Population Control, A Humane Proposal

It is a common belief that those who wish to have children should be able to do so; furthermore, it is widely believed that people should be allowed to have as many children as they want. Many people believe that having children is a God-given right, maybe more important than our freedoms of speech or press, rights to bear arms, congregate peacefully, or petition the government. Some religious people will go so far as to insist that those who wish not to bring a child to term or seek to prevent pregnancy with contraceptives do not have the right to do so, that such acts are murderous and against God's will. When viewing the subject objectively – removing God from the picture – we can see that by monitoring or constraining reproduction, the government would be invading its citizens' privacy and shifting the burden of family planning from the family to the government. This practice could breed tremendous resentment toward the government and create turmoil in under-funded agencies tasked with overseeing programs and enforcing policies concerning population control.

A controversial example of a government population control policy is China's One Child Per Family Policy enacted in 1979 and still in place to this day. In 1979 China was an isolationist regime with finite resources and relatively generous social programs. If its population would have been allowed to grow unchecked China would have surely faced economic, social, and environmental collapse; instead, it probably just forestalled this compound catastrophe in order to experience it simultaneously with the rest of the world some time in the not too distant future. In essence, it was necessary for China to gain control of its population, and the people of China are better off for it. In 1969, the United Nations began operation of the United Nations Population Fund in its own effort to help mitigate the global population crisis. At that time, the world population was approximately 3.5 billion—today, it is approaching seven billion.

If value is accorded to something in proportion to its scarcity, or in inverse proportion to its ubiquity, I assert that overpopulation devalues the individual. A simple analogy comparing gold or diamonds to common soil demonstrates the concept of value being in proportion to scarcity. Humans place a great deal of value on gold and diamonds while dirt is relatively cheap. But if most of the soil on Earth were to suddenly become horribly polluted by a massive effort to mine gold and diamonds, then soil to grow food might become incredibly valuable and gold and diamonds would litter the streets and sidewalks. The price of gold at this writing is $973.7 per ounce. A recently released report by the EPA estimates the value of a statistical human life at 6.9 million dollars, down nearly one million dollars from its estimate five years ago (1). The average weight of an American male is 189.8 pounds. At 16 ounces per pound and $973.7 per ounce, 189.8 pounds of gold is worth $2,956,932.16, so an American human is still worth more than gold (and by the same logic women worth more than men). But if five years ago an American human was worth 7.8 million dollars and today only 6.9, then we will be worth less than gold in about twenty years if the human devaluation rate is linear. Yet if the human devaluation rate tracks population growth its rate is exponential.

Is this human devaluation phenomenon purely attributed to population growth, or is it affected by other trends such as pollution, consumption of natural resources, and destruction of the environment, or is it just the result of a general economic downturn? Actually, the most likely answer is that these things are all connected, with the long term health of the globe inextricably linked to the sustainability of the economy.

I do not mean to paint a gloomy picture of our future. My intention is to direct our attention to the growing problem of overpopulation. There are many things for which we need licenses and permits. One needs a license to fish, hunt, or cut down a Christmas tree, all of which are trivial things in perspective to having a child. We need to apply for a permit—sometimes at multiple levels of government—to make a modification or addition to our home. Arguably, the addition of children to one's family has a far greater impact on society than does an addition to one's house or property. We do not complain when we have to get a license to drive, practice law, or sell liquor. It is all part of the implicit Lockeian social contract we have all accepted, the set of agreements between individuals and legitimate state authority that allows our society to operate. Liberty is a compromise, meaning we have the right to do what we please so long as our actions do not interfere on the equal rights of others. We are acutely aware of our freedoms when they are being infringed upon and that is why I think that contemporary people are acutely aware of the problems humanity is facing. Generations past have consumed with no regard for the future, and following tradition ours does too. This phenomena is what I term trans-generational tyranny. It is not the blatant tyranny of the English king that political idealists sought America to escape. It is the silent insidious postponement of oppression. It is a load of pollution, extinction, and collapse imposed upon future generations without them having any choice in the matter. This is unfair, unjust, and infringes on the rights of our progeny. Granted a big part of the problem is behavioral, but each additional person behaving badly today is stealing from someone living generations from now. Therefore I propose people must be licensed to have children.

Locke may not have had much to say about population control in the 17th century; as far as he was concerned it may not have mattered except in a local context. Jonathan Swift addressed his countryman's concern of being overrun by the Papists in his work A Modest Proposal. He suggested that the gentry consume yearling humans born of the poor. “For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of papists, with whom we are yearly overrun, being the principal breeders of the nation as well as our most dangerous enemies” (2). Although Swift's work was satire it proves that overpopulation was an issue even in 1729. But it is 2008, and the issue of overpopulation is now real and pressing. It is timely and appropriate to begin applying some checks on growth—not just on population growth, but on all reckless unsustainable growth. Nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights does it say we have the right to have as many kids as we damn well please, or to drive big fat gas slurping SUVs. Even though you may be saying, “America doesn't have a population problem—look at India or China: they are the countries with the biggest populations”, The reality is that the environmental impact of the average American citizen is disproportionately higher than the impact of a citizen of any other country. We constitute five percent of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy. With regard to energy consumption, one American's impact is statistically equivalent to that of 13 Chinese or 31 Indians (3).

Couples who adopt a child must meet certain requirements pertaining to age, physical and mental health, insurance, marital status, existing children, housing, and lifestyle. All of these things are examined closely before applicants are considered fit to adopt. Why are these standards not also applied to people who wish to procreate? Are the children in each circumstance not equally deserving of fully qualified parents? Shouldn't children have the right to suitable parents, parents that will have the resources and inclination to care and provide for them? In my opinion, it is only fair to apply the same rigorous standards that are applied to adoptive applicants to all prospective parents.

I do not put forth a comprehensive method of enforcement in this paper, suffice to say having children without permission would not carry with it harsh or controversial penalties. I envision an incentive program that would reward people for having sanctioned children by guaranteeing those children free health care and post-secondary education, and oblige parents to foot the bill for children born without permission. By mandating health care and education for all children, the government could ensure equality while offering a very appealing proposition to prospective parents to limit family size or not have children at all. Even though this explanation is oversimplified, a program similar to it would be effective and withstand legal scrutiny. It would allow the government to better monitor and control expenditures on subsidies, parents to save money on insurance and education, and children to have greater access to important opportunities, giving them a much better shot at success in life, however they may define it.

Bibliography

(1)Bernstein, Seth, “AP IMPACT: An American life worth less today”, 7/10/08; http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i40Z1lLWhFws4xIKaXbYZ96a8y6QD91RFM4G0
(2)Swift, Jonathan, ”A Modest Proposal”, 1729;
http://www.art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
(3)Consumption by the United States;
http://www.mindfully.org/Sustainability/Americans-Consume-24percent.htm

Perceived Choice

Staring at the shelves of personal care products in the grocery store, I am overwhelmed by the choices. I narrow my search to the deodorant section, a series of shelves as tall as I am filled with little containers that have names like Rexona and Ultra Max. The smell is intense. The perfumes from the deodorants, soaps, and home cleaning products in the next aisle over mingle and make me want to get outside quickly. I am looking for deodorant, not antiperspirant, and not a deodorant that has artificial perfumes or colorants. That represents about 96 percent of the products that I must sort through to find what I am looking for. I also want something strong, not some flowery smelling organic stuff that wouldn't even be effective as potpourri. That eliminates the remaining three percent. One container remains, scented with rosemary, sage, and parsley, alcohol and aluminum free, vegan and never tested on animals. The packaging is minimal and made from recycled plastic. It's perfect—exactly what I am looking for.

If there are about one hundred brands of deodorant and each brand has several different types, maybe five on average, then there are roughly five hundred different types of deodorant to choose from. Deodorant, being slightly inane and something the average person is not faced with making a choice about daily, still presents daunting complexity and choice to the consumer. Now imbue every other good and service we consume with equal or greater variety and you have an environment that resembles capitalist America today.

When purchasing a cellphone, there are thousands of options to choose from; there are hundreds of brands, hundreds of types, and hundreds of plans. People who are unfamiliar with cellphone technology have no idea where to start when buying a cellphone. They probably often get more features than they actually want when they purchase one because they are unable to specify their needs. The bewildered purchaser ends up paying too much and struggles to use the overly complex device. Similar scenarios apply to many regular purchases, especially when dealing with high technology. Computers and many other electronic devices introduce a tremendous amount of complexity and choice into our lives due to their innately complex structures and their builder's aggressive revision cycles.
The number of economic choices we have to make on a daily basis is enormous. In order to be fully informed consumers we would virtually have to stop consuming and instead devote ourselves entirely to product research. As a result, we more often than not neglect to fully understand the subtle differences between brands and products, and simply opt for buying whatever is convenient, aesthetically appealing, or popular.

People living in our capitalist society are faced with too much complexity and too many choices. We would all benefit from less perceived choice and more distinction between products. A perceived choice is one when there is no real choice between similar products offered by the same brand or even made by different brands. When closely examined, it is apparent that many similar products have the same ingredients, and even when their ingredients are given proprietary names they are often chemically identical. For example, the artificial sweetener Aspartame is marketed under several trademark names including Equal, NutraSweet, and Canderel, but they are all chemically identical. Choosing between Equal and NutraSweet is a perceived choice because there is no real difference between them. Even when similar products are sold under different brand names, the brands are often owned by the same parent company. The alternate branding creates a perceived choice when really they are the same products with different labels.

I predict that as natural resources become more scarce and as people begin concentrating in earnest on resolving the pressing issues of our time, the facade of perceived choice will be shed from the marketplace. As our economy transitions from a neo-darwinian competitive paradigm to a cooperative based economic model, perceived choice will be shunned and looked upon as dishonest.

Creativity is as much a part of our human nature as our upright walk and opposable thumbs are parts of our physiology. Humans have invented and innovated from the time we started wearing clothing, building shelters, and preparing cooked food. Creativity is integral to to humanity's success and survival. Throughout human history people have devised enumerable creations in manifold fields, forming rich and diverse cultures. While much of humanity's initial creativity was constructive, it was also used for destructive purposes. Metallurgy gave rise to sanitary cookware and tools, but also to swords and shields.

I propose that invention can be divided into two categories: competitive and cooperative. Competitive creativity is often purposed to match or exceed the capabilities of the competition. Weapons and armor are competitive innovations because they must continually evolve to compete effectively with the opposition's newly developed enhancements. Weapons and armor without the consideration of an opponent satisfy no need and thus are not cooperative creations. In all cases except defense, weapons and armor serve no useful purpose. Satisfying no need, weapons and armor do not enhance our lives in any meaningful way. Any inventions solely developed to compete in the marketplace that do not satisfy needs and do not provide people with real benefits are competitive inventions. Marketing for such products often plays off of our fears and insecurities in order to drive us to purchase them. On the other hand, cooperative innovation is specifically geared toward solving real problems, improving our lives, and making us truly better off.

Capitalism began as an effort to satisfy real needs. Before capitalists mastered the art of manipulating markets, politicians, and consumers, they identified needs and sought to satisfy them. Most products were simple, inexpensive, and functional. People kept products for many years and extracted their full utility. Even today, some companies carry on cooperative relationships with their customers. Instead of exploiting their psychology to drive purchases, they poll them for suggestions in order to anticipate and provide for their customers' needs. The cooperative economic model encourages the development of well defined products. The differences between similar products developed under the cooperative economic model can be clearly distinguished: the products are not overly redundant, and they serve unique purposes. Using the principals of cooperation and collaboration to develop creative solutions to today's problems would supply the marketplace with an elegant array of products intended to satisfy needs, create real choices, and emphasize clear distinctions between similar products. The implementation of such a model would drastically reduce the complexity we are faced with in our everyday lives, and consequently, people would experience less stress and enjoy more free time.

People convinced of the perfection of the competitive capitalist economic model believe that competition encourages efficiency and weeds out useless products through a kind of survival of the fittest process—basically, this amounts to evolution through natural selection applied to economics. By applying the processes at work in nature to the marketplace, the free-market capitalists believe that they are using the optimum form of market regulation. The flaw in this logic is that humans themselves are not subject to natural selection pressures, and neither are their ideas. Ever since we began living in cities, using medicine, and dividing labor, humans have insulated themselves from nature. Thus began a process of cultural evolution in which people were favored for their ability to cooperate and get along within their societies. All of our strengths as humans are derived from our ability to collaborate, organize, and communicate. We are not exceptionally fast running animals, we are not especially big or strong, and we do not possess fangs, claws, venom, or stingers, all of which are products of competitive natural selection which we are not a part of. Indeed, humans have only survived due to their ability to cooperate. By mixing a competitive economy and a cooperative society, the market gets the benefit of neither.

Of course, humans are animals, and a competitive spirit is born into every one of us. One only has to point to sports in order to provide an example of our strong desire to compete. It is true that some of humanity's most spectacular feats can be attributed to competition. Landing on the Moon, Venus, and Mars were all important accomplishments and tremendously useful to science. Some competition is fun, honorable, and fulfilling. Intellectual competitions such as spelling bees, science bowls, and debates can provide participants with great satisfaction and self esteem. Such competition is good spirited, though—even at the height of the Cold War, it was US and Russian competition in space that served to unite the two nations through the pursuit of science. Mean spirited competition in which opponents seek not merely to win, but to crush each other, represents the dynamic found in Corporate America. Hostility marks the relationships between most corporate competitors, with total market domination as their goal.

We must transition our economy from the inhuman and antisocial institution it is today to a collaborative environment where ideas are exchanged freely and benefit everyone. The economic community must more closely resemble our social and intellectual communities. It is proven that the scientific method embraced by scientists around the world facilitates the creation of a unified scientific framework. If we could only apply those principals to our economy, we could also have a unified economic model where needs were met, waste was minimized, and people were able to concentrate on the things in life that truly matter.

Building a Robot, a Two-Year Project

When building a robot it is helpful to ask yourself what you want it to do. For the first few robots I built, that question was either an afterthought or the answer so obvious that the question was never asked consciously (it was most likely the latter). All I wanted out of my first robot was motion, which turned out to be mainly a mechanical problem. Mechanical engineering is not exactly my forte—for example, when I need a wheel, a film canister lid with a rubber band around it will suffice nicely. I utilized hot melt glue extensively in my first designs. Needless to say, these projects were purely indoor affairs. Once the mechanical platform was constructed (begrudgingly), it was then just a matter of writing code to enable motion, collect sensor input, and process sensor input to make decisions that affect motion.

The first robot I built was a simple beast indeed. The whole robot consisted of two gear-motors ripped out of a camcorder focusing mechanism, two cad cell light sensors (a cad cell is a sensor made out of cadmium sulfide which has a resistance inversely proportional to the amount of light striking its surface), and a Basic Stamp 2 micro-controller. Never mind what all of this was built on and what was holding it together; it looked like a glue ball with wires sticking out all over the place. My roommate was playing Herbie Hancock on his stereo during its development, thus the muse for the moniker. It is easy to anthropomorphize a robot once it has a set of simple behaviors. Herbie was a he; he was attracted to light and wanted to find the very brightest source of light and bask in it. His most basic behavior, photophilia, is also shared by moths who senselessly bash themselves into light bulbs subsequently resulting in their demise by blunt trauma combined with hyperthermia, but I digress. The point of the moth analogy is that my first robot was essentially a floor moth endowed with significantly fewer survival skills and no ability to reproduce or sustain itself.

The Herbie platform underwent several revisions which included the addition of a sonar sensor, a third cad cell, and a solar cell array. The sonar sensor gave it the ability to see obstacles and precipices and his software was further developed to enable avoidance of these hazards, thus making progress on the survival skills front. The addition of the cad cell and solar array allowed him to sense a threshold light intensity at which he could charge his batteries, and his software was revised to enable him to stop and recharge in bright light. This effectively solved the sustenance problem; however, robot reproduction is a problem that I don't think I'll begin work on until late in my robotics career.

The discussion of Herbie provides background into my robot construction philosophy and an opening to the presentation of a project that is several orders of magnitude more complex: the Robo-Magellan. I christened my Robo-Magellan Sputnik. I know, Sputnik was a Russian space satellite – a program that consisted of forty-one Russian space satellites to be more correct – but I am using the name anyway, mainly because I like it. Sputnik is in a class of robots designed to compete in the Robo-Magellan competition. As you can probably infer from its name, the Robo-Magellan is a competition in which robots navigate. The robots must navigate autonomously, be no heavier than fifty pounds, fit within a four foot cubed box, and not cause damage to their environment. The object of the competition is twofold: minimize the time required to complete the course and contact target way-points. The actual expression for computing the score is slightly complex, but it is readily apparent that race time is inversely proportional to the number of way-points contacted. With this challenge in mind, the answer to the question “what do I want my robot to do?” is simple and fairly complex at the same time. The simple answer: I want my robot to navigate between a series of predefined way-points specified by a set of given GPS coordinates marked by eighteen-inch orange plastic traffic cones, touching each cone that it navigates to while avoiding all other obstacles in its path. On the other hand, the complicated and consequently truncated answer sounds something like this: I want my robot to calculate a vector consisting of direction and distance for each possible way-point pair, optimize a route to contact only the cones that will yield the the optimum race time to acquired way-point ratio, use odometery to measure distance and an electronic compass to measure direction, check for sensor drift with data from a GPS module and correct for high frequency noise in the GPS data with an inertial navigation system, and use machine vision to identify orange traffic cones.

My approach initially was to endow Sputnik with an awareness of its immediate surroundings. Starting with a hacked remote control truck and three sonar range finding sensors, Sputnik was able to bounce around an area in two dimensions like a fly bounces around a room in three. Notice I did not have to employ my mechanical engineering skills in devising this robot's platform. The controller responsible for rudimentary object detection and avoidance I refer to as the platform controller. The platform controller is a subsystem that understands how to drive the robot and detect obstacles. Next I added the navigation controller. The navigation controller is attached to a GPS module, an electronic compass, and a rotary encoder (odometer). The navigation controller stores data from all three sensors for retrieval by the system controller. The system controller is actually a fully-fledged computer. It runs Windows XP and has, among other things, two USB cameras attached to it. The cameras are used by the system controller to look for cones. Although each subsystem has some autonomy and can function in isolation, the system controller is the ultimate decision maker. Its purpose is to request for and process sensor data and make complex decisions based on all of the information available to it.

The concept of using a variety of sensors and giving a weight or degree of credibility to the data from a sensor based on changing circumstances is called sensor fusion. At present the system controller software does a rudimentary job of analyzing sensor data to form a model of its overall situation. In reality, the code is buggy and moderately functional, but when the code is mature enough I will venture to say it is performing sensor fusion. I estimate Sputnik will be competitive for the 2009 Robothon in Seattle and believe that a two-year schedule is appropriate for anyone attempting to build a similar robot. Robotics is an amalgam of electronic, electrical, mechanical, and software engineering with each of them playing an equally important role. Although many robotics applications are complex the successful ones usually embrace modularity and simplicity whenever possible. By using Occam's Razor, the corollary that whatever can fail will fail, you can identify unnecessary complexity (weakness) and cut it out of the design. I am constantly tempted to go wild with my manifold sensor data, and suspect that I will after I win this competition, building inordinately complex simulations, aggressive pathing algorithms, and advanced multidimensional maps of discovered terrain. Meanwhile, in order to constrain my programming focus to only concentrate on what needs to be done to compete effectively, I continually ask myself, “What do I want my robot to do?”