the concept could be extended so that capacities too might coalesce into reality when an observation, conscious choice, or other motivator to action is made about the need for the capacity.

Quantum Smartnetworks
The notion of Quantum Smartnetworks is twofold. First, there is conceiving of some model, like blockchains, as a universal mechanism for measuring, administering, exchanging, tracking, monitoring, recording, finding, and interacting with all manner of granular quanta of anything; any entity that is dividable into essential quantized constituent building blocks. Second, there is the application of quantum principles to smartnetwork instances, in the sense of quantum smartnetworks as the orchestration of post-entity capacities or energies existing in potentiality (Deleuze’s virtuality) into reality.

Science fiction examples can lead the way, for example Accelerando features distributed trust networks and reputation markets, where one use of blockchain models could be digital copies “watching over their originals from the consensus cyberspace of the [smart] city [2].”

References 
[1] Popper, K.R. (1959). "The Propensity Interpretation of Probability" The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10, 37, 25-42.
[2] Stross, C. (2006). Accelerando. London: Ace.

Post-entity Society of Instances

In digital smartnetwork societies, entities wanting to conduct smartnetwork operations will likely need to be independently confirmed and validated through mechanisms like consensus trust. Consensus trust and reputation structures have been conceived as grounded in a fixed and persistent entity.

However, there is the possibility of progressing to a post-entity society. Humans are currently constrained to an embodied form, but this may not be the situation in the future, and there is no such requirement for technology entities in the realm of digital identity. Digital identity might become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities.

The question would then be how to enable smartnetwork operations in a post-entity society, perhaps one in which ‘ephemeral instances of capability and creativity’ have replaced identity-bounded entities. The answer is that reputation could still matter. Even if not a full-fledged identity-entity, any instance, any measurable quantum, any participation no matter how ephemeral could still have a reputation.

Reputations could become a lot more complicated, measuring different levels like actor, action, and intention, and also line-item credit for contributions and new ideas; and calculate composite team reputations for sharded cloudmind group participations. All this is could be possible because blockchains give us much more granularity in record-keeping.

Blockchain Thinking: The Brain as a DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Corporation)

Blockchains are a new form of information technology that could have several important future applications. They could be an explosive operational venue for new kinds of autonomous agents like DACs, distributed autonomous corporations. A DAC is a corporation run without any human involvement through a set of business rules based in software code. It is called a ‘corporation’ because it typically engages in corporate operations like fundraising, providing services, and making profits for shareholders. Blockchains are a software protocol upon which digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin run.

One potential application is blockchain thinking, formulating thinking as a blockchain process. This could have benefits for both artificial intelligence and human enhancement, and their potential integration. Blockchain thinking could be conceived as an input-processing-output computational system with several features whose benefits might include the ability to orchestrate digital mindfile uploads, advocate for digital intelligences in future timeframes, implement smart-contract based utility functions, instantiate thinking as a power law, and facilitate the enactment of Friendly AI.

Top 4 Killer Apps: Brain as a DAC:

1. Friendly AI – Digital intelligences will likely not be running in isolation, they will want to conduct operations on smartnetworks that are possibly managed by consensus models or other mechanisms. Any agent wanting to conduct transactions on a smartnetwork will need to be in good reputational standing to do so. Smartnetwork operations could include accessing information and other resources, fund-raising, entering into contracts, and offering services. The consensus only validates and records bonafide transactions from ‘good’ agents. Thus only friendly players would be able to have their transactions executed, and that is how friendly AI could be enacted. There are some objections to this argument, but the key point is that blockchains are a checks-and-balances system that could potentially encourage certain kinds of behavior.
2. Blockchain Deep-Learners: A crucial moment in AI research was finally having large enough data stores over which to run machine learning algorithms. Google demonstrated this with news, translation, and most recently image recognition of cats in YouTube videos. A similar ‘big data’ argument can be made for thinking where large databases of personal connectome files might lead to an understanding of how thoughts are actually represented in the brain. This understanding could inspire new classes of AI applications. As is currently being explored for EMRs and personal genomes, blockchains could be a useful privacy and access control mechanism for permissioning different parties to the large and sensitive data files more granularly Personal connectome files could also be orchestrated by blockchain processes.
3. Blockchain Advocates - One of the great potential benefits of blockchains could be instantiating smart contracts as your independent third-party advocates in uncertain future timeframes. An element of the business model that needs to be established is trustworthy oracles for confirming information. The Wikipedia of the future could be a blockchain-based oracle service to look up the current standard for digital mindfile processing, storage, and security as these standards would likely be advancing over time. “You are running on the current standard, Windows 36 and a Lloyd Quantanium 3,” your smart contract valet informs you. Thus, blockchain smart contract advocates could help digital intelligences and AI DACs feel more secure in their future survivability and also humans more comfortable in uploading their digital mindfiles.
4. Digital Mindfile Services – Already there may be many different representations of you online, and your digital identity. Over time these could become more explicitly a full and fidelitous ‘digital you’ for backup purposes (like stroke rehabilitation) or otherwise. There are already some existing online mindfile services like LifeNaut and CyBeRev. Presumably machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms will eventually crawl the web to assemble ‘digital you’ files in an automated manner, aggregating social media, photos, linkedin profiles, forum comments, academic or other published writings, etc. into a composite you, including with imputations about your value system and goals. Later brain scans and personal connectomes can be added to this data store, as well as real-time lifelogs, memory logs, idea logs, and EEG brain activity logs from quantified self EEG rigs. This could lead to being able to instantiate your mindfile as a DAC and personal thinking blockchains, enabled to carry out digital tasks on your behalf.

Beyond these killer apps of Blockchain Thinking, there could be more sophisticated uses of blockchains for computational thinking. One could be logging all of an agent’s memories and ideas as discrete units that are encoded, stored, and universally-accessible, perhaps with multiple copies and versions (such as the soft-hashing of ideas in development) that are then deployed in smart contract DACs. Another is that processing might be instantiated in a massively distributed architecture that is not available in human brains, yet still comprises the non-linearity of human thought. Third, blockchain thinking might give rise to new forms of consensus models such as self-mining ecologies and proof of intelligence, and make use of demurrage principles to redistribute brain currencies like ideas and long-term potentiation. Blockchains and blockchain thinking might be not just a tool for the immediate progress of intelligence, but also for the longer-term transition to a world of multispecies intelligence living cohesively and productively in digital societies.

More details: Texas Bitcoin Conference Presentation, Paper, Video

Immanence Reputations of Intelligent Instances running on Smartnetworks

One vision of the future is digital societies, comprised of different forms of intelligence like blockchain AIs, smart-contract DACs, and human mindfile uploads all running on smartnetworks. Verification of such digital identities may well be required for smartnetwork access. We are already living in a prototype of this world now, in the sense that access to digital properties requires digital identity verification. Many websites invite logging in with Facebook or Twitter as an already-established digital identity heuristic.

Also in the contemporary world, we are currently constrained to an embodied form, but there would be no such requirement in the digital societies of the future. Digital identity could become so distributed, portable, copiable, open-sourceable, sharable, malleable, and shardable, that it no longer makes sense to think in terms of entities. Instead of entities, personal identities, or embodied containers, there could be ephemeral instances; thinking, informational, actional, enjoyful, subjectivational instances. The question would then be how to enable smartnetwork operations in a post-entity society, perhaps one in which ‘ephemeral instances of capability and creativity’ have replaced identity-bounded entities.

One answer is that reputation could still matter. Even if not a full-fledged identity-entity, any instance, any measurable quantum, any participation no matter how ephemeral could still have a reputation. Reputations could become a lot more complicated, measuring different levels like actor, action, and intention, and also line-item credit for contributions and new ideas. Composite team reputations could be calculated for sharded groupmind participations. All this is could be possible through technology like blockchains that afford more granularity and accessibility in record-keeping.

Thus teputation might persist as a validation mechanism, even in advanced scenarios like post-entity digital societies. However, the trick will be to enact reputation assessment schemas that are not completely externally-imposed and outside the purview of the agent being evaluated. Preferable is re-envisioning reputation as a mechanism to empower the liberty and expression possibilities of the entities or instances being reputationified. This is an immanence reputation, one that is reflective of criteria self-determined by the agent and that accentuates its possibilities. The predictive analytics of the big data era could be applied to the development of reputational mechanisms to encourage agent futurity and potentiality realization as opposed to those that solely based on past acts.

AAAI 2014: Connecting Machine Learning and Human Intelligence

The AAAI Spring Symposia are a place for worldwide artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other computer scientists to present and discuss innovative theoretical research in a workshop-like environment. In 2013, some of the topics included: learning, autonomous systems, wellness, crowd computing, behavior change, and creativity.

Proposals are underway for 2014. Please indicate your opinion by voting at the poll at the top right for these potential topics:

• My data identity: personal, social, universal 
• Big data becomes personal: knowledge into meaning 
• Wearable computing and digital affect: wellness, bioidentity, and intentionality 
• Big data, wearable computing, and identity construction: knowledge becomes meaning 
• Personalized knowledge generation: identity, intentionality, action, and wellness

Identity Authentication and Security Access 2.0

Identity needs to be authenticated in more granular, flexible, real-time ways as digital venues expand and the physical world becomes more digitalized. Technology is now making it possible to rethink and provide a 2.0 update to the whole area of identity authentication and security access services.

The ubiquity of cell phones, and increasingly smartphones, means that many forms of identity authentication can be moved from costly and easy-to-lose physical ID cards to mobile access platforms. QR codes, NFC, and other wireless-based technologies are already starting to be used for security authentication and single-use sign-on for website access.

Work identity badges, hospital access badges, and government and school IDs are examples of physical-world ID cards that can be moved to smartphone ID cards. Likewise many services linking identity authentication to resource-access and mobile payment can be automated, for example, event tickets, work conference room reservation and access, medical equipment and pharmaceutical inventory access, and rental car and hotel check-in and resource access. Digital ID cards can incorporate multi-factor authentication: for example, the visual look, a custom sound or image elicited upon being tapped, or information returned from an external server as the QR code is read.

Editing human utility functions

There is a claim that potentially coming technologies, molecular nanotechnology and artificial general intelligence (AGI) for example, will not render human life much different. To the extent that humans control these technologies, it will be further cases of the same evolved human society using technological tools. But the claim goes on to include the ability to dramatically edit human biology as also not making a big change.

It is easier to agree with the first claim than the second. Regarding biology, even without editing utility functions, it is already being found that genes, hormones and other physical details determine a large part and much more of our existence than a conscious mind deigns to think. Genetic therapies, hormonal management and other tools may serve as de facto utility function editing. Better neuroscience, computer-based mindfiles, artificial intelligence aids for abstracting lifelogs and other advances could presumably allow for direct exposure and editing of human utility functions.

There are some examples of what occurs when humans have the opportunity to self modify through plastic surgery, steroids, tattoos and virtual-world avatars. With plastic surgery and steroids, the only objective appears to attain a closer social ideal of beauty or athletic prowess, but this could be a function of cost and legality. Tattoos show much more creativity and human expressiveness; many people think deeply about this self-modification and its personal meaning.

Virtual worlds, where the cost of identity modification is essentially free, show some interesting patterns. The predominant trend is that at their first experience with virtual avatars, maybe 80% of people seek to represent themselves as the cultural ideal (20 years old, the tallest, fittest possible). The rest, an increasing percentage over time, seek the long tails, experimenting and exploring and becoming highly individualized. Some examples are the avatar with a rotating satellite dish as a head, the miniaturized avatar for easier navigation and many humanoid personifications.

If the dynamics are similar in the case of human utility function editing: low cost, legal and ease of changeability, the expectation would be that a lot of experimentation and day-to-day change would occur. Utility functions and personalities might be available for design, sharing and download on the net, to be experienced directly or for entertainment. Sliders could allow for in-flight fine-tuning. Going out could mean not just selecting what to wear but who to be.

Which brings up an intriguing identity question, who are you when you can alter your genes, hormones, personality and drives at will?

The multi-self team

Can you imagine yourself in competition for resources with ... yourself?

There are several future cases where multiple copies of people may be quite likely and normal. Multiple personal instances could arise to repair medical damage, to make a backup, to have a physical and a digital version, to extend the capability of an individual and because the technology exists, to name a few possibilities. Regulation and legal rights of multiple personal instances are interesting issues but not considered here.

It is likely that there will always be some scarcity of resources whether tangible (matter, energy, processing power, etc.) or intangible (status, reputation, attention, etc.). So it is likely that individuals and groups will always compete for resources.

Whether in the physical domain, digital domain or across domains, if you have copies of yourself, you will be competing with yourself for resources.

Initially, you will know exactly what your other self is thinking and strategizing and you might share resources effectively.

Then, although identical at the outset, any copies, if not mind-synced, will increasingly diverge. In situations of multiple personal instances, regular mind-syncing will probably be desirable but there will be many cases where this will not be possible or desired.

Even if two copies of the same entity are experiencing the same situation, it will not be equal in interpretation by both, the physical experience will not be completely equivalent and the mental experience will be even more different with the randomness of the brain and micro differences in cell chemical states triggering different experiences and interpretations.

Divergence in experience and interpretation could lead to divergence of goals. As with any current or historical examples of resource competition, divergent goals lead to destruction or collaboration.

The multi-self team
An optimal and evolutionarily superior final state would be one's selves coming together in a new entity, a multi-self team, a pool of many nuances of self and abilities, a borg being broader and more capable than any individual.

del.icio.us for people

Why does del.icio.us for people not exist yet? This would be a means of tagging people with words; annotating their interest areas, likes and dislikes, how you know them, where you met them and probably many other aspects of meta data.

People-tagging would ideally have full portability across the Internet including social networking applications (myspace, LinkedIn, plaxo, etc.), personal IM, email and blogs and corporate/other group applications. Like regular webtags, peopletags could be self-assigned and/or discovered and shared with tiered permissioning.

Instant Affinity Tag Communication - Next Gen RSS
Imagine being able to instantly transmit news, blogposts, videos, events, etc. to a variety of affinity groups without having to remember which friends and colleagues are interested in which topics, Markets 2.0, videoblogging, sustainable energy, etc.

Even more robust would be a next generation of RSS, auto-alerting any identity with a "Singularity" tag, for example, with immediate notice of any new content tagged with Singularity posted to the Internet. Instant Affinity Tag Communication would not only provide richer data streams but also allow anonymity and reduce the requirement of personal relationships to obtain information.

Is it ethical to tag people?
Why not? A tag cloud accompanying people would be a better implementation of currently self-specified interest areas. Like many technologies, some form of people-tagging seems inevitable and mostly productive. The legal frontier would grow to address the extension of libel and slander as hate-tagging, inaccurate tagging and other problematic tagging occurred. Early people-tagging implementations could allow only self-tagging.

A people tagging system could be imbued with trust and value through tag attribute granularity such as by having a parameter for self-tagged vs. tagged by close-circle or wide-world others, disputed/ambiguous/conflicting tags and the ability to filter based on tag attributes.

Life after Second Life

Why be content with Second Life when you can join ...the Multiverse Network... and access and interact in hundreds of virtual worlds all via one portal? Multiverse Network sees itself as the browser of metaverse worlds as users gatewaying through their site will have a universal sign-in, unified billing and centralized marketplace commerce. Interworld communication and travel is planned, as well as social mechanisms for world discovery and collection with personalized "world playlists,” user rankings and contests.

The few hundred development teams in the Multiverse Network's closed beta are finding the virtual world platform to be a unique, fun and high-functionality way to create MMOG worlds. The platform, soon to be in public beta, is being used for traditional game development (Force of Arms) as well as non-gaming work and learning applications (Project Mars which includes Mars-like gravity) and is described in more depth here.

The Multiverse Network's push in releasing worlds to end-user consumers in 2008 will likely trigger a further explosion in synthetic world commerce. One implication is that vendors making avatars, objects, textures, animation scripts, etc. for use in on-line worlds would no longer have to be tied to just one world, as the Electric Sheep Company, SLBoutique and Aimee Weber are to Second Life. Network content developers would have a panoply of potential customers and leveragable products and services.

Interworld connection will allow massive cross-world collaboration networks based on affinities to evolve; what would it be like to be with 1000 avatars online in the same space? While virtual space allows for smaller avatar form factors, communications challenges will likely abound with multi-channel chat streams erupting with some predictable asymptote of crowd participants.

Identity (that temporary and anachronistic human construct) will be different in a multiverse network with larger identity and avatar portfolios to manage (this theme is already occurring in Second Life whose nearly 1 million "residents" correspond to far fewer biological equivalents). Identity experimentation will be fun in multiverse worlds too, such as by being able to be multiple avatars in multiple worlds simultaneously and by permissioning avatars for independent tasks and activities with low-level AI methods.

How much of myself should I bring to the future?

One of the current unknowns in cryonics is how much fidelity a reanimated person will have in the future, will one be an amnestic clone or a being with full memory and personality?

The future form factor or storage and action platform for the human mind could take several and perhaps multiple forms, hopefully by choice, ranging from dryware to wetware; from non-corporeal computers and virtual reality to different flesh bodies. An early example of diverse purpose-driven flesh body types is portrayed in David Brin’s “Kiln People” as an incidental detail.

How much of me (memory, personality, etc.) do I need to feel like me? Do I even want to feel like the me now in the future? What would I like to save from me now for me of the future? Not all the current me will be relevant in the future (in fact, a risk is that all of me will be irrelevant). If corporeality is irrelevant in the future, many memories can be jettisoned. If the construct of self is absent from the future, large chunks of personality and memory will be irrelevant. Beyond irrelevancy, not all of the current me is desirable in the future. Those quirks are part of my uniqueness, but I would be better without at least some of them, and I could still be me without them, especially in a non-me construct. What kind of journal/manual/guide would I write for the future construct of a reanimated me?

Consumer vs. Producer

Identity is an interesting and evolving topic and theme, both in the real world and the online worlds. This post explores two conflicting societal influences on identity: consumer not producer mentality on the one hand while at the same time a bias for activity not passivity.

The consumer vs. producer mentality distinction drawn by JBS Haldane in his 1963 essay, "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years" is especially true today. In America, our whole country and identity are built around the mighty consumer. As a barometer of national health, we look to how much the consumer is spending and two thirds of the US GDP is personal consumption. Some examples of this are the "Buy American" campaigns and the US flag with shopping bag handles as the iconic response to 9/11. The first problem is the economy being the most important (and only?) element of national well-being and second that spending is the most important aspect of the economy.

The deeper issue is that consuming is about being passive and responsive while producing is about being active and creating which is much higher up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We are happier and more fulfilled when we are active, creating and self-actualizing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on Flow Experiences further documents that we feel most happy when we are engaged in a flow experience - an experience where we lose track of time and what's around us, being completely engaged in the activity at hand. A flow activity is one that you perceive to be a worthwhile endeavor and that is challenging but not overwhelmingly stretching for you.

But how can we understand the passivity of consuming together with the bias towards action, the social hypnosis that we have to be DOING something to feel good about ourselves, instead of feeling good about ourselves because of who we are being. When asked who they are, people will usually relate labels corresponding to the different activities of their life, "I work in product management at Company X, I am a parent, I am a skier," as opposed to the broader qualities of who they are as a person, "I am a compassionate inquisitive person."

The problem is that we are driven to action even when the action is purposeless, just acting for the sake of action itself because we believe action is better than non-action. Action is not examined in the broader picture of goals or how it relates to being. Consuming is an action but producing is a higher order action. Being is a higher order behavior than uninformed acting. Action is more fulfilling when it is examined and contemplated in the broader sense of its contribution to our being and when we are fully present to and engaged in it. Contemplation also leads to the appropriate individual balances between producing and consuming and between being and acting.